Straub wins the Clark Award: Making macroeconomics see the "people hidden by the average"

Ludwig Straub of Harvard University won the 2026 Clark Prize. On the surface, it looks like the U.S. economics establishment is once again shining the spotlight on a young star scholar; but if you interpret it only as “yet another genius getting an award,” you actually underestimate the significance of this win.

What is truly noteworthy about Straub isn’t just that he wrote a few strong papers—it’s that he represents a new trend that’s changing how macroeconomists think about problems and how they do their work.

For a long time, macroeconomics has been enamored with depicting an “average person” who makes plans for the future, smooths consumption, and seems to be able to represent the actions of society as a whole. But once a model contains only “one person,” it is almost destined to fail to truly reveal real-world differences in wealth and poverty, disparities in assets, debt stress, and the wide range of individual circumstances. In that case, income distribution, the structure of wealth, and how different households respond differently to policy are often not seriously explained, but flattened from the very beginning of the model. For a model like this, the world is like a piece of paper that’s too smooth; but reality isn’t paper—reality is more like a fabric with wrinkles, varying thickness, and creases.

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