Comment by Top19 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Top19 | Hacker News Reader

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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...

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.

> 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.

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

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

@Top19 also misspelled Stiglitz.

Yeah, I'm so angry they awarded it to that notorious right wing professor Paul Krugman.

You're close.

The bank isn't "a" bank, it's a Central Bank.

And it's Swedish, not Swiss.

You know I briefly wondered as I was writing whether it was Swedish or Swiss but then I was like, “aren’t all the bad banks from Switzerland, aren’t they also just famous for their banks?”.

Thanks for the correction or else I would have been misstating this fact for years, probably in less friendly forums than HackerNews too.

You could have read your own link, though.

Also, no, not all the bad banks are from Switzerland, that's just prejudice.

Nonsense conspiracy theory contradicted by your own wikipedia link.

It was the central bank of Sweden, not some random Swiss bank. It's always been administered by the same Nobel organization. The central bank of Sweden does not have an editorial say in who wins.

I don't think there's enough evidence to say they did it to promote a particular branch of economics. More likely just to promote the credentials of economics as sound science.

But yes, it was founded in a rather dubious way, and of course there's no obligation on the public to accept it as a Nobel prize.

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