Americans win eight of eleven
The awards pay tribute to a mere fraction of man's achievements. Still, the six Nobel Prizes announced every autumn are the supreme status symbol, the most coveted and prestigious honors awarded anywhere in science and literature. The laureates, judged under the terms of Swedish Industrialist Alfred Nobel's will to "have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind," receive medals, money and the instant acclaim of peers and public alike. Ranked with the likes of Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, W.B. Yeats and Albert Schweitzer, they are deluged with honorary degrees, speaking invitations and book contracts.
Last week four more Nobel Prizes were awarded—for economics, physics, chemistry and contributions to peace—to seven men. Together with the previous week's two awards—for literature and medicine—they brought the total number of this year's laureates to eleven. Each of the six prizes, some of which are shared, is worth $212,000, boosted by inflation from last year's $190,000. When the prizes were first given in 1901, they were worth $40,400.
Once again the 1980 honors list is dominated by Americans. Since World War II, the U.S. has won 131 prizes, nearly triple the number of its closest challenger, Britain, with 47. Two weeks ago, the literature prize went to Polish-born Poet Czeslaw Milosz, 69, now a U.S. citizen, and the medicine prize to three immunologists, Jean Dausset, 63 (France), George Snell, 76 (U.S.), and Baruj Benacerraf, 59 (U.S.). Last week Americans took five awards: two for physics, two for chemistry, one for economics. The other two went to a Briton and an Argentine.
ECONOMICS: THE MAN BEHIND THE MODELS. "I have a class at 10:30.1 don't think that this will be an occasion for missing class." That was the response of Economist Lawrence Klein, 60, last week when a reporter telephoned him asking for a comment on the news that he had just won the Nobel Prize. The University of Pennsylvania professor was cited for his contributions as "the leading research worker within the field of the economic science which deals with the construction and analysis of empirical models of business fluctuations."
Econometric models are a combination of economics, mathematics and statistics. Model builders usually set up several hundred mathematical equations that represent the variables in any economy. After these are fed into a computer, the model can provide a picture of how the economy might react to a change in one or more important factors. Economists can predict, for example, how a severe drought in the Middle West might affect not only food prices but also consumer purchases of everything else.