If Hollywood is to be believed, every mad scientist who ever lived has a laboratory full of bubbling flasks, flashing consoles and glowing orbs. Science writer Philip Ball — who has visited countless research labs — tells me that reality is not so very different: the gear may be more subdued, but the gear is always there.
Science depends on tools, often instruments to detect or measure that which was previously undetectable — think of Galileo’s telescope or Newton’s prisms. Nobel Prizes have often been awarded to the physicists who developed such tools: the cloud chamber (1927); the electron microscope (1986); and LIGO, the laser interferometer gravitational-wave observatory (2017).
What, then, of economics? Economics has its own quasi-Nobel Prize, but it is a stretch to find a single example of a prize being awarded for the development of new tools or instruments. Simon Kuznets (laureate in 1971) probably has the best such claim, for developing the ideas behind the gross domestic product measure. Alas, GDP is a broad aggregate with limitations that Kuznets himself understood all too well.