A Beautiful Mind

by Sylvia Nasar

  In June, the committee voted four to one to keep Nash off the November 1989 ballot. Rubinstein was the sole dissenter. Beth Allen recalled, “People were asked to give a rank ordering. Nash didn’t make it. Ariel had a fit. He insisted Nash be put on the ballot anyway.” Bewley made it clear that the matter was closed, a decision he later regretted. “It was the wrong decision,” he said in 1996.39 The episode is reminiscent of the Institute for Advanced Study’s refusal, for many years, to grant a mathematics professorship to the world-renowned logician Kurt Godel.40 But, in that case, there was considerably more justification, since the Institute’s tiny mathematics faculty feared that Godel’s well-known paranoia and terror of decision-making would hamstring its ability to conduct business, which included the selection of each year’s visiting scholars.41

  The crowning irony of this affair is that when Nash did get on the ballot, in the election for 1990 (because Rubinstein circumvented the nominating committee by submitting a joint nomination with Kenneth Binmore, at the University of Michigan, and Roger Myerson, at Northwestern University),42 he received, according to the Secretary of the society, Julie Gordon, “the overwhelming majority of the votes.”43

  48

  The Prize

  You will have to wait to find out [the story of Nash s prize] in fifty years. We will never reveal it. — CARL-OLOF JACOBSON, secretary general Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, February 1997

  IT IS TUESDAY, October 12, 1994. Jörgen Weibull, a personable young professor of economics, looks at his watch for perhaps the fiftieth time.1 He is standing near the front of the massive Sessions Hall of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences — a jewelbox of a room with a heavily ornamented ceiling and portrait-lined walls — which, at the moment, is crowded with reporters and camera crews, jammed in narrow aisles between the U-shaped tables. Near-pandemonium reigns. Everybody is milling around, speculating in loud voices about the delay.

  Weibull had been so elated when he left his office at the University of Stockholm that midmorning that he half walked, half ran through the highway underpass and up the hill to the academy half a mile away. Assar Lindbeck, the chairman of the prize committee, had asked him if he wouldn’t mind being on hand to answer questions at the press conference — quite an honor. But now Weibull’s mouth feels dry, his shoulders ache, and he can feel the first twinges of a headache as he tries to imagine what has gone wrong.

  The Nobel press conference had, as usual, been called for eleven-thirty. These staid, heavily scripted events are always held right after the final, ceremonial vote and always start on time. But it is one o’clock and there is no sign of any academy officials and no word either. All the reporters are saying that nothing like this has ever happened before.

  Suddenly, the enormous doors to his left swing open and a small knot of academy officials burst into the hall, all wearing slightly dazed expressions, like moviegoers stepping out of a theater into daylight. They hurry past the milling, shouting throng, ignoring the questions, brushing aside the demands for explanations. But Weibull, who is standing near the table with the microphones, manages to catch Lindbeck’s eye for a fraction of a second. The relief is overwhelming. “Lindbeck didn’t signal or anything like that,” he said later, “but I saw right away that everything had turned out all right.”2 And the relief turns into something like joy when he listens to Carl-Olof Jacobson, the academy’s handsome, silver-haired secretary general, read the first few words of the press release: “John Forbes Nash, Jr., of Princeton, New Jersey …”3

  The behind-the-scenes saga of John Nash’s Nobel Prize is almost as extraordinary as the fact that the mathematician became a Laureate at all. For years after the idea of a prize for game theory was first considered, even Nash’s most ardent admirers considered the likelihood of his winning impossibly remote.4 But much later, when the prize was virtually his, after he had been told that he had won it, and within an hour of the official notification, the ne plus ultra of honors very nearly eluded him — with far-reaching consequences for the future of the economics prize itself.

  This previously untold story is one that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation — intent on preserving the Olympian aura that surrounds the prizes — have tried very hard to keep under wraps. The academy is one of the most secretive of societies, and all details — the nominations, inquiries, deliberations, and votes — of the lengthy selection process are among the most closely guarded secrets in the world. The very statutes of the prize demand it:

  Proposals received for the award of a prize, and investigations and opinions concerning the award of a prize may not be divulged. Should divergent opinions have been expressed in connection with the decision of the prize-winning body concerning the award of the prize, these may not be included in the record or otherwise divulged. A prize-winning body may, however, after due consideration in each individual case, permit access to material which formed the basis for evaluation and decision concerning a prize, for purposes of historical research. Such permission may not be granted until at least 50 years have elapsed after the date on which the decision in question was taken.5

  There have been breaches, of course. In the 1960s and 1970s, advance rumors of the literature Laureates used to trickle out of the Academy of Arts and Letters with notorious regularity.6 In 1994, a member of the Norewegian Nobel Committee quit over the impending peace prize to the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, and took his protest to the media. Michael Sohlman, the executive director of the Nobel Foundation, still sounds furious when he recounts the incident.7

