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NOBELPRIZE

What is Nobel Week really about?

As Nobel laureates, foreign media and a host of other dignitaries descend on Stockholm for the week of festivities culminating with the Nobel Banquet on Monday, Charlotte West recalls her conversations with two of last year’s winners about the real significance of Nobel Week.

Published: 10 December 2007 10:20 CET

In the midst of all the fanfare, the 10,000 flowers, the $1.5 million prize and speculations about which spectacular dress Queen Silvia will don at the banquet, it is easy to lose sight of the achievements on which Nobel Week is founded.

In his will, Alfred Nobel created the prize to honour those who have “conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.” While the precise meaning of that statement has been the subject of great debate, its essence relates to recognizing those individuals who have made a measurable and meaningful contribution – whether in the form of scientific discoveries, inspirational words or heroic actions – to society.

While I had certainly heard of the Nobel Prize while growing up, the first time I really took notice of it was at my college graduation in Seattle, where our commencement address was given by Leland Hartwell, a cancer research pioneer and the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. He made a reference to standing on stage with the king and queen of Sweden. My ears immediately perked up as I was planning to move to Stockholm the following autumn.

Yet I still had no idea of what that really meant. When I began attending Stockholm University that fall, I was surprised to learn that many of the Nobel laureates would be giving their lectures in the Aula Magna auditorium on campus – and what’s more, that anyone could attend.

These public lectures, presented by the laureates in their respective fields, offer a rare chance to hear what some of the greatest minds of our time have to say. This openness and accessibility are one of the hallmarks of the award. In other words, by making the laureates’ words, and in a sense, the laureates themselves, accessible to the public, the Nobel Prize recognizes that knowledge is not the exclusive domain of the academic elite.

Last December, I had the opportunity to interview 2006 Nobel laureates Dr. Andrew Fire (Medicine/physiology) and Dr. Roger Kornberg (Chemistry), who both came from Stanford University. They each reflected on the benefits, as well as on the responsibilities, of what it means to be a Nobel laureate.

Fire said that being a recipient of a Nobel award gave him the chance to reach a broader audience. “That means one has to be careful but it is also an opportunity to speak up about things. And people over the years have really taken advantage of those opportunities, mostly for good. Scientists who have been in a position to get the ear of the leadership have said things that have really steered society in directions that are important,” he said.

Kornberg similarly spoke of the responsibilities that accompany the Nobel Prize. “I think it puts a bit of a burden on us for a time, to convey the message that all scientists have with regard to support of research and its importance in society. It’s a message that needs to be repeated as often as possible, so it’s our job to do so,” he said.

The responsibility to convey the message about the importance of science and the pursuit of knowledge is not reserved to the laureates in the hard sciences. While the prizes in chemistry, physics and medicine bring ground-breaking scientific research into the public eye, the Nobel Peace Prize and the literature prize bring the human quotient to the table.

Over the years, the literature lectures have dabbled in everything from meditations on the creative process and the future of literature to polemic discussions of global politics and the evils of war. For instance, Harold Pinter in his 2005 speech, Art, Truth & Politics, chastised Bush and Blair for their perpetration of the Iraq war. This year’s literature laureate, Doris Lessing, spoke out against Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe, saying that books – the foundation of literacy and the stuff great writers are made of – will remain endangered species in the country as long as he remains at the political helm. “Writers are not made in Zimbabwe. Not easily, not under Mugabe,” she said.

The lecture thus provided Lessing with a platform to speak her mind, while the world was listening. But perhaps more essentially, the Nobel lectures also serve to inspire, something which Lessing said was an essential ingredient for the creative process. Writers, she said, must have access to a “space, which is like a form of listening, of attention” from which “will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas – inspiration.”

Despite the fact that Lessing was too ill to travel to Stockholm to deliver her Nobel lecture herself, her words, her message could not have been clearer. As I left the Swedish Academy on Friday, I felt a sense of intellectual wonderment that I have not experienced in a long time. In this sense, her Nobel lecture provided the impetus for inspiration, which as she said herself, is essential to any successful literary (or scientific, for that matter) pursuit.

The only remaining Nobel lecture this year is the Peace lecture, scheduled to be given by former US Vice President Al Gore on Monday at 1 pm (CET) in Oslo, where he is expected to speak out about the climate crisis. At a press conference following the announcement of the Peace Prize in October, Gore said, “We have to quickly find a way to change the world’s consciousness about exactly what we’re facing.”

Perhaps Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize lecture will be one step in the right direction.

See a live webcast of Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize lecture during the Nobel Peace Prize Award Ceremony at the Oslo City Hall on Monday, December 10th. 12:50 p.m. – 2:15 p.m. (CET).

