A Beautiful Mind (72 page)

Hörmander was surprised. Like most other pure mathematicians, he didn’t think much of Nash’s work in game theory. And the last time Hörmander had laid eyes on Nash was in the academic year 1977–78. Hörmander had been in Princeton and he had seen Nash hanging around Fine Hall. Nash was “a ghost.” Hörmander didn’t think Nash had recognized him or had even been aware of his presence. Hörmander hadn’t even tried to speak with him. To give such a man a prize seemed to him “absurd, risky.”
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Hörmander was precise and frank. His memories of Nash were extremely distasteful. He recalled Nash’s decision to give up his citizenship; his deportation, first from Switzerland, then from France; Nash’s bizarre behavior at the 1962 conference in Paris; the stream of anonymous cards, with their hints of envy and hostility, that came after Hörmander won the Fields in 1962.

Stahl had also made inquiries among several psychiatrists he knew who, he says, described the illness as unlike depression or mania, where the self remains intermittently at least recognizable. “I knew this type of illness,” he said later. “I know some psychiatrists here. Some of the best head shrinkers. When I talked to them I found out that with this disease there is a complete change of personality. He is not the man who did the thing.”
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Lindbeck, relying on reports from Weibull and Kuhn, was telling committee members that Nash was much improved, that he had, in fact, recovered his sanity.
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About this, too, Stahl was deeply skeptical. The psychiatrists he spoke to told him that schizophrenia is a chronic, unremitting, degenerative disease. “It’s a very tragic illness. It gets calmed down but actually recovering is another matter.”
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Stahl knew that there was great sympathy for Nash. And he could see that Lindbeck had made up his mind. So he didn’t attack frontally, but simply raised question after question. “He’d throw out an argument and somebody would shoot it down,” said another member of the committee. “Then he’d shift to another argument. He tried to irritate and confuse us… to raise doubts.”
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Stahl would say, “He’s sick… . You can’t have a person like that.”
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He asked what would happen at the ceremony. “Would he come? Could he handle it? It’s a big show.”
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He quoted Hörmander and others who had known Nash in the 1950s and 1960s. He read them what he considered a particularly damning quotation from a book by Martin Shubik, who had known Nash as a graduate student.

“The most damning thing,” Stahl repeated later, was something Martin Shubik wrote in one of his books: that “you can only understand the Nash equilibrium if you have met Nash. It’s a game and it’s played alone.”
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He brought up Nash’s work for RAND: “These guys worked with the atom bomb during the cold war. It would be a shameful thing for the prize.”
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He brought up Nash’s lack of interest in game theory after graduate school. As Lindbeck, Jacobson, the academy’s secretary general, and others later hinted, Stahl was not the first member of a Nobel Prize committee who was motivated by deep animus toward a particular candidate or who embraced a wide range of intellectual objections in an effort to derail the candidate.
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But as the spring wore on, Stahl made a great many midnight phone calls. He seemed, Weibull later recalled, to be trying out any and all arguments against Nash’s candidacy.
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What was certainly the case throughout those months, a member of the Swedish academy said, was a growing feeling on Stahl’s and others’ part that “a few bad choices would sink the prize. Nash was of course a very weak prize. People were afraid that the thing would blow up. A big scandal.”
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And David Warsh, a syndicated columnist in whom Stahl evidently confided, subsequently wrote, “The whole intellectual world is watching to see what the Swedish Academy of Sciences is going to do about Nash. The Swedes are known to be worried about what Nash might say.”
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Christer Kiselman, head of the mathematics class of the academy at the time and a member of the academy’s governing council, remembers talking to Stahl. He recalls that Stahl told him that Nash’s work was done too long ago and was too mathematical to warrant a prize.
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Kiselman, whose son Ola has suffered from schizophrenia since age sixteen, had a different interpretation: “[Stahl] was afraid of schizophrenia. So he had some prejudices. So he thought other people would think the same way. He was afraid of some scandal that would reflect on the committee.”
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One by one Lindbeck knocked down Stahl’s objections.
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Lindbeck has a reputation for courage. He has never been afraid to take unpopular positions, even at the risk of alienating his political allies. In the late 1970s, for example, he had publicly opposed a favorite Social Democrat proposal to promote worker ownership of manufacturing concerns that had become trendy.
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Now Lindbeck took the position that Stahl’s objections — that Nash was a mathematician, that Nash had stopped being interested in game theory forty years earlier, that Nash was mentally ill — were irrelevant. He too was worried that Nash would do something peculiar at the ceremony, but he was sure that could be
managed. In any case, it was no basis for denying the prize to someone who was, on intellectual grounds, obviously worthy.

Besides, he found that his emotions were involved.”
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Most Laureates were already famous and much honored. The Nobel was only a crowning glory. But in Nash’s case it was quite different. Lindbeck thought a great deal about the “misery of his life” and that Nash had been, for all intents and purposes, forgotten. Later, he was to say, “Nash was different. He had gotten no recognition and was living in real misery. We helped lift him into daylight. We resurrected him in a way. It was emotionally satisfying.”
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The only other time Lindbeck had felt similarly was when a Viennese libertarian and critic of Keynes, Friedrich von Hayek, won. “Hayek was so hated, so despised… . He’d been in a very deep depression, he told me. It was terribly satisfying to indicate his greatness.”
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The committee listened to Stahl, but it soon became clear that he wasn’t going to win allies. The younger men, Svenson and Persson, were keen on a game-theory prize, and the older ones weren’t inclined to pick a fight with Lindbeck.

