Economists like the attention that economics receives when the "Nobel Prize in Economics" is announced. Winners of the prize like to refer to Nobel and great scientists in their acceptance speeches but rarely refer to economists of note. What they do not tell you is, the fact that Alfred Nobel did not put any money towards a prize in economics. In fact, he did not have any respect for the field of economics. His great grandnephew, Peter Nobel, said in 2001 that he wanted the economics prize dissociated from the real Nobel Prizes.

In 1968 the Bank of Sweden (Sverigs Riksbanks) created the "Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Honour of Alfred Nobel" to mark the the tercentenary of the bank's founding in 1668. They persuaded the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation to administer the prize and include it in the December ceremonies. The nomination and selection is handled by the Economics Prize Committee. The Academy has about 514 members of which 350 are Swedish. The funding comes from the Bank of Sweden and not the Nobel Foundation.

In 1997, the Bank of Sweden Prize in economic Sciences in Honour of Alfred Nobel was won by Merton and Scholes for their work on the mathematics of derivatives. When their work was applied in practice it caused a disaster for their financial backers.

Economists generally dispute the ideas of the only economist who got a genuine Nobel Prize. This was Frederick Soddy who got a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1921 for his work on isotopes, a word he invented. New Zealanders know him as the chemist who worked in Canada with Ernest Rutherford when he was determining how radioactivity was produced when chemical elements decayed stepwise into different elements. Rutherford got his Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work in 1908.

Soddy became a Professor of Chemistry at Oxford University where he took up an interest in economics, writing books such as "Wealth, Virtual Wealth & Debt and "Money Versus Man" on economics. He was the first economist to realise that energy and entropy would become important economic factors. Many economists still do not understand the relevance of these concepts.