Nobel Prize 2015: Winners and updates

It’s Nobel Prize season again, when a select few scientists, writers, economists, and people working toward peace will get phone calls at odd hours informing them that they’ve received one of the most prestigious awards on Earth.

From 1901 to 2015, 573 Nobel Prizes have been given out, including household names like Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Nelson Mandela, Ernest Hemingway, and the International Committee of the Red Cross. It’s a long, long history — long enough to be filled with plenty of drama and contention.

The Nobel Prize in Economics aspires to reward scientific achievement, just like the prizes in physics, chemistry, and medicine. But given how politically divided economics is as a field, it’s normal for prize selections to be interpreted in ideological terms.

Indeed, commentators are already interpreting this year’s award to Princeton professor Angus Deaton as a victory for skeptics of foreign aid, of which Deaton has been relentlessly critical:

2015’s Nobel Prize week wrapped up today with the announcement of the economics prize for Angus Deaton. And because these awards are open to anybody anywhere, questions of nationality can get interesting.

So which countries are racking up the most Nobels? If you do it by people’s country of birth, you end up with this:

Angus Deaton, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics today, is best known for his detailed work on consumption and poverty for individuals. But in his 2013 book The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality, Deaton made a short, compelling, and clear case for why income inequality in society as a whole is a threat to democracy — and why worrying about it isn’t just class warfare or resentment:

In other words, worrying about income inequality doesn’t mean being jealous of wealth. It’s about the effect on the rest of society when the wealthy are rich enough that they can effectively drive political outcomes so they line up with their unusual policy preferences.

Angus Deaton, born in Scotland but a longtime professor at Princeton, has won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Economics “for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare.” Deaton is well-known for a broad body of work rather than for a handful of breakthrough papers. But it is possible to understand his output as falling along a couple of themes. Methodologically, Deaton is about both empiricism and individualism, arguing for a close look at data on how specific human beings and households behave, rather than stylized models or big national-level aggregate data.

Substantively, this is because he’s trying to look behind the easiest summary statistics and understand what is actually happening in people’s lives — who is better off than whom, and why. That’s a subject that has very broad application. We might wonder if the average person in Oslo is better off than the average person in Orlando, and by how much. But it’s of particular interest when we’re thinking about questions of poverty. If we want to improve the lot of the worst-off people, we need to know who they are and how to measure improvements in their well-being.

This year’s Nobel Prize for peace has been awarded to the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet, an alliance of civil society groups that has helped steer Tunisia from its 2011 Arab Spring revolution toward pluralistic democracy.

The group is not particularly famous, but the Nobel Peace Prize does often go to lesser-known groups, an effort by the Nobel Committee to promote and draw attention to their work and to whatever larger forces they represent.

The Nobel Committee loves nothing like a dissident novelist, laboring under and against authoritarianism, but even with that track record today’s Nobel Prize for Literature is unusual: Svetlana Alexievich, from Belarus.

This is unusual because the award traditionally goes to a novelist or poet, but Alexievich is neither. She writes nonfiction; her work could be best described as narrative or even investigative journalism. She’s not afraid of politics, but her work is about so much more than just the political.

Early this morning we learned that the 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to Tomas Lindahl of the Francis Crick Institute, Paul Modrich of Duke University, and Aziz Sancar of University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

They won for a simple reason: Their scientific discoveries revealed the surprising ways in which our DNA is at once extremely fragile and super resilient.

When 17-year-old Malala Yousafzai was announced as one of the winners of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize on October 10, she became the youngest Nobel laureate ever. (The next youngest is William Lawrence Bragg who in 1915 won for physics alongside his father at the less tender age of 25.) So how unusual is it to have younger people in the mix?

By and large, Nobel Prize winners have been on the older side — 61 years old, on average. Partly, this is because it can often take some time to figure out if someone’s accomplishments have had a big impact.