Some brilliant economists never got a Nobel Prize, simply because their intellectual merits and influences are overshadowed by their ideological preferences that are different from the mainstream and the people in power.
The prime example is Joan Robinson (1903-1983), who wrote positively on the economics of Karl Marx and socialism at the time of Cold War. Her work stood at odds with the Western mainstream economic and political thoughts and failed to cater the ideological needs of the Nobel Prize committee and those behind the game.
Quote from http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/9870#ixzz1ZxvbAulA
Great Britain’s Joan Robinson may be one of the most exciting figures in the history of “the Dismal Science.” An acolyte of the great John Maynard Keynes, her work covered a wide range of economic topics, from neoclassicism to Keynes’s general theory to Marxian theory. Not to mention, her notion of imperfect competition still shows up in every Econ 101 class. Add to that the fact that Robinson’s greatest work, The Accumulation of Capital, was published way back in 1956 but is still widely used as an economics textbook. So why no Nobel? Some say it’s because she’s a female, and no female has ever won the Nobel in Economics. Others say that Robinson’s work over her career was too eclectic, rather than hyperfocused like that of so many other laureates. Still others claim that she was undesirable as a laureate because of her vocal praise for the Chinese Cultural Revolution, a fairly anti-intellectual enterprise.
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