Reply #7: There is no such thing as the “Nobel Prize in Economics”

[leftist_not_liberal]

There never has been one. “Economics” was not one of the five prizes bequeathed by Alfred Nobel (Physics, Chemistry, Literature, Peace, and Medicine), there is no mention of “economics” anywhere in Alfred Nobel’s will nor in the enabling documents for the Prize when it was established in 1896, and not a nickel of Nobel’s money has ever been awarded for such a “prize”. So where did it come from?

In 1968, the Swedish Bank established the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, put up the money for the “award”, and talked the King of Sweden into giving away their “prize” at the same time as the Nobels. The President of the Bank, the very same Erik Lundberg discussed above, promised a selection process and committee “kinda, sorta, just like” that of the “real” prizes, immediately stacked the committee, and they were off to the races.

In 1971, the first prize was awarded to a “neo-liberal”, F.A. Hayek, and the new “prize” became bathed in controversy. The “prize” was awarded jointly to Gunnar Myrdal, Sweden’s most famous economist, and to Hayek. The ungrateful Myrdal immediately turned around and announced publicly that Hayek didn’t deserve the prize. Oddly, Hayek agreed. Nevertheless, none of this prevented the world press from trumpeting, Universities from gushing, and Foundations from funding, the flood of new “laureates”, blissfully, or perhaps intentionally, unaware of the underlying fraud.

The comedy went on unhindered until Peter Nobel, the great-grandnephew of Alfred Nobel, went public with a blistering criticism of the “memorial Prize” in the 1990s. “The Swedish Riksbank, like a cuckoo, has placed its egg in another very decent bird’s nest. What the Bank did was akin to trademark infringement – unacceptably robbing the real Nobel Prizes.” Nobel said, “Two thirds of these prizes in economics have gone to US economists, particularly of the Chicago School… These have nothing to do with Alfred Nobel’s goal of improving the human condition and our survival – indeed they are the exact opposite.”
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