  But, few, if any, cracks have appeared, figuratively or otherwise, in the gray Beaux Arts walls of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, guardian of the physics, chemistry, and economics prizes. If not for the mysterious one-and-a-half-hour delay on the day that the Nash prize was announced, the academy might well have succeeded in protecting the secrecy of the process. As it was, academy officials not only refused to explain the delay but denied that it was in any way significant. Indeed, they very quickly began to assert that it had never happened. Recently, Karl-Göran Mäler, a member of the economics prize committee in 1994 and privy to all of the events that transpired, said, “I do not recall any delay.”8

  The prize in economics is something of a stepchild.9 Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist and inventor, did not have the dismal science in mind when he wrote his famous 1894 will creating Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and peace. The economics prize was not created until nearly seventy years later, the brainchild of the then head of the Swedish central bank. The prize is financed by the bank and administered by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation. It is not, in fact, a Nobel Prize, but rather “The Central Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Science in Memory of Alfred Nobel.” To the public, that is a distinction without much of a difference. The early winners of the economics prize — among them Paul Samuelson, Kenneth Arrow, and Gunnar Myrdal — were generally acknowledged to be intellectual giants and lent their distinction to the prize. And, so far at least, it has become “the ultimate symbol of excellence for scientists and laymen alike” and does in fact make economics Nobel-ists “life peers in the world community of scholars.”10

  The criteria, rules, and procedures for the economics prize are patterned after those that apply to the science prizes.11 Candidates must be living. No more than three can share a prize, which is less of a problem in economics than in physical science, where teamwork is more the norm. Though many people, even those who participate in the nominating process, have failed to appreciate it, the Nobel is not a prize for outstanding individuals nor is it a lifetime achievement award. The prize is awarded for specific achievements, inventions, and discoveries. These can be theories, analytical methods, or purely empirical results. As in physics, in which mathematics plays as big a role as in economics, there is a strong bias against prizes for only mathematics.12 (Nobel himself is said to have hated mathematicians, though some
of the best stories about why — revolving around sexual and professional jealousy — turn out to have been apocryphal).13’

  The prize selection process is also virtually identical to the cycles for the science prizes.14 A five-member prize committee, composed of senior Swedish economists, gathers nominations and referees reports from elite academics around the world. The committee makes its choice every spring, usually in April. The so-called Social Sciences Class — all academy members in economics and other social sciences — endorses the candidate or candidates in early fall, usually late August or early September. And the academy votes on the nominees in early October, on the day that the winner or winners are announced.

  On paper, at least, all the members of the prize committee are as distinguished as the candidates, and the selection of winners is a detached, disinterested, and, ultimately, democratic exercise in scientific judgment — as divorced from personal likes and dislikes, prejudices, or political and pecuniary considerations as the business of determining the winners in a sports tournament. There is some, even a good deal, of truth in this idealized description of what actually goes on, but it is not anything like the whole story.

  Assar Lindbeck, who joined the prize committee in 1969 and became its chairman in 1980, has dominated the economics selections for the entire history of the Nobel Prize.15 Tall, red-haired, powerfully built, he looks like the boss of a machine tool shop or a mine. He is from the far north of Sweden, a little crude, a little uptight, more than a little brusque. He has opinions, strong ones, about nearly all topics that engage his lively mind, and as a result is quite unpopular in the academy. But he is not without a certain earthy charm. His sense of humor is sly and dry. He is a Sunday painter — showing up at prize committee meetings with paint spatters on his horn-rimmed glasses. A large — and extremely graphic — erotic painting hangs in his office at the university.

  Lindbeck is Sweden’s most important economist. Top academic economists in Sweden, where academia, government, and industry have long been closely entwined, have traditionally wielded a great deal more political power than their American counterparts.16 Bertil Ohlin, the committee’s first chairman, was for years the leader of Sweden’s opposition. Gunnar Myrdal, who won the prize in 1974, was a minister in the Social Democratic government. Lindbeck himself was a protégé of Prime Minister Olof Palme, has held many political advisory posts, and has been involved in most public policy debates since the 1960s.

  Unlike Ohlin and Myrdal, Lindbeck never abandoned his research career to become a full-time politician. Indeed, he is generally considered a likely contender for a Nobel himself. Even today, at age sixty-eight, there is a small assembly line on the shelves behind his desk at the University of Stockholm: impressively large piles of paper marked “Articles Under Preparation,” “Articles Submitted,” and “Articles Accepted.” And he has used his political savvy and prestige to build up economics departments and research institutes. “He’s kind of a mafia leader, a fixer,” said Karl-Gustaf Lofgren, an adjunct member of the economics prize committee and a professor of resource economics at the University of Umea.17 He adds:

  I never did any resource economics, but I became a professor of resource economics. [Lindbeck] has good ideas about who to move here and there. He listens. He has his own opinions. I like him. He’s a very sound guy. Very smart.

