
The Absurdity of Nobel Prizes in Science - gfredtech
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/10/the-absurdity-of-the-nobel-prizes-in-science/541863/?&amp;single_page=true
======
adekok
I was a collaborator on the SNO project. I worked with Art McDonald, who co-
won the 2015 Nobel prize in physics for the project.

There were hundreds of people involved. We couldn't have done it without the
hundreds of people. While Art was a fantastic guy and a tireless worker, a
good chunk of his contribution was management.

i.e. A _competent_ manager. He not only understood all of the physics
involved, but a good chunk of the engineering, along with having decent
managerial skills. No one with skills solely in an MBA, or theoretical
physicist, or civil engineer could have done it.

Even if he didn't win based on something he mathematically proved, there's no
question he's one of the top physicists around.

If you look at the Nobel prizes as the "best of" awards, and not "the guy who
invented something all alone", it becomes a bit more palatable.

On top of that, the Nobel committee is limited by the rules of their
foundation. Even assigning Nobels for something done 5 years ago is arguably
outside of the directions of the trust.

So yeah, the article isn't theoretically wrong, but it's wrong for practical
purposes.

~~~
cooper12
> On top of that, the Nobel committee is limited by the rules of their
> foundation

The article address this argument though and says that the Foundation has
already stretched the rules.

~~~
SEMW
> The article address this argument though and says that the Foundation has
> already stretched the rules.

That bit of the article is arguably misleading. The foundation is not
stretching its rules in awarding it to three people. That stretching (from one
to three) was done immediately after Nobel's death as part of the settlement
of his Will, and enshrined in the statutes of the foundation ("nor shall it be
divided into more than three prizes at most")[0].

Whether it's possible to change it now to allow more than three is a question
for someone who knows Swedish Trust law.

[0]
[https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_organizations/nobelfoundati...](https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_organizations/nobelfoundation/statutes.html)

~~~
Pigo
Just to play devils advocate, where should the line be drawn? None of this
work could be done if it weren't for the cafeteria staff that provided brain
food, or the spouses who shouldered the responsibilities of any parents who
worked on the project while providing moral support. It could get messy.

~~~
adekok
When you do your work, do you share awards and raises with the cafeteria
staff? Does the cafeteria staff understand the work you do? Do they contribute
materially to it? i.e. technical contributions which are meaningful in the
field?

No? Then the analogy is false.

The difference with physics (for example) is that when a paper has 160 co-
authors (as in my experience) _all_ of those people contributed materially to
the result. They are _all_ experts in the field, and they _all_ understand the
contents of the paper.

------
sleavey
I agree with parts of the article, that big breakthroughs are rarely these
days individual efforts, and that praising only the ones at the top is
misleading and potentially damaging; however, as a member of the LIGO
collaboration, I think these three guys really do deserve credit for what
they've driven over the past 50 (!) years, and all of the work we've been able
to do over the years has only been enabled by their drive. While choosing
three from thousands is never fair, it's probably more fair than distributing
the award equally among anyone who's ever played a part in gravitational wave
science.

The recipients have been at pains to make the collaborative effort clear. One
of the first things Rai Weiss (winner this year) said on the phone to the
Nobel press conference today was that he saw this as an award for the 1000+
scientists in the (LIGO) collaboration. When a special Breakthrough Prize was
awarded to all of us last year, with large prize money being given to Rai, Kip
and Ron Drever (who died earlier this year and who otherwise might have been
one of the three Nobel laureates today), Rai and other senior scientists spent
the money funding grad students and other science activities [1]. They have
given ample credit to the people that helped in their success, and they've
shared their knowledge and resources with the newer generations.

Today, we're celebrating this as a recognition foremost for the three new
Nobel laureates, but also to the other pioneers who didn't make the "final
three", the diverse collaboration of scientists past and present who've been
involved around the world in gravitational wave physics, and all the
technicians and students that did the grunt work building the machines and lab
experiments. While our names aren't all stamped on the medals, I for one am
deeply satisfied to have played some (tiny) part in it all alongside these
greats.

