The economics prize has always been set apart from the other Nobel awards, and the subject of much controversy: unlike the other awards, which were created in Nobel’s 1895 will. Photo: AFPStockholm: The Nobel prize in economics, to be announced Monday, has increasingly honoured research in the field of finance — a subject which, observers note, is far from founder Alfred Nobel’s philanthropic ideals. “Alfred Nobel himself, a prolific inventor and businessman of genius, would not have created a prize for economics,” according to economists Avner Offer and Gabriel Soderberg in their book “The Nobel Factor”, which came out in September. Most of the mathematicians who have won a Nobel prize can be found among financial economists — yet their equations and models would probably not have impressed Alfred Nobel. “By the traditionally rigorous standards of the natural sciences, financial economics has been a failure.

Source: Mint October 08, 2016 06:22 UTC