NOBEL

‘Disbelief’: US trio wins Nobel economics prize

Three economists from the United States were awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in Stockholm on Monday for their research in predicting asset price movements.

Published: 14 October 2013 13:01 CEST
'Disbelief': US trio wins Nobel economics prize

Eugene Fama, Lars Hansen, and Robert Shiller won the prize “for their empirical analysis of asset prices”.

“The laureates have laid the foundation for the current understanding of asset prices,” the Royal Academy said in a statement.

Reached on the phone in the United States, Shiller was shell-shocked at the news he’d won the Nobel.

“Disbelief, that’s the only way to put it,” he told reporters.

“A lot of people told me they hoped I would win, I am aware there are so many other worthy people that I discounted it.”

Speaking with officials from the Nobel Foundation following the announcement, Hansen said he was “very surprised” to have won, while Fama said he was “thrilled”.

Fama and Hansen are both professors at the University of Chicago, while Robert Shiller teaches at Yale University.

The economics laureates were unveiled at a press conference at the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences at Stockholm University.

Eugene Fama was born in Boston in 1939, and studied at the University of Chicago, where he is now a Distinguished Service Professor.

Lars Peter Hansen was born in 1952, and studied at the University of Minnesota. He is now a Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago.

Robert Shiller is also a US citizen, born in Detroit in 1946. He studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is now a Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University in New Haven.

In fielding questions following the announcement, Shiller called the field of finance “fundamental to human activity”.

“Finance is a theory that while it has many controversial elements, is useful for society and is important to human welfare. I’m glad to see this has been given recognition,” he said.

He admitted, however, that there was still much to learn in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 which continues to affect parts of the global economy.

“The financial crisis reflected mistakes and imperfections in our financial system we’re already working on correcting those mistakes, but it will take decades,” he said before nevertheless striking a note of optimism.

“There have been financial crises many times throughout history, and we’ve learned from them,” said Shiller.

Commenting on the work of the three researchers, Eva Mörk, an economics professor at Uppsala University, explained that the new laureates were looking at whether asset prices were “predictable or unpredictable”.

“In the 1960s, Fama found that in the short run, asset prices are not predictable,” she told The Local.

“It’s very hard to beat the market, you can’t use past information about to predict future prices. If you read it in the paper in the morning, it’s too late to react because the market has already reacted.”

In the 1980s, Shiller looked at asset prices over longer time horizons and found that they fluctuated more that one might expect based on the dividends paid out.

“He began to see peculiar patterns in the data that were hard to analyze using traditional models,” Mörk said.

“We believe that asset prices should reflect future dividends, but what he found was that prices varied a lot more than future dividends. Something else was going on.”

Shiller pioneered a new field, behavioural finance, but it was thanks to Hansen’s innovations in modelling that allowed the work of this two fellow laureates to be tested in a much simpler and targeted way.

“Hansen’s methods, combined with the findings of Shiller and Fama “told researchers in finance that new thinking was needed” said Mörk.

“We learned that we can’t hold on to our existing theories; that we need to continue so we can better understand the data,” she added.

The Uppsala professor admitted that some may question awarding the researchers in finance as the global economy continues to struggle with the effects of a financial crisis.

“But I would argue that it’s even more important when we see that these things matter so much,” she said.

“If it wasn’t for these laureates, we’d probably have much bigger problems understanding what’s happening today.”

Despite the advances brought by Shiller, Fama, and Hansen, “there are still a lot of things that we don’t know” Mörk continued.

“We don’t have all the answers yet, but thanks to the laureates, we are in a much better position to understand things, and hopefully in the future we’ll be in a better position to understand how we should regulate financial markets in order for them not to fall apart,” she said.

The prize has been awarded since 1969 by the Bank of Sweden (Sveriges Riksbank), which pays the Nobel Foundation’s expenses associated with the prize, as well as the monetary award.

SEE ALSO: Stockholmers speak about their favourite Nobel Prize

While not technically a “Nobel Prize”, as Alfred Nobel only left money in his will to physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace, the economics prize is always presented together with the other prizes in Stockholm in December.

Last year’s economics prize went to US economists Alvin E. Roth and Lloyd S. Shapley “for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design”.

The 2013 Nobel Prizes in medicine, physics, chemistry and literature and the Nobel Peace Prize were all announced last week in Stockholm and Oslo. All awards will be handed out on December 10th, the anniversary of Nobel’s death in 1896.

Follow our live blog of the 2013 Nobel Prize announcementshere.

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