[1] [http://www.ligo.org/magazine/LIGO-magazine-
issue-11.pdf#page...](http://www.ligo.org/magazine/LIGO-magazine-
issue-11.pdf#page=36)

~~~
KGIII
Well done. Your post embodies and expresses how I expected the majority of
fellow scientists responded to this news. I don't want to say that's how
they/you should respond, but that's how I hoped you'd respond.

To have even played a small part in LIGO must be an awesome feeling of
accomplishment and enable a true appreciation for collaboration with genius.

Congratulations on your (tiny) part. The effort that went into the project is
mind boggling.

------
eesmith
I visited Sweden once, during the Nobel Prize award ceremony.

I loved how the ceremony was broadcast on TV, and the scientists, who are
famous in their own field, walk the red carpet and are given the (literally)
royal treatment for their visit.

I loved the clips where they show the award winners and family visiting places
in Sweden - a bit like the background clips they show during the Olympics.

For this brief time, scientists eclipsed actors, athletes, and the other pop
culture stars.

'Course that could have been just me. I do like a bit of absurdism.

~~~
KGIII
When I was a young child, I used to daydream about winning a Nobel. I didn't
daydream about winning an Emmy or a Grammy, but I did dream of winning a
Nobel. (And Formula 1 championship races, but that's not important right now.)

Do kids today daydream of getting a Nobel? Science was a Pretty Big Deal when
I was young. We were just getting started with space exploration and splitting
the atom was pretty new. We kids talked about the breakthroughs we would make,
when we weren't seriously considering our future career as baseball stars and
how we'd enjoy our flying cars and robots.

My kids are all grown, so I can't really ask them what little kids daydream
of. The kids my daughter interacts with are probably a bit too preoccupied to
think about winning a Nobel.

~~~
felipemnoa
>>When I was a young child, I used to daydream about winning a Nobel. I didn't
daydream about winning an Emmy or a Grammy, but I did dream of winning a
Nobel. <<

I suspect that lots of us as kids had the same daydreams, self included, and
I'm sure that many kids today with a love for science daydream about the same
thing.

~~~
Retric
It could be a feedback loop. Kids may not dream of being a banker etc. because
they don't have anything to tie it to.

------
bjourne
I think that there is a similar problem in the software world when it comes to
free software projects. Who created Python? Linux? Perl? Wikipedia? If your
answer is Guido van Rossum, Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall and Jimmy Wales you are
about as wrong as the Nobel Prize committee. But sometimes there are a single
guy who is responsible for a lot of the project even if that person is almost
never credited, like Tom Lane or Fabricio Bellard.

I don't know about what to do about this unfair distribution of credit.
Probably nothing.

~~~
ams6110
On the other hand, would we have Python, Linux, Perl, or Wikipedia without
those people? They had the vision and they made it happen. Sure many other
people could have done it. But those people did do it.

It's much easier to be a contributor, than a founder/leader. The
founders/leaders deserve more credit.

~~~
BurningFrog
Yeah, the did something very important for those projects.

But what do we call it?

~~~
lstyls
BDFL?

------
pipio21
For me Nobel prices in Science are one of the things that work better the way
they are that most alternatives.

Nobel prices in peace are ridiculous. Not talking about (fake) Nobel prices of
Economy that do not exist but have managed to buy themselves some recognition
because the money printing of central bankers.

For me this article is absurd. If you have a better way of giving to science,
create your own price with your own money.

~~~
fatjokes
Agreed. Nobel laureates in peace are basically bullshit. Look at Obama---good
president, but how many drone strikes did he order, and Aung San Suu Kyi--
currently accused of genocide. The Nobel laureates in science indisputably
pushed forth the frontiers of human understanding.

