Posted 2012-October-16, 03:44
Lloyd Shapley also, at age 90. There's quite a bit of money comes with it, and he might have liked to have that money rather sooner. It is not suddenly now that we realise Shapley's contribution, it was obvious going back many years, and there have been several Nobel Prize citations going back quite some time where I have thought "and Shapley doesn't get a share of that?" Of course Roth and Shapley does make a nice pairing, but at the cost of giving it to Shapley very late.
James Mirrlees shared the Nobel Prize with William Vickrey in 1996. It required quite some stretch of the imagination to justify pairing them, and it is generally presumed that Vickrey was added in last minute because it was heard that he was dying, and he was on their virtual list of likely future winners. In practice he died a few days after the announcement and before he could collect, so the money went to his estate. Though I do know Mirrlees wouldn't begrudge the money, he was my tutor and was not very interested in accumulating money, he was much more interested in Being the Edgeworth Professor of Economics - he told me he'd be quite happy to do that for rather less than the stated salary, even though British professors are much worse paid than American ones.
We all know that Jean Tirole will be get the prize if he lives long enough. I don't know why we are waiting, the importance of his contribution was evident 20 years ago. Since he be run down by a bus, or get cancer, give it to him now. few are more deserving. He will of course share it with Jean-Jacques Laffont, except he won't because Laffont is dead. Unlike Shapley, Laffont died in his early 60s and didn't make it to 90 to be able to collect his well deserved prize. Doesn't this make it clear why they ought to give them out quicker?
John von Neumann made about three separate Nobel Prize worthy contributions to economics, in that he could justifiably have shared it with Arrow (1972), Debreu (1983) or Nash (1994). But JvN died in 1957, aged only 53. But he'd only have been a year older than Shapley if he'd shared it with Nash. Edit: Though of course the Nobel Prize of Economics didn't even exist in 1957.
The economics prize is occasionally given for really odd stuff. I think they could weed out the less obvious winners and give it to worthy winners before they die or get very old a bit more often. Doris Lessing, a literature winner a couple of years ago, said so quite publicly. What is the point, she asked, of giving it to her now, now she is nearly dead. I don't think she even felt she deserved it, rather she felt that there seemed to be more advantage to the Nobel Committee in associating themselves with her than the other way around.
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