Scrapping of Nobel literature award: MeToo issue as grave as World War?

The Swedish Academy has announced it will not select a Nobel laureate in literature for 2018. Instead, two laureates will be appointed 2019, one for 2018 and one for 2019. The decision is not unique. The prize has been withheld on no fewer than seven occasions in the past and it has also been postponed for a year five times previously – the last time being in 1949.

The reason for postponing the prize this time, however, is exceptional since it is not related to the academy’s inability to unify behind one single candidate, but is instead the consequence of a more general crisis in the academy in which a number of members resigned their posts over a scandal relating to allegations of sexual harassment made against the husband of one of the members.

According to the academy, the reason for the decision is more specifically the number of members who have withdrawn from participating in its work. Eight members of 18 are no longer academy participants, which will impede its work, and make it hard to evaluate the different authors nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature in particular. Another motive for the decision to postpone, the academy’s announcement said, was the necessity to restore the academy’s reputation after a few months filled with accusations and scandal.

Why Richard Thaler won the 2017 economics Nobel Prize

The 49th Sveriges Riksbank prize in economic sciences – commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize for economics – has been awarded to Richard H Thaler for his contributions to behavioural economics. He was a key proponent of the idea that humans do not act entirely rationally. By applying insights from psychological research, he helped the world better understand people’s economic decision-making in particular.

Thaler published extensively in the field of finance. He pinpointed the difference between the predictions in financial literature, which assume that people act perfectly rationally to maximise their expected profits (the idea of the homo economicus), and what actually happens on the markets.
Thaler was on many people’s list of Nobel favourites. But since the award already went to Daniel Kahneman in 2002 for behavioural economics and then jointly to Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen and Robert Shiller in 2013 for financial markets, his chances seemed relatively slim. But the Great Recession – caused by financial markets seeming to behave “irrationally” – brought a lot of attention to research that extensively cites Thaler’s 40-year long academic career. He even made a guest appearance in the film The Big Short to explain why banks kept buying and selling bad debt to their detriment.
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Three gravitational wave scientists win 2017 Nobel Physics Prize

Scientists Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne won the 2017 Nobel Prize for Physics for decisive contributions in the observation of gravitational waves, the award-giving body said on Tuesday.

“This is something completely new and different, opening up unseen worlds,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement on awarding the 9 million Swedish crown ($1.1 million)prize.

“A wealth of discoveries awaits those who succeed in capturing the waves and interpreting their message.”

Physics is the second of this year’s crop of Nobel Prizes and comes after Americans Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael Young were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine on Monday.
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