The normal procedure when there are unresolved disagreements is to append a formal reservation — a minority opinion — to the committee report.
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Such reservations, which are duly reported to the full academy at the voting session, are not unheard of in physics or chemistry.
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And, although they are not reported in the announcements at the time of the decision, they become part of the official record and may be made public after fifty years. Things were different in the economics committee. Lindbeck was extremely proud of its record and apparently regarded unanimity as necessary in maintaining the prize’s credibility.
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As the report to the Ninth Class was being readied, Stahl threatened to register a formal reservation.
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In the end — whether because of pressure from Lindbeck, advice from his old friend Mäler, or simply a reluctance to go down in history as first to break the former pattern of unanimity — he did not. The Class, which is used to going along with committee proposals, endorsed the proposal.

To Lindbeck, this was the end of the matter. He had prevailed, as he usually did. He felt, however, that extraordinary measures were necessary to make sure that everything would go smoothly once the media furor broke. He took an unprecedented step. He telephoned Kuhn in Princeton and told him that “it’s ninety-nine percent certain now” that Nash would get the prize. “The votes were unanimous,” he told Kuhn, not giving any hint of the controversy.
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He gave Kuhn permission to inform the president of Princeton University of the impending award so that the university could make arrangements. As it turns out, Kuhn had to wait until after Labor Day to pass along his exciting news.
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Harold Shapiro, president of Princeton, was away on vacation.

For once, Lindbeck, for all his political savvy, was wrong. It was not just that Stahl, who was far angrier than Lindbeck appreciated at the time, was a powder keg
waiting to explode. Rather, Lindbeck’s own long reign, and, indeed, the economics prize itself, were on shakier ground than he imagined. Powerful critics of both within the academy, including a former secretary general of the academy and a number of prominent physicists, were itching to do something. This prize had become an issue for them.

Few people outside Sweden, indeed, few outside the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, realize how controversial, even vulnerable, the economics prize has been since its creation in 1968 and continues to be to the present.

The economics prize has never been especially popular within the academy. “Many people question the Nobel Prize [in economics] here,” said one longtime member.
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Oldtimers still thought it had been a grave mistake to add a new Nobel to the original prizes. They thought it cheapened the currency and had, after the “mistake” of accepting the economics prize, successfully fought off efforts to establish other prizes that used the Nobel name. Erik Dahmen, an economist who was a close adviser to one of the richest families in Sweden, the Wallenbergs, calls it “the so-called Nobel Prize in economics.”
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He adds:

This is not
really
a Nobel Prize. It should never be spoken of together with the other prizes. The academy should never have accepted the prize in economics. I have been against the prize since I became a member of the academy.

One physicist said: “The economics prize was just a way of jumping on the Nobel bandwagon, piggybacking on the Nobel.”
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Economics was not held in high regard by many of the natural scientists who dominated the academy. It is not, they said, a sufficiently scientific field to deserve equal footing with hard sciences like physics and chemistry. Ideas, they said, slipped in and out of fashion, but one could not point to scientific progress, a body of theories and empirical facts about which there was certainty and near-universal agreement. Anders Karlquist, a physicist, said, “It’s not as solid and big an enterprise as chemistry and physics.”
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Lars Gårding, a mathematician at the academy, for example, said later that Nash’s prize was for “a very small thing.”
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Finally, there is a widespread feeling, particularly on the part of natural scientists and mathematicians, that the shallowness of the field was leading to a sharp and rapid decline in the quality of Laureates — a decline that would necessarily worsen with time. Bengt Nagel, secretary of the physics Nobel Prize committee, jokingly quotes an economist who is supposed to have said in the early 1980s, “All the mighty firs have fallen. Now there are only bushes left.”
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There are occasional calls to abolish the prize. After Myrdal won the prize, he is supposed to have suggested abolishing the prize because there were no longer any prizeworthy candidates.
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As recently as 1994, Kjell Olof Feldt, the former minister of finance and soon-to-be chairman of the board of the Bank of Sweden — which finances the prize — suggested in a lengthy article in a political monthly that the prize be done away with.
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But although many academy members regret that the prize was established in the first place, said Karlquist, they “realize that it’s a fact of life.”
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By 1994, in fact, the critics’ objective was to wrest control of the prize from the economists. Lindbeck was personally unpopular. It was particularly galling that membership in the economics prize committee seemed to be a lifetime sinecure and that its members could choose winners without any real accountability to the academy.

In February, an academy committee had “suggested” that the economics prize committee be forced to operate by the same rules that apply to the physics and chemistry committees.
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The suggestion was not binding, but it was a warning note, the first concrete sign that critics of the prize were gaining momentum, and it carried with it the promise that the academy council would, when it got around to it, appoint another group specifically mandated to deal with the matter of the economics prize. The imposition, as for other standing committees, of term limits would, of course, have a drastic and immediate effect on the economics committee. It would eliminate Lindbeck, Mäler, and Stahl, the three longtime members, and virtually end their reign. The other, and more drastic, suggestion was to widen the membership to include non-economists and, most radically, to transform the economics Nobel into, in effect, “the Nobel Prize in social sciences,” a notion that appealed not only to natural scientists, but also to the psychologists, sociologists, and other non-economists in the academy’s Ninth Class.
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Thus the debate between Lindbeck and Stahl over whether Nash was a suitable candidate for the prize, a debate that really turned on whether the choice of Nash would embarrass the committee, took place in an unusually hostile atmosphere and under intense scrutiny. The future of the prize committee and the prize looked more vulnerable than they had in times past. All of these behind-the-scenes opinions and maneuvers explain why, between early September and early October, Stahl acquired a powerful set of allies who joined him for reasons quite apart from Nash’s candidacy.
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The stage was set.