Showing posts with label Nobel Prize. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nobel Prize. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Nobel Prize in Economics

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2010 was awarded jointly to Peter A. Diamond, Dale T. Mortensen and Christopher A. Pissarides.

Diamond, 70, is an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a specialist in Social Security. Bernie Madoff would have loved to have Diamond on his team, since Diamond completely ignores the Ponzi like aspects of Social Security and tinkers with "fixing" the scam. Going beyond Madoff, Diamond then ignores the coercion involved in SS. He focuses with tunnel-like narrow vision beyond the coercive aspects, and Ponzi like aspects, to pontificate in numerous journal articles and books about how to "save" SS, including recommendations to cut "benefits" and aggressively increase SS taxes...

Mortensen, 71, is an economics professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He studies frictional unemployment. This is like studying half time in a basketball game. Yeah, it exists, but it is a pretty simple concept that doesn't tell you much about the game. Frictional unemployment simply means that if someone loses a job, it takes them time to find another job...

Outside of this obvious point, these guys have no real insights that can help anyone understand the economy and one of them. Diamond, is near the controls of the greatest Ponzi scheme the earth has ever experienced. I would be objecting less if the award was given directly to Madoff.

In summary, the Nobel Committee could have only done a worse job by giving the award jointly to Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke.

read the entire article

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Barack Obama and the Nobel Prize

The Press Release:

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama's vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.

Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama's initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.

Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population.

For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world's leading spokesman. The Committee endorses Obama's appeal that "Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges."

source


Wall Street Journal editorial

The Nobel Peace Prize awarded to President Obama yesterday was greeted with astonishment as much as any other emotion, even among many of his admirers. Our own reaction is bemusement at the Norwegian decision to offer what amounts to the world's first futures prize in diplomacy, with the Nobel Committee anticipating the heroic concessions that it believes Mr. Obama will make to secure treaties that will produce a new era of global serenity.

Maybe he really is The One.

Mr. Obama seemed more than a little amazed himself, after only nine months on the job and having been inaugurated only 12 days before Nobel nominations were due in February. The prize isn't "a recognition of my own accomplishment," the President said yesterday, adding that "I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who've been honored by this prize." Humility grace note accepted...

Mr. Obama sees the U.S. differently, as weaker than it was and the rest of the planet as stronger, and so he calls for a humbler America, at best a first among equals, working primarily through the U.N. The world's challenges, he emphasized yesterday, "can't be met by any one leader or any one nation." What this suggests to us—and to the Norwegians—is the end of what has been called "American exceptionalism." This is the view that U.S. values have universal application and should be promoted without apology, and defended with military force when necessary.


James Pethokoukis

The complete abdication by the Obama administration on trade should disqualify him from the Nobel Peace Prize. Free trade has lifted hundred of millions out of poverty worldwide and promoted a closer global society. But the Obama White House has been as protectionist as any in memory. Free trade is that the core of foundation of the post-World War II economic order.

Sheldon Richman on Frederic Passy

Monday, October 13, 2008

Paul Krugman Wins the Nobel Prize in Economics

"for his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity"

link

My thoughts: A Keynesian hack. "How much you would you bet that Hayek would list his Nobel on eBay now if were alive? The Nobel in economics is now, officially, a bad joke." Anon. blogger

Update: William Anderson on Krugman

Monday, October 15, 2007

Nobel Prize in Economics

Americans Leonid Hurwicz, Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences on Monday "for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory".

read more here