The Nobel Prize in economics had a difficult birth. It was created in 1969 to mimic the five prizes initiated under Alfred Nobel’s will. These had already been around for 68 years, and purists fought hard to stop the newcomer. Some members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences still dismiss economics as unscientific, and its prize as not a proper Nobel. Early winners were among the prize’s fiercest critics. Gunnar Myrdal, who shared the award in 1974, said the prize ought to be abolished (but he did not return the money). Milton Friedman, winner in 1976, doubted the ability of a few people in Stockholm to make decisions respected around the world.
By the 1990s, the Nobel committee had gained a reputation for intransigence. Gary Becker won only after a flood of nominations forced the cabal in Stockholm to act. The fathers of theory won only after Mr. Nash’s sudden recovery from paranoid schizophrenia, though the disease had no bearing on the quality of his work, the best of which was done before he became ill. Robert Lucas received a prize that many economists believed he should have had much earlier. In 1998, the prize became the subject of countless jokes after the collapse of Long-term Capital Management, a hedge fund firm whose founders included Robert Merton and Myron Scholes, the 1997 Nobel laureates. The Merton Scholes’ choice also highlighted another enduring problem with the prize: untimely deaths. Fischer Black, co-originator of the options pricing model for which Messrs Merton and Scholes were recognized, died a year too soon to join his collaborators on the podium. Last year, many economists hoped that Zvi Griliches, a noted econometrician who was unquestionably deserving of the prize, and was suffering from a long illness, would win. He did not, and died soon afterwards. Because the prize came into being so late, there are still elderly luminaries waiting to be recognized. Paul Samuelson, one of the younger winners, and Mr. Becker, who was a friend of Griliches, want the committee to take old age explicitly into account.
The committee could also cast its net more widely across the profession. ①Almost ail, the laureates(戴桂冠的人)are also the theoreticians; advances in empirical work and applications in the past two decades have yet to be paid due respect," a fact bemoaned by Mr. Becker. ②Mr. Samuelson adds that the economics committee’s selection methods have. excessively mimicked those used for the prizes in natural sciences: It" the right apple fell on your head, and you saw it, then you got the prize. But if you had a lifetime of excellence in all branches of physics, you didn’t get it.\
From the first paragraph, we learn that ______.