Concerning the Nobel Prize in economics. There is the strange case of Joan Robinson, and why she didn't get the Nobel Prize in economics. She was widely expected to get the Prize in 1975. Indeed, Business Week published a profile on her, precisely because they were expecting her to win the Prize, but the Nobel committee, instead, at the last moment, awarded it to the Soviet economist, Leonid Kantorovich, and the American, Tjalling C. Koopmans, for their work in creating linear programming.
Apparently, Robinson despite her contributions in such areas as the analysis of imperfect competition and capital theory (work which was of at least the same caliber as that of other economists who did win the Prize) was denied it because of her outspoken leftist, even Maoist, politics, and many say, because she was after all a woman. No woman has ever won the Prize in economics. It was also said that the Nobel Committee was fearful that she might "pull a Sartre" and turn down the prize, possibly following that up with a denunciation of the economics profession in general. In fact it is reported that she went out of her way to reassure the Committee that she had no intentions of doing any such thing, but they never awarded her the Prize anyway.
And of course a man like Paul Sweezy, who was the dean of American Marxist economics was never in the running for such a prize, even though he had made contributions to technical economics (such as his "kinked edge" demand curve under conditions of oligopoly) which would have normally merited the Prize.
Jim Farmelant
-- Wojtek Sokolowski <swsokolowski at yahoo.com> wrote:
Criticisms of Nobel Prize in economics - or more correctly Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (not the same as one the five Nobel prizes proper) - for its bias toward conventional views in economic thinking is nothing new, no point in repeating it here. Suffice it to say that not much would be lost if this institution were characterized as an award given by a tightly knit club of rich white men to those academics who exert extraordinary effort in supplying needed conclusions to that tightly knit club of rich white men.
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