And the Nobel goes to…

The Swedish Academy announced today that Edmund S. Phelps will receive the Nobel Prize for Economics. Phelps, a professor at Columbia University, is being lauded for his work on inflation and its effects on unemployment. Phelps becomes the sixth American this year to win a Nobel.  Only two more Nobels for 2006 are left: literature and peace.

It almost certainly won’t be an American sweep this year. We have no idea who will win for literature (one thing’s for sure: it won’t be Harold Pinter), but we do have some odds on who might get the big kahuna for peace.  In this week’s list, FP takes a look at some of the leading candidates, which include former Finnish president and current UN peace negotiator Martti Ahtisaari and Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, for their work on the Aceh peace accords.  

We’ll also admit that our top picks may be totally wrong. After all, the Nobel Committee has a history of picking surpise recipients.  Remember when Jody Williams and the International Campaign to Ban Landmines won in 1997?  No one saw that coming.  The IHT has a good primer on how the prizewinners are chosen. In short, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize is selected by a group of five Norwegian committee members, who are selected by Norway’s parliament. They choose from a list of nominees (this year, there are 191, including 23 organizations), whose names are put forward by previous laureates, academics, and parliamentarians around the world.  It’s like Fight Club: what happens in the committee, stays in the committee (although nominators are free to talk to the press individually about who they recommended, which is why we know that people like Ahtisaari and Bono have been nominated in the past). Still, if we were betting folks, we’d put our money on the Finn.