Krugman has NOT got a Nobel Prize in economics!

Miscellaneous General
1

There exists no such thing!

The Nobel Prize was instituted by the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel. In 1895 he testamented his fortune, made after having invented dynamite, for this purpose. His testament specifies five prizes: Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature and Peace. Not Economy!

In 1968, over 70 years after the death of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish central bank donated money (which of course it had stolen or counterfeited) for another prize: “The Prize for Economic Science of the Swedish Central Bank, to the Memory of Alfred Nobel”). This is the prize that Krugman received last year. The Swedish king hands it out at the same time as the Nobel prizes.

Considering the tremendous hype and prestige involved in Nobel Prize, I think that this deliberate mix up, by the central bank, between the natural sciences and economics, might well have contributed to, and legitimized, the quantification/econometrication of the economics subject.

Quantification of economics might also be driven by speculators wanting to forecast prices based on historic prices and fundamental data. It is a tempting idea. When I studied finance I was surpriced to see how many papers there are with titles like “Applying GARCH for valuation of Bermudan style options”! They are about applying some stochastic process as price generator, by data mining parameters for it, and then assume that errors between prediction and outcome are mathematically related to the errors during earlier periods. Students and postgraduates probably write such papers to prove for emplyers in the financial sector that they command the quantitative methods in question. Funny thing is, the math of it isn’t very complicated, its a piece of cake for any undergraduate physics student what these financial econometrics guys publish in order to get a doctors degree.

Anyway, I thought that non-Swedes might need to be reminded that there exists no Nobel prize in Economics! It’s a lie created by a central bank.

2

it doesn’t need to be. it just needs to signal your status. if you’re trying to signal to math illiterates then the bar is low.

3

Enlightening. I absolutely did not know this.

[^o)]

4

on the other hand, the same can be said for Hayeks prize, etc.

5

Yes, all the 40 economics prizes awarded by the Swedish central bank, 1969-2008, of course. Btw, Hayek had to share the prize with the Swede Gunnar Myrdal, whose dissertation is said to have “anticipated ideas later developed by John Maynard Keynes”. Myrdal was also a social democratic minister and he argued for compulsory sterilization, which also was applied in Sweden until the 1970s!

Shall we institute a Porn prize “to the memory of Alfred Nobel”???

6

As long as it includes gay porn (maybe as a separate category), sure. It’d at least make for better amusement than the prize in Economics.

7

Simply unbelievable.