Frankly, I think the Nobel prizes in the sciences are carrying the name.

~~~
vacri
Perhaps look at it another way - assigning a Nobel peace prize is a way of
putting wider attention onto someone, and maybe works as a soft pressure to
keep them behaving a little? For half a year or so after you get awarded a
peace prize, your profile in the world is a lot higher than normal, perhaps
giving you a bit more of a nudge in the right direction.

Also, Aung San Suu Kyi won her Nobel Peace Prize in _1991_ , 26 years ago. How
old is that? Well, that was the year that the world-wide-web was born. Kurt
Cobain was still alive. George Bush was in office and was just 'George Bush',
not 'George Bush Sr' (and the first Bush war against Iraq started in January).
The Soviet Union still existed, dissolved only in December of that year.
_Street Fighter II_ hit the arcades. The Rodney King beating sparked the LA
riots. The war that gave us the term 'ethnic cleansing' started that year in
Yugoslavia. Apartheid was still going on in South Africa, with a couple of
years left to go. Linus Torvalds announces Linux on comp.os.minix.

Calling the Nobel Peace Prize bullshit because a recipient behaves
differently-to-expected _a generation later_ is itself bullshit.

~~~
felipelemos
Maybe we should only award Nobel Peace Prize posthumously.

~~~
vidarh
The rules prevent it other than in exceptional circumstances. See my comment
above about the consideration of an award to Gandhi for example. Apart from
wanting the candidate to continue to do good, there are also considerations
such as practicalities of where the money should go as the money is awarded
with the intent of using it to further the purposes of the prize, though the
recipient has wide latitude, and so it is not a given that it'd be appropriate
to just hand the money to someones estate for example.

------
schoen
The abstract of the 5,154-author paper that this article mentions:

[https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.11...](https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.191803)

I first thought it was this one

[http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008JInst...3S8003A](http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008JInst...3S8003A)

which is also by Aad et al., but that one has a mere 2,926 authors (because it
includes only the ATLAS collaboration and not the CMS collaboration).

Seeing all of these people listed definitely lends some weight to the "it's
kind of unreasonable for only 1-3 people to win a Nobel for this sort of work"
view for me.

~~~
greeneggs
> Seeing all of these people listed definitely lends some weight to the "it's
> kind of unreasonable for only 1-3 people to win a Nobel for this sort of
> work" view for me.

But what is the alternative? The article doesn't give much detail; it just
says, "Why not award the scientific prizes to teams and organizations, just
like the Peace Prize can be? The price of reform is low, and the cost of
avoiding it is high."

But this is clearly wrong. If you give the Nobel to a collaboration of 5000+
physicists, then you greatly devalue the Nobel prize. Either they are all
laureates, including those hundreds of grad students who signed on for just
six months, or maybe none of them really are. After the Nobel is devalued it
will be nearly impossible to rebuild its status, or to replace it with another
prize with equal status in the public consciousness.

The main problem described in the article is that the current system gives a
"misleading impression of how a lot of science is actually done." I don't
agree with this claim; anyone who has seen a picture or budget for LIGO knows
that this isn't a one-man show.

And that is not the point anyway. The prize puts a human face on major
scientific accomplishments. This is far more important than the possible
downside of slightly misleading some people about how science works.

~~~
schoen
Thanks for presenting this counterpoint.

------
superasn
This is like open source projects.. Even though hundreds and thousands of
people contribute to these projects when you think of Perl you credit Larry
wall, linux is Linus, laravel is taylor otwell, etc.

------
alkonaut
It would be interesting to know what the prizes would be awarded for if they
considered only individual efforts, no huge projects with decade long
collaborations of thousands of people.

The effect would likely just be that a few theoretical advances could be
nominated while experiments, even those that confirm the theories in question
(Higgs, or this years prize) would go unawarded.

