The Nobel Foundation’s returns on invested capital are down 8 percent from last year, so today it announced that future Nobel Prize winners will only receive about $1.1 million, rather than $1.4 million. Surely intellectuals around the world are wondering if it’s even worth trying to better mankind anymore, but Peter A. Diamond, an MIT professor who won the Nobel in economic science in 2010, explains that one can still leverage the prize into a vacation home and a sports car or two. “One of the things that comes with the prize, besides the prestige and the money,” he says, “is the opportunities to make more money.”
