Janet Currie

The work. How early childhood conditions, from pollution exposure to Medicaid coverage to prenatal health, shape a child's later life, measured with administrative data at scale.

The case for. She built the economics of child health almost from scratch, the findings drive policy, and the committee has yet to reward health economics directly.

The case against. Heckman's 2000 prize already touched early childhood investment, and her work reads as a program of careful findings rather than one landmark result.

The KmikeyM angle. Currie shows the returns on a person get set before anyone is paying attention; KmikeyM's shareholders bought in when he was already 30, so the early rounds went unpriced.