The Nobel peace prize has had a long tendency of handing out awards short-sightedly for promises rather than solutions, not just when giving it to American politicians:
• In the 1920s, Britain and France got the Peace Prize for telling Germany that it's allowed to attack Poland, and Germany received it as well for graciously accepting these terms.
• The International Peace Bureau and Inter-Parliamentary Union got multiple prizes for the great accomplishments of existing, despite having achieved nothing of note in the 120+ years of their existence.
• Similarly, the League of Nations got several prizes in the first few years of existence (when everyone was too broke to afford another war anyway), despite being a toothless paper tiger that did nothing to prevent WW2.
• Kellogg received the prize in 1930 for a treaty he organized in 1929, which failed as early as 1931.
And that's just the questionable awards up until 1930. Its track record later isn't much better.
I don't have any objections to this year's laureates (though I'm not too familiar with their works), but ultimately, the question is whether the prize is living up to its high expectations, and if not, what should be done to improve it.
> The Nobel peace prize has had a long tendency of handing out awards short-sightedly for promises rather than solutions
And that is supposed to be a bad thing? If they only give out trophies for feats accomplished years ago that prize would be worthless decoration.
The whole point is that the prize offers acknowledgment and support. It is not magic, as you point out, but it does not have to be.
No, that is telling you you are asking the wrong question. They all started the same way and were intended to stay that way. For hard sciences they changed anyways because ..., this is not the case for this one.
They didn't change, the very first Nobel prizes in the other categories, including literature, so it's not just the hard sciences were awarded for lifetime achievements.
If you want to be condescending, at least have an idea of what you're talking about. Just stop now.
Nobel's will specified that the prizes were supposed to be handed out for the greatest contributions done during the last 12 months. They've slowly moved away from that, since as your examples demonstrate, it's hard to judge the lasting impact of anything that fast.
Nobel put the same clause in for all the prizes, but in all other categories, this clause was ignored even for the very first Nobel prize in each category: They've been mostly consistent in awarding them as recognition of life works, at most for topics that have been recognized in their field for longer, but were of recent public interest and thus could fall within the 12 months clause based on reporting on such older works that stood the test of time.
The peace prize is the only one that regularly ignores this informal guideline and goes for what must be assumed to be cheap publicity grabs.
* They knew about the heinous crimes for which recipients such as Kissinger had already been responsible. (With Obama this is somewhat less of an issue, but he already had a record as US senator and president for a few months; and those did not suggest a future worthy of a peace prize, to say the least).
* They knew those recipients were not penitent regarding their crimes.
* They never acknowledged the awardings of these people as a mistake.
So - they got it right, in their view. It's just that your or my idea of what's right is not theirs.
I already gave the two examples necessary to address this.
- Kissinger. He was Nixon's National Security Advisor, intimately involved in prosecuting the Vietnam War, a war which he fully supported on the grounds of containing the influence of communism. By awarding the peace prize to him, the prize committee shows that they don't think it's crazy for millions of Vietnamese people to die in order to protect the interests of global capital. No credibility.
- Obama. His prize was awarded nine months into his first term. This was based on essentially nothing. The prize committee treated it as little more than a Time Magazine Person of the Year style popularity contest. No credibility.
So there's no need to keep score on correct vs incorrect calls based on unreliable prognostication about future outcomes. These are concrete examples of times when, even just considering the information they had at the time, they made an absolute mockery of the prestige of the Nobel prize.
