It is that time of year for Alfred Nobel to start rotating in his grave. Bloomberg says: “Leonid Hurwicz, Eric S. Maskin and Roger B. Myerson, all from the U.S., won the Nobel Prize in economics for theories that help set rules for transactions ranging from auctions to elections.”

Small problem. There is no Nobel prize in economics. The prize being awarded is actually “The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel,” and should probably be called the Myrdal prize, after the guy who got it started and then arranged to be awarded it. Subsequent recipients have been awarded the prize for things that range from the trivial to spectacularly wrong (can you spell LTCM). The current award is more on the trivial end of the spectrum, when compared to the standards of the true Nobel prizes,  like the form of the DNA molecule or the genetic code.  Other examples include James Buchanan’s prize for telling us that politicians and bureaucrats act in their own interests, Robert Lucas’s for telling us that people do the best they can in figuring out what to do, and Franco Modigliani’s for telling us that people save and spend their savings at different times in their lives.

Yes, the Peace prize is a real Nobel prize, but don’t get me going on politicians and especially Al Gore.