Battleangel

How right he is.

The Local - In the week before this year’s Nobel laureates are announced, the great great nephew of Alfred Nobel has reiterated his criticism of the Nobel Economics Prize, which he says is “a PR coup by economists to improve their reputation”.

Nobel despised people who cared more about profits than society’s well-being, Peter says, reiterating his vehement criticism of the Nobel Economics Prize which he says Alfred Nobel would never have created.

“It’s most often awarded to stock market speculators”, which does not reflect Alfred Nobel’s spirit of improving the human condition, he fumes.

What a broadside. I totally sympathize with his views. As noted, the Economics Prize is handled by Sweden’s Central Bank (central bank conspiracy theorists harken!) and was only introduced as late as 1968. I think Peter Nobel is onto something here and it’s not the first time he has raised these issues in public either. Economists are an awkward sort (no offense!) .. not as people but in the Weltanschauung they adopt when they join the professional ranks. Just go to any university library and listen to their dreary and introverted discussions over portfolio investments, interest and why they have to pay so much tax and consequently can’t afford a BMW. It is quite pitiful. And that is just part of the problem. Economists have an aura and an influence over civil society that is breathtaking and quite frankly unsound.

Ironically, Peter’s prize of choice is the Peace Prize, which also is not a “real” prize, and has to put it mildly been handed out to some pretty questionable characters in the past. Peter mentions Kofi Annan and Amnesty which are two exceptions to a long history of clueless and opportunistic Peace Prize awards. Just look at the list. Jimmy Carter, Elie Wiesel, Mother Teresa, Henry Kissinger, not to mention the three stooges, Peres, Arafat and Rabin. And that is just from a quick glance at the list without researching the unfamiliar names.

In addition, if one were to return to the Nobel Economics Prize, I recall Chalmers Johnson bringing up the concept in Blowback (excerpts), noting how the once “soft” field of emperical economics, linked to social sciences, had been transformed into a “hard” mathematical science. For a very specific reason of creating a fighting ideology that would match Marxism-Leninism.

Its propositions were now expressed less in words than in simultaneous equations, the old ideas of Adam Smith reappearing as fully mathematized axioms, increasingly divorced from empirical research. Its data were said to be “stylized facts,” and economists set out to demonstrate through deductive reasoning expressed in mathematical formulas that resources could be allocated efficiently only through an unfettered market. By now all these terms (”resources,” “efficiency,” “markets”) had been transformed into abstractions, not unlike the abstract formulations (”the proletariat,” “the bourgeoisie,” “class conflict”) of its Soviet opponents. English-speaking economics became such a “hard science” that in 1969 the central bank of Sweden started giving Nobel Prizes to its adepts, virtually all of them American academicians. This ensured that virtually all aspiring economists would in the future try to do so-called theoretical economics — that is, the algebraic modeling of markets — rather than old-fashioned empirical and inductive research into real-world economies.