  Lindbeck has a reputation for getting his way. His style is that of a central banker rather than a chief executive officer. As his longtime friend Mäler put it, “Assar never controlled with commands.”18 In an article Lindbeck wrote on the economic prize in the mid-1980s, he bragged: “So far the proposals of the prize committee to the Academy have been unanimous. A consensus has in fact developed quite ’automatically’ within the committee, as if by some kind of invisible hand, after intensive discussions.”19 The invisible hand, of course, was his own. “You could put it that way,” said Lofgren, laughing. “You can say it’s unanimous… . But he’s a dominating person. We don’t vote officially. You agree.”20

  Kerstin Fredga, the president of the Swedish Academy of Sciences, said at one point, “Very few people have ever dared say no to Assar.”21 Ironically, by December 1994, when Fredga made the remark, it was no longer true.

  John Nash’s name first appeared as a candidate for a Nobel in the mid-1980s.22 The Nobel selection process is like a giant funnel. At any given time, the economics prize committee has a dozen “investigations” running of fields and clusters of possible candidates. But, fairly quickly, the focus shifts to the hottest fields and candidates. By 1984, the “obvious” Nobels had been handed out to the likes of Samuelson, Arrow, and James Tobin. The committee was looking further afield among newer branches of economics, and nothing was newer or hotter at that particular moment than game theory.23

  In 1984, the prize committee contacted a young researcher at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. A combat veteran and an activist in Israel’s peace movement, Ariel Rubinstein took months to write a painstaking ten-page report on potential candidates for a prize in game theory. He placed Nash at the top of the list.24

  The 1982 paper that established Rubinstein as one of the leading researchers in game theory was an extension of Nash’s 1950 bargaining paper.25 Rubinstein’s sense of indebtedness to Nash and his appreciation for Nash’s original achievement were thus very vivid. Having encountered Nash on a visit to Princeton, Rubinstein also could not help but be struck by the stark contrast between Nash’s past contributions and his current circumstances. His outrage was fueled partly by a firsthand encounter with the stigma of mental illness: his mother was once hospitalized for depression, and Rubinstein never forgot the lack of basic human respect accorded her by doctors and relatives.26

  The Nobel Prize committee did not take up the matter again until 1987, when it commissioned a second report, this time from Weibull.27 After he submitted it, Lindbeck told him that the committee wanted to ask him some questions and asked him to attend a couple of committee meetings at the Royal Academy. Weibull was, of course, pledged to complete secrecy.

  When Weibull walked into the paneled room, introductions were hardly necessary. As a member of Sweden’s small academic elite, Weibull already knew the five men, mostly academics, sitting around the enormous table. He was nonetheless slightly awed, realizing from the committee’s questions that he was being given the opportunity to participate at the earliest stage of a historic decision. “My impression … [was] that it was the first time that the committee had met to consider this.”28

  Weibull presented a verbal summary of his report, telling the committee about the central ideas in game theory, their importance for economic research, and the key contributors. He, too, had placed Nash at the top of his list of half a dozen seminal thinkers.

  The committee’s questions were carefully phrased to hide the members’ own opinions, and focused, in the first session, on whether game theory was just a fad or really an important tool for investigating a wide range of interesting economic problems. By the second meeting, however, Lindbeck, the committee chairman, zeroed in on Nash. Was what Nash did merely mathematics? Lindbeck asked. Did he simply formalize ideas that economists had formulated at least a hundred years earlier? Was it true that Nash had stopped doing research in game theory in the early 1950s? That question was the closest anyone came to mentioning the subject of Nash’s mental illness.29

  When Weibull left the meeting, he thought that there was a good chance that the committee would eventually agree to award a prize in game theory, but he had no reason, given Nash’s illness and the decades that had passed since his early papers, to believe that Nash would make the cut.

  Eric Fisher, a visitor at Stockholm University’s Institute for International Economics that year, recalled being quizzed by Assar Lindbeck about Nash’s mental state. Fisher had been an undergraduate at Princeton, where he used to see Nash hanging out in the foyer of Firestone Library. Lindbeck wanted to know whether Nash was “competent enough to handle the publicity t
hat winning [a Nobel] might entail.”30

  It was two years later, the fall of 1989, that Weibull hurried across the Princeton University campus to meet Nash for the first time.31 After weeks of delicate negotiation, with the chairman of the mathematics department acting as a go-between, the elusive mathematician had finally agreed to have lunch. Weibull had a specific motive for the meeting. Lindbeck had pulled him aside shortly before his departure from Sweden and asked him to report back to him on Nash’s mental state. There was some talk, Lindbeck said, that Nash had some sort of remission and was behaving quite reasonably. Was it true? Weibull was about to find out.

  Weibull knew instantly that the tall, white-haired, frail-looking man standing in the driveway in front of Prospect House, Princeton’s Florentine faculty club, was Nash. He was standing there rather awkwardly, smoking, looking down at the ground, obviously dressed up for the occasion, wearing white tennis shoes but also a long-sleeved dress shirt and long pants. As Weibull drew nearer, he could see that Nash was deathly nervous. When Weibull gave him his ready, friendly smile and extended his hand, Nash was unable to meet his eye and, after the briefest of handshakes, instantly put his hand back into his pocket.