From Science Watch. Thanks to Greg Mankiw for the pointer. Their ideas:

1. Aghion and Howitt for Schumpeterian growth theory. I appreciated Howitt’s comment on one of my PSST papers, so I would be happy if this came true. I suspect it won’t.

2. Baumol and Kirzner on entrepreneurialism. I have been predicting Baumol for a long time. He has a phenomenon named for him (Baumol’s cost disease), which is a good sign. In the past, I have remarked on Bill James’ distinction between top peak performers (Koufax) vs. consistent high performance (Don Sutton). I have observed that economics Nobels tend to reward peak performances rather than more consistent high performance. Baumol, notwithstanding cost disease, may not have the one big idea. I recently took another look at “contestable markets,” which at the time looked like it could be his big idea, and I can see why it failed to take off. It is hard for me to think of markets in which potential entry is an important factor. Baumol’s later work, on what he called “the free market innovation machine,” seems more on target, but less novel.

As for Kirzner, at the risk of committing Austro-blasphemy, I have to say that I don’t get what makes him such a big deal. His idea of entrepreneurs always struck me as somewhat enervated–the entrepreneur as arbitrageur rather than as a creative force.

3. Mark Granovetter. An interesting suggestion. I hope people are replicating his “weak ties” research and finding that it holds up.

If this were a horserace, I would place my bet on the field, i.e., on someone other than those listed above.