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(外国网文摘要: ) 1896年, 瑞典工业家和硝化甘油炸药发明家诺贝尔将他的财富遗赠一个基金会, 并建立年度奖励, 来嘉奖那些之前已经为人类社会的进步作出最大贡献的人们, 其奖项包括物理,化学,生理卫生,文学和和平奖, 共五个. 这些奖项在1901年第一次颁发. 诺贝尔经济学奖(The Nobel Economics Prize)并不是诺贝尔遗嘱中的五大奖励，而是由瑞典银行在1968年为纪念诺贝尔而增设的，全称应为“纪念阿尔弗雷德·诺贝尔瑞典银行经济学奖(The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel)”。 其评选标准与其它奖项是相同的，获奖者由瑞典皇家科学院评选，1969年第一次颁奖。
这个诺贝尔经济学奖从一开始就一直是有争议的, 并出现了许许多多的反对意见. 首当其冲的是经济学既够不上一种科学, 同时它对人类进步的贡献又不值得用高贵的诺贝尔奖, 这种观点不仅存在于知识界和主流媒体, 还存在于自身经济学界. 尽管Gunnar Myrdal有功于建立经济学奖并于己于1974年获得了它, 他最终也公开承认这种争议. 第二种反对观点是它引发的经济学同行间的竞争干扰了经济学的研究工作. 第三种反对观点是没有足够的杰出学者来挑选, 尽管在70年代和80年代早期有不少耀眼的名字, 但之后的获奖者越来越受到较大的争议. 第四种反对观点是评奖委员会的偏向, 有人更是明确指出有"芝加哥商学院偏向". 而最近几年, 经济学奖更是偏向于根本就没有一点名气的领域, 结果使这些无名领域的知名度一夜之间发生巨大变化. 因此, 瑞典央行时而会被指责没有给予最著名的被提名者经济学奖, 有些甚至遭到了专业经济学家们的谴责, 许多人甚至要求终止诺贝尔经济学奖, 或用一个较低档的奖励来代之. 原文: In 1969, the Swedish central bank (Sveriges Riskbank) established a prize known as the "Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic ciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel", which is commonly shortened to the Nobel Memorial Prize. The Nobel Memorial Prize has a similar procedure of award selection (by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences) as the original Nobel prizes. It also disburses the same monetary amounts and shares in the formal ceremony. The Nobel Memorial Prize has been quite controversial since its inception and numerous objections have been raised against it. The first objection is that economics is either not "scientific" enough or does not contribute to "human advancement" enough to merit the prestige of an award with the Nobel name. The sentiment, often echoed in wider intellectual circles and the popular press, is shared by many economists themselves. Indeed, Gunnar Myrdal, after having helped the Riksbank set it up in 1968 and receiving the award himself in 1974, eventually came to publicly admit this.
The second objection, is that the Bank of Sweden's decision to use the prestigious "Nobel" name has thrust economics into a kind of medal race, pitting nations, universities and individual economists against each other. All this leads to a lot of unnecessary acrimony that distracts and disrupts serious economics research. A third objection, and one that has become increasingly louder, is that there is an insufficient number of truly outstanding economists that deserve it. After the initial splash of glorious names in the 1970s and early 1980s, many have come to argue that the awards made during the 1990s are more disputable. This is true to some extent, but understandable. When the awards began being handed out from 1969 onwards, there were generations upon generations of deserving scholars which had to be quickly awarded before it was too late. The choices of the 1970s were not really disputed. By sheer bad luck, giants such as Joan Robinson, Nicholas Kaldor, Abba Lerner and Don Patinkin never won the award partly because they were unfortunate enough to die too soon. By the mid-1980s, with the "doubtless" Nobel laureates either already rewarded or dead, it was natural for the awards committee to begin pacing itself somewhat and start scooping gems from a little bit below the cream. A fourth objection is that the Nobel awards committee has its own agenda and doles out the awards with an eye to encourage the profession to move in a particular direction. At the crudest level, some have claimed that it has a "Chicago School" bias, given the number of economists associated with the University of Chicago that have won the awards (for a breakdown of the awards by nationality and school, click here). This is not wholly untrue, but it ought to be placed in context. The Nobel name, of course, lends a powerful platform to the recipients -- and the awards committee has made controversial and idiosyncratic choices which have had a profound impact on the economics profession. The 1974 award to the nearly-obscure Friedrich A. Hayek, for instance, generated a huge resurgence of interest in Hayek and Austrian economics. Milton Friedman's 1976 award elevated him overnight from the profession's maverick to one of its elder statesmen and gave Monetarism a more respectable polish. In more recent years, awards have brought entire fields of study into the research spotlight: bounded rationality was virtually unknown before Herbert Simon's 1978 award; so was Public Choice theory until James Buchanan's 1986 award. New Institutionalism and New Economic History were still fringe movements before the awards to Coase, Becker, Fogel and North in 1991-1993. Of course, at times, the suggestions of the Nobel committee do not seem to have the desired impact. The awards to Kuznets and Stone, for instance, were perhaps meant to encourage the vital but unglamorous tasks of data compilation and interpretation, but there was no perceptible rise in interest as a consequence. A corollary to this is that the Bank of Sweden is occasionally criticized is for failing to choose the most popular candidates. Some of the choices it made have been openly criticized by professional economists. There are a number of perennial candidates so universally liked and recommended, always leading straw polls year after year, whom nonetheless received no award. So, even if one disagrees violently with its choices or gets frustrated by the fact that one's favorite candidate keeps missing out, perhaps one ought to continue to admire the Bank of Sweden's bravery. However, it is precisely because of the erratic and disproportionate "impact" the Bank of Sweden's choice has upon the profession and the shape of subsequent economics research that many have called for an end to the Nobel Memorial Prize. One proposition is to replace it with a less lop-sided and less pretentious "lifetime award", like the Francis Walker Medal that used to be handed out by the American Economic Association. The Bank of Sweden's Nobel Memorial prize for economics is announced around October 12th of every year, while the actual ceremony (shared with the original Nobel awards) is on December 8th. Winners are requested to present a "Nobel Memorial Lectures", which is initially published in the volume Les Prix Nobel en 19xx, put out every year by the Nobel Foundation and then republished later in the academic journals of their laureate's choice. In recent years, the American Economic Review has intermittently reprinted many of the Nobel Memorial Lectures. |
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