'Not-So-Crazy' Crazy Idea #1: The American Prizes
Why do we let Sweden have the preeminent global awards?
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Author’s Note: Last week was the annual family vacation, so I found some time for a quick newsletter. It will be the first in what should be a regular series: ‘Not-So-Crazy’ crazy ideas, where I’ll briefly argue for an unusual or odd idea that I think it would be interesting to implement. As the preamble always states, I hope you find this newsletter ‘worth reading’ rather than it necessarily ‘being right.’ These will be out-there ideas, so please let me know your thoughts in the comments.
The Nobel Prizes are five1 separate prizes awarded annually in Stockholm, Sweden since 1901. Generally considered the most prestigious prizes in their respective fields, they are part of the legacy of Alfred Nobel, a Swedish chemist and engineer.
Over the course of Nobel’s life, he became exceptionally wealthy, mainly from his hundreds of inventions and the business associated with them. His most famous invention is dynamite, a more stable form of the explosive (and vasodilative) nitroglycerin.
Nobel's will specified that his fortune be used to create a series of prizes for those who confer the "greatest benefit on mankind." A foundation was created to manage his wealth and each year a committee selects nominees (but does not have to award) each of the five prizes to a living candidate along with a cash award.
Now for a bit of unbridled patriotism: America is the global geopolitical and cultural hegemon. We do things bigger and better than everyone else. Why do we just let Sweden have all of the prestige associated with the Nobels?
‘Not-So-Crazy’ crazy idea: America should host and award the biggest intellectual prizes.
Yes, some of that is pure and raw patriotism, but it also presents an opportunity to improve upon the structure of the Nobel prize, increase the incentives for innovation, discovery, art, culture, and global improvement, while also playing some geopolitical hardball that further increases America’s advantages.
Here’s how I’d set it up: I’d combine the ethic of the Nobel Prize (those who confer the "greatest benefit on mankind”) with the size and flexibility of the MacArthur “Genius Grant” (no specific fields, 20+ awardees annually), while exponentially ratcheting up the prize money, with a slight twist on eligibility.
Every year, The American Prize Committee should select forty people from any field doing any work and the United States government should award them $25,000,000 tax-free dollars. Eligibility is every citizen or resident of all countries in North and South America.
The most glaring issue with the Nobel Prizes are that they are rather reductive. There are infinitely more facets and aspects to the human experience than the narrow five categories that the Nobel Committee awards. You see this most often with the biological sciences, where they have to be shoehorned into either Chemistry or Physiology or Medicine.2 Just remove the categories all together and award people that have done amazing things in any field.
This also touches on another issue with the Nobels: how few are awarded. Up to three people can win each prize, but Literature is essentially always one while Peace is usually one or two. So we’re talking about ~12 people per year being awarded, across the global population of ~8 billion. Countless people are doing incredible work and they should be recognized; let’s increase the throughput and recognition of the most preeminent awardees.
Finally, the last improvement on the Nobel is how meager it’s prize money is. It’s only ~$1M dollars. For reference, that’s barely more than the average NIH R01 grant. We should drastically improve this. The people that have done the work for “the greatest benefit of mankind” should never have to worry about money again and still have significant funding leftover to work on whatever they want to.
Will some retire to the Caribbean? Sure. But I’d be willing to bet that giving $25M each to forty of the best and brightest annually would have incredible ROI. And the total cost would be a literal rounding error in the United States’ budget (The budget for FY2023 was $6.13T, so an extra $1B would represent an increase of ~0.02%).
Finally, let’s discuss the geopolitical, realpolitik hardball: the eligibility.
In ‘The Accidental Superpower,’ the geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan argues that the United States has several innate geological advantages, including the fact that literal oceans make up its Eastern and Western borders.3 This provides unparalleled security to the United States.4 But if you think about it, it also applies to the entirety of North and South America as a whole.
Another advantage that the entire New World possesses birthright citizenship. It is somewhat of a vestigial remnant of colonial times, meant to attract people to come to the New World, but it remains a major advantage to all American nations. Not only can you come here, but assimilation is possible, even encouraged.
I’ve always thought that we should leverage both of these into a proactive “brain drain,” even more so than our university system already passively does. What better way to do that (and extremely United States American) than to award huge sums of money to the most talented citizens or residents.
By expanding it to the entire Americas, rather than just the United States, we not only improve our nation, but the entire New World, while scoring some easy diplomatic points with our fellow American nations. Of course, the money would be going to individuals, rather than countries, but it would still represent quite significant sums (for reference, our annual foreign aid to Brazil is ~$20M). And while they aren’t perfectly analogous, examples such as the American pandemic stimulus and universal basic income experiments in Kenya, highlight the potential benefits of give unrestricted cash to individuals.
In conclusion, the United States government should fund and host “The American Prize,” a bigger and better Nobel Prize with an extremely large cash award. It should be awarded annually to citizens or residents of any New World nation that are doing exceptional work for the betterment of humankind.
Take that, Sweden.
The five prizes are Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace. A sixth prize for Economics is also administered by the Nobel Foundation, but it is funded by a separate source (Sweden's central bank) and was only first presented in 1969.
2020’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for the development of CRISPR and 2023’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded for the nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines, even though the former is more medical while the latter is more chemistry.
Some other include its two large breadbaskets (the Midwest and Central California Valley), its large navigable river systems (the Mississippi being the quintessential example), its barrier island chain off the East Coast, and its large natural resource reserves, especially fossil fuels.
The full thesis is that the oceans, combined with incredibly friendly allies to the North (Canada) and South (Mexico), really does provide the United States unparalleled security.