re: #126 fern01

Economics would be my suggestion - removing taxes, killing all government programs

Point of Interest: The Nobel Prize for Economics isn’t a real Nobel Prize. Unlike all the other prizes it was not created by Alfred Nobel’s Last Will and Testament. It’s official name is the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel and it was created by conservative free market Swedish bankers in the 60’s trying to undermine government control of monetary policy.

So why does it exist? Notre Dame historian Philip Mirowski has found evidence that the economics award grew out of Swedish domestic politics. According to Mirowski, in the 1960s, the Bank of Sweden was trying to free itself from government oversight and become independent. One way to do that was to frame economics as purely scientific, rather than political — in which case, government interference could only hurt the bank. Having a Nobel Prize boosted economics’ scientific street cred. And Mirowski isn’t the only academic who is skeptical of whether there should be a Nobel-associated economics prize. Friedrich von Hayek, who won the award in 1974, used his Nobel Banquet speech to critique the prize.3 “The Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess,” Hayek said. He worried that the prize would influence journalists, the public and politicians to accept certain theories as gospel — and enshrine them in law — without understanding that those ideas have a different level of uncertainty than, say, gravity or the mechanics of a human knee.