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Note: From the Globe and Mail (Check comments, Mark informs us that NNT was aware of this in TBS, so in fact, it’s the Globe and Mail author who got it wrong).
http://goo.gl/Sd61

The next prize winner will be revealed to great public acclaim or, more typically, puzzlement on Oct. 11. But what neither Mr. Taleb nor most other people realize is that none of the above actually won a Nobel Prize — at least not the official one set up in the name of the late dynamite mogul.

What the gaggle of economic theorists have actually scored is the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences, which is paid for by the Swedish central bank “in memory of Alfred Nobel,” who set aside nothing from his vast fortune to honour economists.

 

 

 

Credit: Reuters By Adam Cox

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – Did the Nobel prize help trigger the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression?

Nassim Taleb, who shot to fame with his ideas about risk in the book “The Black Swan,” believes the economics award and the theories it celebrates deserve their share of blame.

“I want to remove the harm from these economic models. And the Nobel is not helping. They should be held partly responsible, if not largely responsible, for the crisis,” Taleb told Reuters by telephone.

The first of the Nobel awards will be announced next Monday, with the economics prize due a week later on Oct 11.

According to Taleb, there are a number of mistaken ideas about forecasting and measuring risk, which all contribute to events like the 2008 global crisis. The Nobel prize, he says, has given them a stamp of approval, allowing them to propagate.