Colorado College, our evolving Neo-Liberal Arts school, has been inviting a slew of globalization advocates to intone on patriarchal economics. The latest, game theory “Cold Warrior” Thomas Schelling, will speak on Thursday, Feb. 21st. Schelling is being lauded as a “Nobel Laureate of Economics.” Except there is no such thing as a Nobel prize for economics.

The “Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel” is to the Nobel prize, what air hockey is to hockey. If air hockey was played by chiseling cardsharps.

The would-be Nobel ruse is exposed with regularity, but without traction in the mainstream press. Every year the impostor recipients steadfastly don the stripes and hit the lecture circuit as “laureates.”

The current issue of Adbusters revisits the scheme, and this time even recommends rescinding a number of the fraudulent awards. The most egregious it suggests, which have harmed mankind by encouraging wrong-headed laissez-fair policy, went to Milton Friedman in 1976, Robert Solow in 1987, and Gary Becker in 1992. “Further recalls may be necessary.”

We can only hope Thomas Schelling and his “junk economics,” lobbying as he has against the Kyoto Treaty and for the Copenhagen Consensus, will be next.

Presumably to make amends for inventing dynamite, Alfred Nobel endowed a peace prize in 1907 to be awarded each year in the areas of physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and peace, where such work contributed to the well being of mankind. Nobel made zero provisions for offering an award to economists.

In the late sixties, a cabal of economists contrived to make their own prize, through the Bank of Sweden, “in honor of Alfred Nobel,” presuming to correct Nobel’s shortsightedness, in defiance of his apparent farsightedness. And indeed the only economists which they have honored have been the malevolent World Bank booster variety.