Worthless Nobel Prize
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Worthless Nobel Prize
| Mon, 10-13-2008 - 8:07am |
The Nobel Prize is officially a leftist propaganda tool. After giving the award to such luminaries as Yasser Arafat, Jimmy Carter, and Al Gore, a Nobel Prize has now been given to NY TImes columnist Paul Krugman. Not that I had much respect for the award before, but now, I think it is completely worthless.

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I suspect I've known who Paul Krugman is for considerably longer than you have. But I suppose there's no way to verify that. If you like, however, we could have a discussion about the relative merits of "The Great Unraveling," book-salon style. That would be fun! You've read it, of course....right?
However, my response to you would be: why on earth would a bunch of "Europeans" care one way or the other about American political leanings enough to try to influence American politics or culture by handing out their awards to people less-deserving of the award than others who were up for consideration? Why cheapen the name and reputation of the world-famous award to try to influence the politics of a country which isn't even theirs?
I think what I said in my first post and what I said in my most recent post mean the same thing, but if you want to parse it out, I guess that's your perogative.
And I haven't had much respect for the Nobel Prize as of late precisely because I feel that they have been giving it to people who don't deserve it. Arafat was a terrorist. Carter sat back and watched while Iran slid into an Islamic theocracy, negotiated a ridiculous deal with North Korea, and gave legitimacy to the "election" of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Gore is an environmental extremist whose film included numerous errors and lies and who doesn't practice what he preaches. He beat out a woman who saved Jewish children from the Holocaust for goodness sake. He really deserved it more than her?
As for Krugman, who may have done some admirable economic research in the past, he has become nothing more than a mean-spirited partisan hack for the NY Times and I think further legitimizing him this way is a joke.
Now, can you try to refute my current points without simply making fun of me or conservatism?
If you're so knowledgeable about him and think that he truly deserves it, why not say so in the first place?
As for the Great Unraveling, no, I didn't read it, because I have often read his reactionary columns directly from the NY Times and saw no need to read them again.
IMO, he suffers from what Charles Krathammer has called Bush Derangement Syndrome.
See, this is kinda what I mean when I say that it's not worth much (IMO) to try to have "debates" with people with whom you can't even agree upon a set of facts or what reality is. I had no idea, for example, that Paul Krugman's ideas were "reactionary":
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Unlike Krugman, I don't think that the Bush tax cuts and a plan to partially privatize Social Security are synonomous with wanting the bring about the downfall of the U.S. political and economic system. In that respect, Krugman was acting as a reacationary to progress and change.
And I'll ask you again - why do you think Arafat, Carter, Gore, and Krugman deserved their Nobel Prizes?
Honestly, I hadn't been paying all that much attention to this years' Nobels, frankly. Nor am I an economist myself. I haven't had the time - nor do I think I'd likely possess the expertise - to determine whether Krugman's theory is worthy of such a prize; or whether it was MORE worthy than any of the OTHER entrants, whose names and accomplishments I don't even know, at present. I could go try to educate myself on the nominees and their accomplishments, I suppose, but not being an economist, I'm not sure how much value my own layman's opinion would be worth. I've read Krugman and understand much of it.....but that doesn't make me worthy of grading his accomplishments against other professional economists' efforts. I suspect you are likely not a professional economist, either, or you probably would have said so by now.
That being the case, I'm content to let the Nobel committee, which is, after all, set UP to study and compare such things, determine to whom their prize ought to go. Is it the same choice each and every person would have made, given the same options? Obviously not, or you wouldn't be here complaining about it. But then again, a) it's their money and their award to bestow, and b) I'm betting that there's at least a reasonable argument to be made for Krugman's selection over the other nominees, even if some might disagree with their choice. It's not as if they'd pick, say, some anonymous ranter at DailyKos who bashes Bush.....just because he bashes Bush, over all the other entrants.
I think you might be mixing up the Nobel Peace Prize with the Nobel prizes in specific academic disciplines. The method for awarding Nobel prizes in specific academic areas is significantly different from the method used for the Nobel Peace prize, which is not even awarded by the same country. Thus, the awarding of the Nobel Peace prize tends to have a very different intent due to the differences involved in the process.
The Nobel prizes in Chemistry, Physics, Physiology or Medicine, Economics and Literature are actually awarded by selected committees from the relevant disciplines within Sweden (e.g., for Chemistry, Physics and Economics a committee of 5 is selected from the Swedish Academy of Sciences, while the Physiology or Medicine award is handled by the Karolinska, one of the leading medical research universities based in Stockholm). The Nobel Peace prize, otoh, is actually awarded by a committee selected by the Norwegian parliament (Storting), and thus has a more political character from the outset.
The Nobel prizes in academic disciplines are almost exclusively awarded for activities that occurred some time in the past (average, I think, is something like 20-30 years earlier), mainly because the assumption is that highly significant contributions can only become apparent in hindsight. There is also the additional concern of possible fraudulence, so the intent is to only award results "tested by time". The award this year for Chemistry, for example, went to people working with a chemical (GFP) that goes back to 1962. It's pretty rare for recent work to be rewarded; the prize for solving the structure of DNA was probably one of the most rapid with regard to time from publication to prize and that still took about 9 years.
I'm fairly sure, given the history of these groups of prizes, that Krugman was awarded the prize for some long-finished research in economics rather than current activities. As far as I have ever been able to tell (as a scientist who tends to keep a fairly close eye on the prizes every year, as well as the reactions) there has rarely been controversy over the actual discoveries or research selected for the relevant academic prize. The biggest controversies with the academic prizes tend to revolve around people who were left out although they could have (and have) argued that they contributed to the discovery, and people who did not get mentioned because they could not be awarded the prize posthumously (Rosalind Franklin being probably the most famous example of this occurrence).
The Nobel Peace prize, otoh, awards more recent or immediate achievements. If I recall correctly, the aim is to award achievements from the past year or two at the most. It is by far more controversial than the academic prizes. People have often complained, for example, that it has been used more with the intent to forward certain political aims than to award actual past behaviour, but those complaints have come from both sides of the political spectrum. Another complaint is that it is much more difficult to judge the long-term impact of recent activities, thus there is an argument that the Peace prize should be awarded for past activities in order to ensure that long-term impact has been rewarded, rather than short-term, fashionable (for lack of a better word) activities.
All of the prize winners you have listed in this post are Nobel Peace prize winners (though I don't remember Hugo Chavez actually getting a prize?). Sadly, the winners of the prizes in the more academic disciplines barely get a mention in general. It's kind of nice to see that at least someone noticed that a prize was given out in Economics this year :-).
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