~~~
usrusr
It might end up looking like a random "employee of the month". There are
thousands of individuals working on their own little puzzle piece of these
large cooperations, singling out some individual contributors "down in the
trenches" for an award would be a lot more disrespectful to their peers than
awarding some shared head figures who implicitly represent their entire
extended teams.

~~~
alkonaut
I was thinking that the prizes would go to smaller individual discoveries,
rather than to the major ground breaking discoveries. I.e. either the prize
would be basically for theoretical physics, in which case Higgs could get the
prize (and no one involved in confirming it would be awarded). This would
basically leave experimental physics out of the question because these huge
experiments obviously always involve huge amounts of people.

 _Or_ the awards would go to small discoveries that actually were made by
individuals or small teams. Basically you'd see the largest and most
groundbreaking discoveries go completely unawarded because they are group
efforts, and since the price is directed towards the lone genius, it would be
awarded for tiny discoveries.

~~~
usrusr
But are there even small discoveries in physics? Anything not predicted by
current models would be considered huge, and everything else would not be a
discovery.

------
empath75
I think the prizes are important as a means of drawing the attention of the
general public to certain important discoveries. I do think they should do
more to recognize more contributors to various discoveries, even if they have
to limit the number of people who receive the monetary award.

------
Blackthorn
This is a fabulous article. Touches on everything from large groups of people,
obviously missing attributions due to death, and even the sexist outcomes.

------
dna_polymerase
Typical competitive thinking from everyone here. Just see the Nobel Prize as a
little gem alongside the road to greater goals. Focus on the work to come
instead of arguing about a procedure older than any human alive.

It doesn't matter who gets a shiny medal, the only thing that matters is that
we push science to next level. To help our understanding of the world and to
help the people.

~~~
alkonaut
Also: it doesn't matter who picks up the shiny medal, what matters is also
that science, like sports or movies, also has a couple of hours of glamour.
The Oscars are also a charade, but it makes the whole industry a bit more
magical and glamorous. The glamour and attention might attract that next Curie
or Einstein to science, in which case it was all worth it.

------
Glyptodon
I keep hoping they'll give one to SciHub.

~~~
dyukqu
..or to Alexandra Elbakyan; for a lifetime† achievement (in supporting
hundreds of thousands of scientists/researchers around the globe).

†since she has helped so many researchers, affected their lives, it shall
count as _well-beyond-lifetime_

~~~
dna_polymerase
Or Aaron Swartz who had to die for the very same thing.

------
j7ake
If viewed as context of a CEO of company or captain of a sports team (or even
solo sports) these nobel prizes seem to make sense. The winners are the face
of the organisation.

------
melling
If companies and universities tried to win Nobel Prizes like teams try to win
the Super Bowl, the Olympics, America’s Cup, etc it would be more useful.

It does give visibility to science, which hopefully, motivates a few more
people to grow up to want that achievement.

Personally, I think we need more prizes and “sports” for these endeavors:

[https://www.xprize.org](https://www.xprize.org)

[http://roborace.com](http://roborace.com)

------
jlg23
A heretic thought: Maybe the Nobel Prize only manages to ~"distort our
perception of science" because the reporting about it can fill the void
created by incredibly bad, superficial science journalism?

------
lutorm
Alfred Nobel only wanted to reward people for making discoveries. There are
many reasons one can argue that this is counterproductive (Like this article
points out, science is not a single-person endeavor, but even more importantly
is that it invokes a huge survivorship bias: You only get the prize for being
_correct_ , so someone else who did just as important work on another theory
that showed that it was _not_ correct will never be rewarded.)

But in the end, it was Nobel's prerogative to do what he wanted with his
money. We can argue whether it would have been better if he had done something
different, but it is what it is. It's not a reward by a government or any
community or democratically elected organization where we really have standing
to argue that it should be different, it's just a committee trying to follow
the century-plus old will of a single person. If we don't like what it does,
we don't have to pay attention.

~~~
ordu
Hmm... Should we follow his idea how to reach his goals, or maybe we should
follow his goals with our best? Nobel idea how to invest his money is based on
the understanding science as it was at XIX century. But now science is
different and is changing further constantly. So if we follow Nobel last will,
than Nobel Prize would become irrelevant, having zero influence on science,
just some tradition from the past to give money for good managers or for
respectable elderly scientists choosed from hundreds of other equally
respectable and elderly scientists by some qualities having nothing to
productivity in science or revolutionary ideas. Alternatively we can try to
adapt the Nobel Prize to new reality, allowing it to reflect current state of
affairs and to hold its influence on science.

