Nobel Prize Winners by Area of Specialty

Question #1: What is the Distribution of Nobel Prizes by Area of Specialty?

This illustrates that the Nobel Prizes are not given equally among the six categories of the Nobel Prize. 

The areas of Physics and Physiology or Medicine and Chemistry represent 66% of all Nobel Prizes conferred. 

Conclusion

Of the Nobel Prize categories, two stand out as different than might be expected. First, the Nobel Prize for Peace is not an intellectual award, making it different than the other 5 categories.

The other Nobel Prize that stands out is Economics. Economics is a highly political domain where one burnished their career with the economist publishing materials that are appealing to and helps justify ultra-wealthy behavior. Economics is not a part of standard academics and will frequently pretend to be part of the hard sciences, where it barely qualifies to be in the social sciences. Economics does not validate its conclusions against objective evidence but rather creates a series of fantasy assumptions that help defend the economic model from reality. Poor quality economics tends to flourish, while high-quality economics, which is predictive, tends to be sidelined. 

The following quote from The New Great Depression explains this issue with on Nobel Prize winner in Economics.

The difficulty is that none of the programs that the Fed has used for the stock market provide stimulus or create jobs, none of them will return the economy to trend growth, even to the week 2009 to 2019 trend growth, they will keep hedge funds and banks from failing and they will keep trading markets from freezing up in the short term. Yeah, these programs are not a source of jobs or growth. The reason for this world, historic litany of failure by the Fed can be reduced to one word, velocity, that is the turnover of money to explain why a detour, a detour through the theory of monetarism is needed. Monetarism is an economic theory closely associated with Milton Friedman winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1976. It's basic ideas of changes in money supply, are the most important cause of changes in GDP. The US GDP challenge is measured in dollars are broken into two parts, a real component which produces actual gains, and an inflationary component which is illusionary. The real plus the inflationary equals, then nominal increase measured in total dollars. Friedman's contribution was to show that increasing money supply in order to increase output would work only up to a certain point, Beyond that nominal gains would be inflationary effect the Fed could print money to get nominal growth yet, there would be a limit to how much real growth would result. A monetarist attempting to fine tune monetary policy, shows that if real growth is capped at 4%. The ideal policy is one in which money supply grows at 4%, velocity is constant and the price level is constant. This produces maximum real growth and zero inflation. It's all fairly simple as long as the velocity of money is constant. What if velocity is not constant. It turns out that velocity is not constant, contrary to Friedman's thesis philosophy is like a joker in the deck. It's a factor, the Fed can control philosophy psychological depends on how an individual feels about her economic prospects philosophy cannot be controlled by the French printing press. And that's the fatal flaw in monetarism as a policy tool. Velocity is a behavioral phenomena and a powerful one, the velocity of M to the broad definition of money supply peaked at 2.2 in 1997. That means that for each dollar of money supported 2.2 dollars of nominal growth velocity has been declining precipitously ever since it fell to two. In 2006 Just before the global financial crisis and then crash to 1.7 in mid 2009 As the crisis had bottom, the velocity crash did not stop with a market crash, the velocity continued to fall to 1.43 by late 2017 Despite the Feds money printing, and the zero rate policy that went from 2008 to 2015. Even before the new pandemic related crash velocity fell to two to 1.37.

And the following quote is also illustrative. 

It is time we debunked the idea of Economics as a science - how many scientific theories would have survived in the light of a consistent and persistent failure to have any predictive force? Yet in the face of such a monumental failure to have any predictive relevance we find that Milton Friedman argues that their theories are based on "wildly inaccurate descriptive representations of reality, and in general, the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions" (Davies Economia p69)