In a few weeks the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences will name the 2026 Nobel laureate in economics, and the guessing is already under way. The prediction market, Kalshi allows traders to buy Yes/No shares on individual economists.
Leading the field is Ariel Pakes of Harvard, tipped for his foundational work on industrial organisation and how real markets are actually structured. Also among the favourites is Partha Dasgupta of the University of Cambridge, a perennial contender for putting a price on nature, biodiversity and the economic value of the natural world.
Susan Athey of Stanford University is regularly shortlisted for her work at the join of economics and machine learning, on digital platforms and on how to draw cause and effect from messy data. Richard Blundell of University College London is backed for decades of empirical research on how people work, spend and respond to public policy.
No clear favourite has emerged, and the traders are doing what punters always do, naming the plausible contenders and putting money on them.
A cartoon got there first. In a 2010 episode of The Simpsons, the ten-year-old Milhouse fills in a children’s Nobel betting pool and gives, as his pick for economics, a real MIT professor named Bengt Holmström. Six years later Holmström won it, with Oliver Hart, for their work on contract theory, and MIT gleefully retrieved the old screenshot.
It joined a lengthening list of things the show is said to have foreseen, and another of them is in the business pages right now. Netflix has agreed to pay $82.7 billion for the Warner Bros studio and streaming arm, Paramount has countered with a hostile bid for the whole of Warner Bros Discovery, and in June Fox agreed to buy Roku for roughly $22 billion.
A 1998 episode had already put a sign on a studio lot reading “20th Century Fox, a division of Walt Disney Co.” Nineteen years later Disney paid around $71 billion for the bulk of 21st Century Fox. Add the “President Trump” episode of 2000 that imagined the reality sixteen years early, and there are plenty that believe The Simpsons can see the future.
It can’t, and over more than 750 episodes and made many thousands of jokes, almost all of them foretold nothing. We remember the handful that did and forget the rest, which is survivorship bias in cartoon form. But the real hits rest on two methods, both with names in business and a long corporate tradition. The lesson from The Simpsons is how the hits were made.
The prophecy was really a forecast
Ask the people who wrote the jokes and the magic evaporates. The showrunner Al Jean has explained that the Disney gag was not a vision but an extrapolation. Disney had bought Capital Cities and ABC a couple of years earlier, the media industry was visibly consolidating, and the writers privately assumed they would all be working for Disney one day. So they drew the logical end point and drew it on a studio lot. The Trump line worked the same way. A celebrity billionaire running the country was the natural terminus of a 1990s culture already fusing fame and politics, pushed one step further for a laugh.
This is scenario planning, and it has a distinguished corporate pedigree. In the early 1970s a planner named Pierre Wack ran a small team at Royal Dutch Shell whose job was to imagine futures the company would rather not think about. One of the futures they rehearsed was a sudden collapse of the postwar oil order and a spike in prices. When the 1973 oil shock duly arrived and every rival was caught flat-footed, Shell had already thought through the world it created and moved faster than anyone, climbing from one of the weaker of the major oil companies toward the strongest.
Wack’s insight, which reads today like a note to a comedy writers’ room, was that the goal was never to predict the future. It was to ask what would have to be true for a particular future to happen, and then follow the present all the way to its consequences.
That is what a room of satirical writers do for a living. They take a trend everyone can already see, corporate consolidation, celebrity politics, the creep of surveillance, and asks where it ends if nobody stops it. The answer comes true because the trend was real and the extrapolation was honest.
The Nobel pick is the second method, and it is even less mysterious than the first. The writers did not divine Bengt Holmström’s name, but filled the pool with the field’s genuine front-runners. Name enough real contenders and time will eventually vindicate one of them. That is an each-way bet rather than a crystal ball, and it is exactly what the traders pricing this year’s economics prize are doing as you read this.
An organisation willing to take a visible trend to its conclusion, or to name the real contenders instead of hoping for a lucky one, will now and then look like a prophet. More often it will simply be ready.
Homer was behavioural economics before it had the name
If The Simpsons reads the market with unusual clarity, it reads people even better. There is a peer-reviewed academic book, Homer Economicus: The Simpsons and Economics, edited by the economist Joshua Hall, in which a roster of economists work through incentives, comparative advantage and public choice using Springfield as their laboratory. A companion paper, “Simpsonomics,” appeared in the Journal of Economic Education. Economists, it turns out, have been mining this cartoon for years.
When The Simpsons began in 1989, mainstream economics still ran on a particular fiction: rational economic man, a creature who calmly weighs his options and chooses whatever serves his own long-term interest. And then there is Homer Simpson, who chooses the doughnut now over the pension later every single time, eats the sandwich he knows is spoiled, and reaches for his son’s throat on pure impulse. For years that made Homer a study in economic failure, a man doing everything the models said he shouldn’t.
Then the models changed. Daniel Kahneman, Richard Thaler and the rise of behavioural economics established that real humans are not rational calculators but bundles of bias: we over-value the present, over-rate our own judgement, and let a fast, instinctive mode of thinking make decisions our slow, reasoning mode would veto. Homer stops being a failed rational man and becomes an accurate irrational one. He is present bias and overconfidence with a doughnut in hand, System 1 thinking with the reasoning switched off, and he arrived a decade before the discipline caught up with him.
The lesson for anyone running a business is not academic. Strategies, forecasts and incentive schemes are still routinely built for an industry, a customer or a competitor who behaves like rational economic man, and they still fail for the same reason, which is that life and the people involved often behave like Homer.
The irony or course is Springfield never changes. Bart has been ten years old since George H. W. Bush was president, the family never ages, the town resets itself every episode. It is a fixed lens, looking at a world that never stops transforming. The writers were just watching the present more carefully than the rest of us, and building a punchline.
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