STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN – Americans Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences, which carries $.15 million in prize money.
Sargent, who teaches at New York University and Sims, who teaches at Princeton, were given the award “for their empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy”, the Nobel Committee said on announcing it.
Forbes notes that it is the seventh time the award has been given for work attacking Keynes’s Phillips curve “showing a tradeoff between unemployment and inflation”. The two, both in their late sixties, were longtime colleagues at the University of Minnesota and conducted research in the 1970s into macroeconomic cause and effect. An interview on the Nobel Prize’s radio station Monday morning made it clear that neither or them have solutions to what Sims called “this mess”, saying however that “the methods that I have used and that Tom has developed are essential to finding our way out of this mess.”
Forty Americans have won the prize since it was first given in 1969.
Three people are sharing the 2010 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, for their work explaining how the jobless rate could be so high when so many jobs were on the market: US professors Dale Mortensen and Peter Diamond, nominated to the US Federal Reserve, and British-Cypriot Christopher Pissarides. Their work on the search market has deepened understanding of why it can take a long time for employers and potential employees to find each other after a shock to the system such as the global economic crisis of 2008-2009.
“Search theory has emerged as the predominant model for considering the effects of economic-policy measures on the labour market,” the Nobel committee said in announcing the winners, who will share the 10 million Swedish kroner prize. The size of unemployment benefits and hiring and firing rules are part of these measures, it noted, but search theory also includes the difficulty of matching the right worker to the right job.
Links to other sites: Guardian, UK, New York Times, Nobel Prize, Paul Krugman’s blog, NY Times
Two Japanese and an American have won this year’s Nobel Prize for chemistry, it was announced 7 October in Stockholm. The three men developed a tool that allows carbon atoms to be manipulated into complex forms, similar to those found in nature, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, bestower of the award, said. Richard F. Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi, and Akira Suzuki will share the SKR 10 million prize.
The tool, known as palladium-catalyzed cross coupling allows scientists to bind carbon atoms, which are essentially stable, together more easily on a palladium atom.
Links to other sites: Reuters, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences site
The Honduran government is defying international pressure to allow former President Manuel Zelaya, deposed 28 June, to return to power. An Organization of American States (OAS) mission of seven American foreign ministers urged the interim government of Roberto Micheletti to accept a plan worked out by Nobel prize-winner Oscar Arias, former president of Costa Rica, which would allow Zelaya to return to power to serve out his term in exchange for amnesty for the interim government.
Micheletti said Tuesday 25 August at the conclusion of the two-day mission that Honduras would hold elections 29 November as scheduled “whether or not the world recognizes the result” and that “nobody is coming here to impose anything on us, unless troops come from somewhere else and force us.” The US has instructed its embassy in Tegucigalpa not to issue visas to Hondurans. BBC, CNN, El Heraldo (Spa)
Photo: Gaya Mageswaran/International Federation, © International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The horrors of the battle of Solferino 150 years ago 24 June brought into being the international Red Cross and Red Crescent movement, based in Geneva. To mark the day, Swiss media have been focusing on numerous events taking place in the region:
Le Temps mentions the week-long celebrations organized by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and highlights the coming together of volunteers of the 186 national Red Cross and Red Crescent societies at Solferino, in Italy. Three hundred young people will retrace Henri Dunant’s trip back to Geneva from Solferino: Dunant was the Geneva businessman who witnessed the battle and returned home determined to help change things.
TSR reports that starting 22 June at ICRC headquarters 20 runners will run a relay in 20km stages all the way to Solferino, where they will join the hundreds of volunteers from the national societies. TSR also mentions that Geneva’s jet d’eau fountain was illuminated in red Wednesday, 24 June.
The Tribune de Genève details the relay race to Solferino from Geneva, and notes that 12 of the runners are ICRC staff members. They arrive Saturday 26 June.
Swissinfo commemorates the occasion with a special section that includes photos and background articles on the Red Cross in the news.
Geneva is the headquarters of both the ICRC, which offers its services in instances of armed conflict, and of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), which coordinates the activities of the 186 individual national societies. The IFRC has its own page for the events being commemorated.
Solferino would have been just another bloody battle to be forgotten in northern Italy 150 years ago, but for the fact that it moved one man, Dunant, to start something that has helped untold victims of warfare since then. Geneva’s Dunant saw the battle of Solferino, 24 June 1859, that pitted French and Piedmontese forces against the Austrians, and then helped to organize assistance to the abandoned wounded on the battlefield.
He went away with the germ of an idea that brought into being the Red Cross and Red Crescent movement and won him the first Nobel Peace prize in 1901.
American economist Paul Krugman was awarded the Nobel prize (the Sverike Riksbank Prize) in economics for “his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity.” The Nobel Academy pointed particularly to his integration of the “previously disparate research fields of international trade and economic geography.” Nobel site
The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Martti Ahtisaari, for his efforts over decades and around the world to resolve conflicts. He is a former president of Finland and, largely through the UN, has worked to find peaceful solutions in Indonesia, Africa, Kosovo and elsewhere. Nobel press release
The Nobel Prize for Literature is being awarded to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, a 68-year-old French-born author whose life and writings are marked by his nomadic spirit. He began to write at age 11 but came to the public’s eye when he wrote Desert at age 24. Reuters, Nobel site
Two Japanese researchers, Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa, and one American, Yoichiro Nambu, are sharing the Nobel prize for physics, all for work done in the area of sub-atomic physics. Still to be announced: prizes for chemistry (8 October), literature (9 October), peace (10 October) and economics (13 October). Nobel Prize
