The Nobel Prizes this year included two controversial selections: of the jihadist-praised South African jurist Navi Pillay and of two Bernankeist funny-money economists Robert E. Hall and Michael Woodford. Thereby, at a time when the forces of good economic and foreign policy are sadly beleaguered, the Nobel committees have given prestige, money and fame to representatives of error. As I will explain, the Nobel Prize system was misguided from its inception, and has become steadily worse as it has become fully captured by the Left. It is time to shut it down!

Alfred Nobel, first, was a superb entrepreneur/businessman, one of the best of the 19th century. Not only did he invent dynamite and gelignite, without which modern construction (for example) would be impossible, he also owned a major steel company, Bofors, and with his brothers opened up the Baku oilfields, making Russia the world’s largest oil producer by 1900. He and his brothers also invented the technology for oil transportation by sea, the forerunner of today’s supertankers.

Then late in life, Nobel, who never married, was troubled by his conscience and decided to donate his immense wealth to the Nobel Foundation and the Prizes it grants annually (the Economics Prize is funded by the Swedish Riksbank). Various left-wing newspapers had accused him of being no benefactor to mankind, but his life was in reality mostly not devoted to weaponry (unlike that of his contemporaries Alfred Krupp and Hiram Maxim) and only a small percentage of dynamite’s use was military. Overall, like most great entrepreneurs, he created far more value for mankind in higher living standards and improved possible destinies than he received in return.

You should thus argue that Nobel’s life was a generally positive and useful one, with nothing significant that needed redeeming. His decision to set up the Nobel Foundation, allocating 94% of his assets to it and thereby institutionalizing his wealth, was one frequently copied by the modern super-rich, who regard charities, however spurious, as being better recipients of their money than allowing some large percentage of it to go to the government.

That is an argument for reducing inheritance tax rates or even abolishing inheritance taxes. It is also an argument for eliminating the tax preference given to charities, the vast majority of which are corrupt boondoggles benefiting leftist political agitation. In general, government expenditure is subject to democratic control whereas charity expenditure is controlled by the unpleasant ideologues who collect fancy salaries for running the charities, a far more corrupting enterprise than getting a real job in the private sector or even the government. Overall, therefore, one should prefer one’s money to go to the government than to a charitable foundation, however corrupt and wasteful the government generally is. Setting up a gigantic charitable trust as Nobel did is almost always morally doubtful and thoroughly damaging in its long-term effects.

In recent years, the most egregious Nobel prizes for economics came in 2021 and 2022. In 2021, the prize went to three economists, David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens, who had carried out market analyses that claimed to prove various shibboleths of leftist economics, such as that minimum wages do not increase unemployment and that immigration is good for wage levels. However, when the studies were examined closely, their analysis did not support the favored conclusions, and was essentially worthless — unsurprising, since the conclusions themselves, to a classically trained economist, were obviously wrong.

In the following year, the Nobel Committee made an even more egregious error, when it awarded the prize to Ben Bernanke, Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig for their already debunked work in destroying the normal market mechanism in interest rates, so making monetary policy an artefact of central planning, like the Soviet GOSPLAN. The sharp burst in inflation in 2022 had already by the prize’s award in October of that year shown the fallaciousness of their work. The solid U.S. economic recovery in President Trump’s second term, combined with the continued feeble growth in Canada and Europe, have since shown that returning to more conventional monetary policy, in which market factors determine interest rates, produces much better results than the decade of malinvestment, economic lassitude and soaring debt that the Bernanke policies produced.

Further back, the Economics Prize does occasionally acknowledge the free market schools; it was given to both Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. However, Ludwig von Mises, a greater economist than either of them, was passed over before his death in 1973 – much of Hayek’s work, in particular, is simply a messy compromise between Mises and Keynesian socialism.

This year’s Economics award is another gold star for the left. Hall and Woodford were quite sensible early in their careers, but their main achievement was in developing the New Keynesian mathematical models that central banks around the world now use. Those models resulted in the disastrous decade of Bernankeism, when interest rates were set artificially below the inflation rate, producing an explosion in real estate and other asset prices that has still not been worked off, and will cause much pain to the public while the rectification process is in train. Keynes never understood interest rates or saving, as evidenced throughout his writings, so why a Keynesian model, even neo, is thought appropriate to regulate the money market is quite beyond me.

Fortunately, Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh rejects such fallacies, which may be why this year’s prize was awarded to Hall and Woodford – as a leftist rebuke to Warsh and President Trump, in the same way that the Peace Prize award to Pillay was primarily a rebuke for Israel.

In non-economic areas, the Nobel Prize committees have made a number of egregious errors. In 1906, they omitted to give the Chemistry Prize to Dmitri Mendeleev, discoverer of the Periodic Table of the chemical elements (he was dead by the following year, and the committees had decided not to grant awards posthumously). They also gave the 1949 Medicine Prize to Antonio Egas Moniz for lobotomy, probably the most scientifically misguided award ever. Errors of omission include Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, neither of whom ever received a Nobel; the committees are full of academics, so often fail to recognize achievements that are primarily technological, especially if those achievements have brought the individual anything so vulgar as a vast well-earned fortune. William Shockley received the Physics Nobel in 1956 for inventing the transistor, but then he had the good taste to die relatively poor.

Finally, the Peace Prize has witnessed a succession of gross errors, as you would expect from such a politicized, ill-defined concept. 1973’s Peace Prize was given jointly to Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho for the Vietnam peace agreements, which collapsed in 1975 – to be fair, Tho, already planning his invasion of South Vietnam, turned the prize down. As for Kissinger, he did not deserve an award for Vietnam, but he and his boss President Richard Nixon, certainly did deserve one for their 1970s policies of détente with the Soviet Union and opening to China, which sharply reduced the dangers of nuclear war in that and the following decade.

More recently, the Peace Prize has become even more politicized. The 1994 Prize was awarded to the terrorist leader Yasser Arafat together with two Israeli leaders for a peace process that never meant anything. The 2009 Prize was given to President Barack Obama even before his thoroughly undistinguished term in office had time to achieve anything. The 2019 Prize went to the obscure Abiy Ahmed for an Eritrean peace agreement that was promptly violated. As for this year’s Prize, it appears to have been awarded purely for anti-Semitism. On that basis, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin should be retrospectively honored – indeed, I suspect the Nobels were quite close to honoring Stalin in around 1946, as a protest against the emerging Cold War.

Like all charitable bequests, the Nobel Prizes have escaped from the original aims of the donor Alfred Nobel and have instead fallen into the hands of non-profit leftists, the inevitable beneficiaries when there is eleemosynary money around and no grown-up control. Like most other charitable foundations, it should be terminated as its Prizes now send consistently false and damaging signals to the world.

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(The Bear’s Lair is a weekly column that is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that the proportion of “sell” recommendations put out by Wall Street houses remains far below that of “buy” recommendations. Accordingly, investors have an excess of positive information and very little negative information. The column thus takes the ursine view of life and the market, in the hope that it may be usefully different from what investors see elsewhere.)