I'm not a lawer, so I don't know is it possible to change Nobel Prize
principles. All I want is to point to futility of blind following the old
rule.

------
bkcreate
This seems like less of an issue with the Nobel Prizes and more that the
author doesn't like prizes in general. Not everyone that contributes to a
movie gets to go up on stage to collect the Oscar. There are always going to
be problems with subjective awards in terms of leaving people out, people
being overshadowed who would have won in other years, etc. I think the award
does a good job of celebrating achievements that otherwise wouldn't be nearly
as widely recognized.

~~~
gutnor
Sport/Media are ripe with awards and top personalities are paid a salary
directly proportional to their recognition.

Science powers the whole world, yet scientist receives a very minimal
recognition for it, either in salary or prizes. Nobel Prizes are basically the
only way that scientists achieve a bit of that.

~~~
jessriedel
This is because most people care about pop musicians much more than about
scientists, regardless of lip service to the contrary. You can't make them
care by creating more awards. There are already an uncountable number of
awards in physics (e.g., the Dirac medal, the Sakurai prize, the Wolf prize,
the Newton medal, the Breakthrough prize, etc., etc.).

------
EGreg
Why not start a website where scientific discoveries can be linked to their
uses on the one side, and on the other side to their contributors and former
discoveries it is based on? Could be a wiki.

~~~
Koshkin
> _uses_

I am not sure if the discovery of gravitation waves can be of any use to us
(other than perhaps stimulate funding for further astrophysics research, that
is).

~~~
xenophonf
That's a rather narrow view.

Can you imagine what went into building the gravitational wave observatories?
Don't you think that's advanced the state of the art with respect to the
different kinds of technology, manufacturing, and construction techniques
involved?

I support biomedical research. We're adopting scientific collaboration tools
developed by the high energy physics community and specifically LIGO. These
tools make it possible for large-scale, multi-institution, transnational
collaborations to readily and securely share data worldwide. I'm really
excited about what has become possible.

Admittedly, that has nothing to do with the detection of gravitational waves
themselves. Still, these projects (and others) have improved the state of the
art, and while it might not lead to something you can buy at Walmart any time
soon, it might make a malaria cure happen sooner, or improve the quality of
care for tuberculosis patients, or reduce the rate of breast cancer---little
stuff that over time adds up to hundreds of thousands of people alive and well
who, without all those little things adding up, wouldn't be alive today.

~~~
dekhn
any ancillary benefits that occur as side effects of funding a physics
project, could almost certainly have been achieved, without the funding of the
physics project. for example, direct investment into disease research is much
more likely to have short-term impact.

that's not to say ancillary discoveries with impact outside the original
domain don't occur- they're just not as cost effective.

~~~
pcnix
But then that means you wouldn't have funded the physics project. In the long
term, research in fundamental physics is the main thrust for human scientific
progress, which is why it is given the importance it is.

Ancillary benefits are, by definition, not the primary thrust of what research
is about.

Apologies if I misunderstood your comment.

~~~
dekhn
Most of the big expensive physics projects actually have little to no impact
on daily life, or really scientific progress they're mainly about confirming
theories that were thought up a long time ago. Dollar-for-dollar medical
research has a much greater impact than physics

------
microcolonel
What about Nobel prizes in _peace_ , those are plenty absurd too.

------
lokerfoi
If European Union got the Nobel peace prize, then so can an organization
behind LIGO experiments.

------
Tloewald
The only problem I foresee is that Berkeley will quickly run out of parking
spaces.

------
projectant
Do people not want to especially reward the small numbers of organisers for
their efforts?

~~~
projectant
What's wrong with rewarding the project leaders?

