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.
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 picks for economics an MIT professor, Bengt Holmström. Six years later Holmström won it.
The prophecy was really a forecast, and this is how The Simpsons does it.