Nobel Prize

Barack Obama with his Nobel Prize medal and diploma

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A Nobel Prize is a really cool thing you get for being a scientist, a humanitarian, or someone else who adds significantly to the lives and knowledge of humanity — unless you're a mathematician, geologist, or computer scientist.^{[note 1]}

The prize was founded by the inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel (1833–1896).^[2] After reading an obituary of himself, prematurely published by a French newspaper in 1884 and terming him a "merchant of death", he had a mild attack of conscience and sought to make amends. No, not by giving up the dynamite business, but instead using his wealth earned from manufacturing dynamite to endow the creation of the prizes upon his death in 1896.^[3]

There are prizes for chemistry, physics, medicine, economics, and the controversial Peace Prize.

Notably, no young earth creationist "scientist" has ever managed to get any of these. However, hated liberals Al Gore (the only person ever to win an Oscar, a Presidential election, and a Nobel Peace Prize) and Jimmy Carter have.

People tainted by the foul aroma of nefarious deeds have also received Nobel Prizes: Henry Kissinger (a long list of war crimes, overthrowing of democratically elected governments, and complicity in various genocides and other crimes against humanity), Aung San Suu Kyi (Rohingya genocide), Mother Teresa (various), Yasser Arafat (terrorism), and Peter Handke (genocide denialism) also got them. The Nobel Peace Prize can be viewed as something of an insult, no matter who you are.

In 2009, United States President Barack Obama was randomly selected from among just under seven billion people to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, which was being awarded that year to anyone who was not George W. Bush.

Current Prizes[edit]

The 5 prizes were established by Alfred Nobel in 1895 and first awarded in 1901. The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was created only in 1968, with the first prize in 1969; it was an idea originally conceived by Sweden's central bank (Sveriges Riksbank) to promote its tricentenary.^[4][5]

• Nobel Prize in Chemistry — Awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
• Nobel Prize in Physics — Awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
• Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine — Awarded by the Karolinska Institutet (the top-ranking medical university in Sweden)
• Nobel Prize in Literature — Awarded by the Swedish Academy (but not "of Sciences")
• Nobel Peace Prize — Awarded by a committee elected by the Norwegian Parliament.^[6] The last point is often missed.
• Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences — The Nobel Prize in Economics was established only in 1969, almost 70 years after the others, by Sweden's central bank. Nonetheless, the laureates are selected by The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (the same institution that selects the Nobel Prize in Physics and Chemistry^[7]) according to the same principles as for the Nobel Prizes that have been awarded since 1901,^[8] and the Nobel Foundation recognizes it as a Nobel Prize.^[9]

Presumably the Norwegians got saddled with the Peace Prize task because, at the time Nobel came up with it, Norway was not a sovereign state and the Norwegian parliament was less likely to be entangled in foreign policy affairs that could influence the vote than the Swedish would have been. This is of course not the case anymore today and cries about "political" votes are almost as common as Nobel prizes themselves. Since 2012,^[10] each prize is worth +7,500,000 Swedish kronor (1,100,000 USD).

Sometimes cited as a reason for the lack of a Prize in mathematics is a story about Nobel's wife having an affair with a mathematician, but it's just a story. Nobel never married and didn't even have a wife.^[11]

The dismal science prize[edit]

Besides having been created by the Swedish National Bank as a birthday party favor,^[4] the economics prize comes with substantial criticism. Unlike the other prizes in science (chemistry, physics, physiology), economics is not considered a "hard science", but is included among the social sciences, and consequently the field of economics is more subject to observer bias.

