Photograph from A Beautiful Mind. She has managed, through interviews with several participants, to piece together a plausible account of the process. There were, according to her informants, six names on the short list from which Nash, Reinhard Selten, and John Harsanyi were eventually chosen. The others were Lloyd Shapley and Robert Aumann, both mathematicians by training, and Thomas Schelling, a social scientist. It was created in 1968, over heated and formidable opposition within the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Many members still believe that the creation of a sixth Nobel prize was a mistake.
They find it disturbing that economic ideas dart in and out of fashion for roughly the same reasons that women's hemlines rise and fall, with no clear evidence of any growing amalgam of theory and fact with which a reasonable person might find it difficult to disagree. It should never be spoken of together with the other prizes. The academy should never have accepted the prize in economics. I have been against the prize since I became a member of the academy. Nasar maintains that it is widely shared, and that calls for abolition surface periodically.