That’s it for another year. Monday’s award of the Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel to Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims brings to an end the 2011 Nobel season. But is there room for one more: a Nobel prize for management?
In the narrowest sense, yes. Alfred Nobel specified five prizes: physics, chemistry, physiology and medicine, literature and peace. But in 1968, the Swedish central bank backed a new award for economists. It is not, technically, a “Nobel prize” and only a brave central banker would now deploy funds for such an enterprise rather than, say, quantitative easing. But this did establish a precedent.
A management prize would also recognise Nobel’s own gifts as an innovator, entrepreneur and builder of companies. Though he might not himself have considered management a task worth rewarding. Just before the Nobel dynamite interests were brought together to form the world’s first international holding company in 1886 – with Nobel as honorary president – he wrote that he cared more about his research: “I find it high time to disengage myself from the slavery to which for years I have submitted against my will, and for no good, either to myself or others”.