On Monday, the winner of the 2008 Nobel prize in economics will be announced. That statement is not quite true: there is no Nobel prize in economics, merely a more recent prize established in memory of Alfred Nobel.

The existence of a quasi-Nobel in economics infuriates some. One objection is that Nobel himself would not have approved. I do not much care. A more serious objection is that economics is not incontrovertibly a science, but then neither is peace or literature.