Yes, being _part_ of the team is one achievement, being _leader_ of the team
is another achievement on top of that.

Sorry there's not "participation prizes" for everybody, but there are concrete
important differences between being _team member_ and _team leader_ , as much
as some seem to want to delude themselves otherwise and give themselves the
"consolation prize" of feeling good, instead of getting the result (being the
PI/project lead and getting the Nobel) they wanted.

Zero sympathy for the people who would want to Nobel, now trying to diminish
the achievements of those who won the Nobel, just to console themselves.
Everyone knows how science works. There are teams and PIs and projects and
project leaders. Instead of crying that the reality is "unfair" if the
complainers actually _cared enough_ about winning, they would have tried to
position their careers in such a way that they were competitive. To pretend
you were disserviced when you know how it works is disempowering your own
potential to have done better, and also really disrespectful to diminish the
importance of Nobel recognition, to people who contribute to winning those
prizes.

TL;DR - Looking at the group complaining about not being recognized, all I see
is a bunch of sore losers, inventing disempowering reasons to console
themselves, instead of inventing results for themselves. Take personal
responsibility, be inspired by the achievements of others, these traits will
help you win.

~~~
circlefavshape
I see nothing wrong with recognising the project leaders.

If you think, however, that the "sore losers" want to change the rules of the
game solely in order to give themselves a better chance of winning, then
there's something missing in your understanding of humans. People like
fairness

~~~
projectant
I understand if you feel otherwise, but I see no unfairness in Nobels going
_only_ to project leaders and PIs.

I think the sore losers act entitled to something they didn't earn. I don't
think that means I'm missing something about humans. Why would you _want_ to
suggest that? Your argument ought to stand on its own not by pretending I'm
less. That's not nice. Nor kind. But, look, I am missing many many things in
my understanding and experience about humans, and life, and every topic,
because I don't understand anything completely or nearly so. And I've only
experienced what I have in my life. I'm okay with that.

If you think people prefer fairness, then maybe you didn't face what I did, or
maybe you just reacted differently (and if you did then you better teach me
how!). I learned people prefer themselves, to fairness, and will cooperate or
cheat as either pays off.

I'm no better than that. Let me show you: If you don't think the same way as
me, then clearly there is something missing about _your_ understanding of
humanity, or your experience. See? I like to cheat, too. When it pays off. Or
maybe it's fair to give like you get? What do you think, given that you said
there's something missing in my understanding, was that comment fair and
justified?

My view is both of us are missing many things about understanding and
experience, and if we think differently it's just because we had different
experiences and reactions. There's not one true way. And I think that's fine.
Diversity right?

So if we can put all that nastiness behind us, what's our common ground, how
do you think we ought to make the Nobel prizes more fair and still have them
be effective? Do you think we ought to preserve, dismantle or alter the
hierarchies and institutions that have worked for science? And do you think we
can agree that "fairness" is not a universal good, and that in this case we
have (possibly competing) interests such as progress, or effectiveness?

------
d33
Personally I find peace prizes abominable:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_Peace_Prize_laur...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_Peace_Prize_laureates)

They just got way too political.

~~~
mmanfrin
How is it _abominable_? And how do you propose advocation of peace to be
divorced from politics? It is necessarily intertwined.

~~~
throwawayknecht
"Moral revulsion" seems reasonable to feel at Kissinger's win.

Obama's is meaningless, even if you believe he did contribute materially to
international peace (he didn't) he hadn't done so yet, with less than a year
in office.

Giving it to the EU is just farce, in the same sense as "corporations are
people." The EU is the result of the process the prize is supposed to
encourage. It should be going to the people responsible for that institution's
functioning - but good luck convincing anyone that its leaders have done a
particularly good job navigating post-sovereign-debt-crisis, the period the
prize would usually be awarding.

