did you guys know that the nobel prize in economics is not technically a real nobel prize? it’s the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel”. but it was never part of the Nobel bequest, and the prize is not actually administered through the Nobel Foundation. what happened was that in the late 1960s the Sveriges Riksbank (the Swedish central bank), in honour of their 300th anniversary, decided to donate a whole bunch of money to the Nobel Foundation’s investment portfolio to be used for a prize like the Nobels, in “memory of” Alfred Nobel. they can get away with that because the Nobel Prizes have always been a bit decentralised in the way they’re assigned, the Nobel Foundation just handles the money.
apparently you can just do that and then people will start calling your thing the Nobel Prize in whatever. I’m going to start a Nobel Memorial Prize in Feminism. the prize is only ten bucks but the publicity is priceless.
like I don’t wanna toot the horn of the Nobel Foundation’s Authentic Discernment but it’s just fascinating because this kind of stuff is everywhere in the recent history of economics, the exchange of money for the credibility of economics as a discipline. Peter Nobel, a descendent of of Alfred Nobel, went so far as to call it “a PR coup by economists to improve their reputation”.
so remember that whenever anyone talks about the great Nobel Laureates Hayek and Friedman.