• Human rights lawyer Peter Nobel a great-grandnephew of Alfred Nobel, criticized the creation of the prize. He stated that the prize was "a PR coup by economists to improve their reputation" and that Alfred despised people who valued profits over societal well-being.^[4]
• Friedrich Hayek criticized the prize even as he was awarded it in 1974, stating during his awards speech, "It is that the Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess. This does not matter in the natural sciences. Here the influence exercised by an individual is chiefly an influence on his fellow experts; and they will soon cut him down to size if he exceeds his competence. But the influence of the economist that mainly matters is an influence over laymen: politicians, journalists, civil servants and the public generally."^[12] Hayek accepted the prize anyway because: Moolah!
• Several of the prize recipients have been criticized for various reasons:
  • Hayek: several of the awards committee members belongs to the same society that Hayek had founded, the Mont Pelerin Society,^{[13]:104–105} Both former Swedish Minister for Finance Kjell Olof Feldt and former Swedish Minister of Commerce and Industry (and Nobel co-recipient with Hayek) Gunnar Myrdal wanted the award abolished because of Hayek's prize, whom they considered a reactionary^[14]
  • Milton Friedman received the award in 1976. Friedman had been rightfully accused of supporting Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship in Chile after he spent a 6-day consulting trip to Chile in 1975. Four previous Nobel winners wrote to The New York Times protesting the award.^[15]:166
  • Robert Aumann, who was awarded the prize in 2005, was criticized for using game theory to argue against dismantling Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine.^[16]
  • Three winners have been libertarians: Hayek, Friedman, and James M. Buchanan (1986), all of whom had close ties to the Cato Institute,^[17] an institute that promotes ideas that would have been contrary to Alfred Nobel's intent (as per Peter Nobel),^[4] i.e., promoting profits over societal well-being (specifically, Cato opposes the welfare state, universal healthcare, public schools, environmental regulation)
• In 1994, following the awarding of the prize for work in game theory (John Nash), the scope of the economics prize was expanded to include all of the social sciences, which just increases the problematical nature of the prize since both economics^[18] and psychology^{[note 2]} have a reproducibility problem.

Sexism[edit]

There has been an issue with sexism in determining who gets a Nobel Prize, regardless of actual merit. For instance, Jocelyn Bell, the discoverer of the pulsar, didn't win the Nobel Prize, but her supervisor did. Bell herself has viewed sexism as playing a part in why she didn't receive the Prize:

The fact that I was a graduate student and a woman, together, demoted my standing in terms of receiving a Nobel prize.^[19]

While Bell was "only" a graduate student at the time she discovered a pulsar, other people have won the Prize for discovering things, such as Koichi Tanaka, who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2002 while only possessing a bachelor's degree.^[20]

Nominations and the fringe[edit]

The fact that the nomination process is pretty free and easy has led to some rather strange nominations, particularly for the Peace Prize. These include Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Fidel Castro,^[21] Hugo Chávez, and Vladimir Putin.^[22] Oh, and Donald Trump.

The secretive nature of the nomination process^[23] has also opened up for willing cranks^[24] to fraudulently claim that they've been nominated, when clearly, they have not been.

Politicization of the Peace Prize[edit]

Some deserving nominees never received the Prize, such as Mahatma Gandhi (for the Peace Prize) and Jorge Luis Borges (for literature). In Gandhi's case, the Nobel Committee's decision to not award a prize in 1948, as "there was no suitable living candidate," was, in effect, an award for Gandhi, as the prize is generally not given posthumously.^[25] It was a rather lame excuse since Gandhi had been previously nominated in 1937, 1938, 1939, and 1947.^[25] Just to rub in the hypocrisy of the Nobel committee, they had already a awarded a prize in literature to Sweden's Erik Karlfeldt in 1931, and would later award a posthumous peace prize to Dag Hammarskjöld in 1996.^[26]

It has been alleged that the Peace Prize has been highly-politicized, particularly by the Catholic Church which has a keen interest in it.^[27]:361-373 The committee has shown bias in favor of evangelical Christians by awarding peace prizes to people to people that few others had even heard of or did nothing to deserve it (self-promoting monk Dominique Pire in 1958 and Archbishop of Uppsala Nathan Söderblom in 1930).^[27]:367 The committee also has a history of appeasing the United States with what have been considered inappropriate awards (Theodore Roosevelt, George Marshall, Henry Kissinger).^{[27]:364-366[28]} The subsequent protests against Kissinger's award resulted in what might have been the first appearance of the phrase "Ignobel Prize" in 1973.^[27]:366

See also[edit]

• Ig Nobel Prize
• Nobel disease
• Templeton Foundation

External links[edit]

• Time magazine's top 10 list of Nobel Prize controversies

Notes[edit]

References[edit]