Nobel Committee Missed Point on Economics Award
The selection of Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton for the Nobel Prize in economics [“2 U.S. Scholars Win Nobel for Formula on Stock Options, Oct. 15”] is truly a troubling choice. It isn’t that their work wasn’t an ingenious development, because it was. The problem is that it has nothing to do with increasing our knowledge about the process we know of as economics.
What they’ve created is a tool that corrupts the investment process by diverting the markets away from a place where people invest in the economy and makes it safer for big-time speculators to manipulate the markets by turning the process into a casino game that belongs in Las Vegas.
It seems to me that awarding them a prize in economics for this kind of work is kind of like awarding the prize in medicine to Typhoid Mary.
SANFORD THIER
Palos Verdes Estates
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