10 thoughts on “More Nobel congratulations”

  1. I’m afraid I don’t see what El-Baradei actually did to deserve the award? Perhaps he got it for thinking good thoughts, certainly he hasn’t actually ACHIEVED anything remarkable as far as peace goes. However El-Baradei certainly isn’t as undeserving of the award as was Yassar Arafat. (to name one example)

  2. Isn’t that what the Nobel Peace Prize is for, at least half the time? For the prize committee to make a statement about what organisations and/or individuals it considers to be a Good Thing? Sometimes these organisations are indeed useful in the world and thoroughly deserve recognition; sometimes they just represent the Weltanschauung of the committee (‘We think disarmament is a good thing, so let’s give a prize to disarmament. Now who is Mr Disarmament? Well, there isn’t really one, so we’ll have to invent one. Ah, of course, the IAEA.’)

    The economics prize is a fascinating choice. In many ways Schelling is somewhat outside the mainstream of the profession, and Aumann is just one of those who could have been granted an award for repeated game theory. (Indeed in many ways, what I think of as Aumann’s most interesting work, on epistemology, is not mentioned at all in the citation.)
    All pre-poll bets that I saw were completely off the mark (the MIT internal betting pool voted for Peter Diamond but this happens every year, marking questionable rationality on the part of some of the discipline’s supposedly top minds since if and when he does win, the payoff will be very low due to the mass of bets). The buzz seemed to surround some of the usual suspects (Krugman, Barro) but seemed more focused on Fama this year.
    In some ways Aumann’s contribution is indeed greater than any of these – he definitely deserves the award – but then to have him linked with Schelling and to have the citation sound as if he had contributed explicitly to our understanding of international relations makes it seem like the Nobel committee wasn’t entirely comfortable awarding a prize for pure theory for theory’s sake.

  3. Schelling has done interesting work outside international relations. On problems of self-control, Schelling introduced the idea of willpower and the notion that people might display commitment (and therefore act non-impulsively) as the solution to a bargaining game. One of his well-known real world examples involves cocaine addicts voluntarily writing letters to police that confess their drug use guilt but which are only sent to police by their treatment centre if they re-use. This led on to George Ainslie’s theories of ‘personal rules’ to enforce commitment as the tit-for-tat solution to an (internal) intrapersonal game. I won’t ever smoke because even if I take only one cigarette now, and do myself negligible harm, that’s the best signal that next period I will smoke again. Recently philosophers like Bratman have attacked such theory but it is interesting and in my view ties ideas of taste formation to those of learning and intelligence.

    I can’t judge whether Schelling deserved the prize (there are plenty of bright people out there) but he is an innovative game theory thinker whose work bears on many fields — international relations and these recent models of willpower.

  4. Sylvia Nassar wrote in A Beautiful Mind how a bunch of game theorists including Aumann were invited to Sweden in the early 90s to give seminars on game theory. Aumann was carrying on like the Nobel was in the bag. This pissed a lot of people off and the first Nobel for game theory went to Nash, Harysani and Selten in 1994.

    I guess the prize committee thought 11 years in the sin bin was long enough.

  7. Steve wrote:
    “El-Baradei certainly isn’t as undeserving of the award as was Yassar Arafat. (to name one example)”
    Another example would be Henry Kissinger.

    What did El-Baradei do?
    Well, if the US was prepared to lobby to ensure his removal as head of the IAEA, as they seemed to want to do earlier this year, then surely he must have done something right….

  8. Agree with the Kissinginger example, actually I am trying to think of a recent recipient who actually deserved the award. Mikhail Gorbachev excepted. Nelson Mandela was another, although his conduct since, whilst nothing like as disgraceful as Arafat’s, is still sufficient to blot his copybook rather severely.

    El-Baradei “must have done something right”? He hasn’t done anything, which is cause for removal from any post.

  9. Perhaps I’m getting off the topic of the Nobels a little, but I couldn’t help noticing, reading Tony Parkinson’s slightly back-handed tribute to El-Baradei in today’s ‘Age’, that he has written about the “nefarious nuclear weapons programs in Iran”. Is Parkinson up to his old tricks again? Remember that he was one of the louder members of the chorus chanting over Iraq’s WMD before the invasion. If anyone is absolutely convinced that Iran has a “nefarious nuclear weapons program”, I suggest he/she read material collected at the website of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Add to that a column by British nuclear physicist Norman Dombey in the London Review of Books last year. The matter would appear to be far from conclusive.

  10. Steveatthepub: I do not understand what point you are trying to make about El Baradei. Doi you think all recipients of the Peace prize are undeserving? Perhaps the Red Cross too?

    “The International Atomic Energy Agency and its director, Mohamed ElBaradei, won the 2005 Nobel Prize for Peace yesterday for their efforts to prevent the spread of atomic weapons and promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy.â€? And: “In announcing its selection yesterday at a ceremony in Oslo, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said ElBaradei “stood as an unafraid advocate” for disarmament, relying on diplomacy, rather than confrontation, to rid the world of nuclear threats.â€? (Dafna Linzer, Washington Post, Oct. 8, 2005). http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/07/AR2005100700179.html

    If you’ve got specific reasons for why you think El Baradei did nothing, please share them with me.

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