(I agree the award is necessarily political. I think it's better to say many
recent awards have been _tactical_ \- moves in an attempt to bring about
better relations, mostly unsuccessfully, rather than recognizing those who do
really encourage them.)

~~~
vacri
The efforts of the EU (and other things, of course) have helped the major
powers in Europe avoid war for over half a century now, a rarity in European
history. Why wouldn't that be worth recognising?

I mean hell, on this page we have people complaining that the prize "only goes
to three people when thousands were involved", and here you're complaining
that "a group of people are awarded instead of a few individual". Damned if
you do, damned if you don't...

~~~
throwawayknecht
I support the EU, but it's not clear to me that they are the primary entity
responsible for peace in Europe between 1945 and 1991. And I think they have
acted especially parochial and conservative during 2007-2012, the period prior
to getting the Nobel.

------
aaron695
The Absurdity of the Academy Awards in the Arts.

Blah, blah, blah, I disagree with some perceived unfairness so it's all crap.

End of the day nothing is perfect, but encouraging people in awards like these
push forwards the areas.

You want to push forward Science the Nobel Prize is amazing to encourage
people.

You want your own new age everyone gets a prize award, create one.

------
duncan_bayne
I think this is what you get when the participation trophy generation wants to
rework the Nobel Prize.

Some of his criticisms are valid - e.g. discrimination against female nominees
(although perhaps not the number of same) - but for the most part it seems to
be a thinly veiled complaint about the concept of prizes in general.

------
c3534l
They reward some notable people in science, they don't determine what was the
best and most worthwhile science. You might as well criticise bananas for not
actually being bicycles.

------
Top19
Want to briefly hijack this thread to quickly point out that there is no such
thing as a Nobel Prize in Economics. Literally a Swiss bank made it upon the
70’s and dubiously said their prize was to “honor Alfred Nobel”. They were
very forceful and never backed down from the prize, ultimately winning the PR
battle and forcing the real Nobel org to sort-of acknowledge them.

They did this to originally award distinctions to conservative economists like
Milton Friedman, though today they’re a little bit sneakier and will every now
and then sneak an award to someone like Joseph Stieglitz.

You can read more about it in the somewhat sanitized Wikipedia article which
only hints at the dispute that lies beneath:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Econom...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Economic_Sciences)

EDIT: I understand the downvotes for the incorrect factual background. I want
my main point to be the issue of economics not doing a great job over the last
30-40 years when these awards were begun / the general retreat of Keynesian
economics in favor of Neoliberalism. That being said it’s sometimes mentioned
that the peak of a scientist’s productivity is right before he or she gets the
Nobel (Memorial) Prize due to the resulting fame, so perhaps other economists
are to blame.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Literally a Swiss bank made it upon the 70’s and dubiously said their prize
> was to “honor Alfred Nobel”. They were very forceful and never backed down
> from the prize, ultimately winning the PR battle and forcing the real Nobel
> org to sort-of acknowledge them.

1\. Swedish, not Swiss. Both start with “Sw”, but, still, completely different
countries.

2\. And not just some random Swedish Bank, but the Swedish _central_ bank
(equivalent to the US Federal Reserve.)

3\. And the first award was in 1969, which would be hard if it was made up in
the 1970s.

4\. The “real Nobel org”, as relevant to this discussion (there's actually
four different ones) is the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (which awards
the Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry.) Which don't just sort-of
acknowledge the Economics prize, they are the ones who award it.

5\. And, as requested by the bank which both endowed the prize and pays for
administrative expenses related to it, the Academy awards it using the same
standards as associated with the prizes funded by Nobel’s endowment.

6\. While Hayek and Friedman did win the prizes in the 1970s, neither earlier
nor later laureates were consistently identify with conservatism.

The idea that you seem to be pushing, that it's a right-wing propaganda tool
issued by some other organization unrelated to the prizes endowed by Alfred
Nobel that is merely “sort-of acknowledged” by “the real Nobel org” is simply
not supported by the facts.

~~~
emmelaich
> The idea that you seem to be pushing, ...

Interesting, I read it the other way, because of the "sneaked" later.

@Top19 also misspelled Stiglitz.

