Some people have difficulty respecting my Nobel Peace Prize nomination.  Most cases of those claiming a Nobel Peace Prize are from the political world, rarely from the scientific world.  Science justifies most of the other Nobel Prizes and is where my strongest claim arises.  Unfamiliarity with physical science is the problem with many of my detractors.  So I am writing this press release to try to explain away the science denial holding many of you back.

Alfred Nobel's Will

Nobel's will states that the Peace Prize should be awarded "to the person who shall have done the most or best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding or promoting of peace congresses."  The first and third items get most of the attention, the fraternity between nations and the holding or promoting of peace congresses.  The Hague Peace Conference of 1899 would be a good example of the latter and negotiating peace treaties would be a good example of the former.  Except for the Kellogg Briand Treaty and some of the nuclear treaties, there is little in the middle category, the abolition or reduction of standing armies.  My Peace Economics theories and models argue strongly for the reduction of standing armies due to the lack of national economic growth that comes from local military spending. 

Unique Approaches

My unique approach is the next evolution of Seymour Melman's approach to peace.  This is something I have taken out of the largely word-oriented political economy approach of Melman and turned into the hard science, numbers-oriented approach of my long term economic model based on historic economic evidence.  Ruth Leger Sivard started this hard science empirical approach with her bar charts and I took those expressions to the next level in many ways.  That innovation has made all the difference, as I chose the path less traveled.  That has led to a long list of corollaries, the most significant of which is a theory of empire.  I described how empire starts and impacts everything in the domestic social structure of society along the way.  This is a great innovation in thinking, a movement towards science and away from the more common historical description approach (history is biography) to empires. 

Domestic Issue

Military spending becomes the most important domestic issue, not just foreign relation-oriented, and counter-intuitive to the widespread propaganda of military Keynesianism.  Empire theory is a virtually unheard of concept I am building up in many ways.  Finding patterns is quite different from the idea that everything in history is a unique case example.  Tolstoy is the nearest thing to a predecessor in that kind of approach.  However, I am pretty unique in taking an algebraic A leads to B leads to C mathematical approach.  It is a business approach to look at all the decision trees of all possible effects of military spending, such as internationally, regionally, a defense model, future scenarios, latitudinal models comparing several nations over a common period of time, and longitudinal modeling for one nation over a long period of time.  This approach comes from my extensive mathematical skills that have earned me many awards.  

Conflicts with Various Disciplines

My interdisciplinary approach to analysis often runs counter to various disciplines.  For example, one economic department head told me that building a model from the data is "cheating".  The correct way, according to him, is to build a model from logical precepts and then test it on the data.  That could be considered a perversion of the scientific method.  Examining data, coming up with a hypothesis, and testing that hypothesis is the correct scientific method.  However, when you have 50 equations of 3 or 4 variables each to make up an econometric model, of course it is "cheating" to fit it to the data.  The degrees of freedom assure you that any such model can be made to fit.  It turns out that is the wrong way to go.  Micro economics does not build up to macroeconomics:  they need different approaches, just as Newton's physics is different from Einstein's physics.  Occam's razor suggests simpler is better.  My model has three factors for long periods of time with another two catastrophic factors for the US Great Depression and the Oil Crisis of the seventies.  Much of the time there are just two factors, the military spending and the federal deficit.  The long term factor is third, the Kondratiev Wave cycle, which has been discounted by many academics, including the head of the admissions committee of a political science department I once applied for.  And another economics department head of MIT in Cambridge, MA, called the famous developer of Systems Theory and a leading advocate of the Wave in his business school a "charlatan".  A friend had told me about the cycle and gave me his book on it.  I did not believe it until the congressperson mentioned it while congratulating me on winning the Vice Chairman position in the Democratic Party organization in his District.  That is what I was up against developing my theory, because the Kondratiev Wave cycle is correct, not wrong or the work of a charlatan.  It worked so well that several other spin-off results came into prominence with my new model.  In my model I used the engineering/mathematical concept of a sinusoidal wave being the answer to all differential equations.  This model is a great development, not possible without the combination of my political, engineering, and business backgrounds, and a willingness to see through the messy details to a greater whole made possible by my following five different religions at different times in my life.  That religious diversity helped me understand that there is underlying truth between the lines of various orthodoxies.  For example, the golden rule is found in all religions.  Simplicity triumphs again.  The Encyclopedia Britannica came to my aid when I discovered a nine year cycle lay in the long term model's data.  I tested the predicted model against actual results each year and found large differences.  But the sum total of those differences disappeared every eight nine or ten years.  I learned about this Juglar cycle from the encyclopedia.

Global Warming Theory

The next great task I faced was to explain and reconcile the three great manifestations of the long cycle and its length.  Long cycle theorists varied greatly in their estimation of the length of the cycle.  Most consider it a fifty year cycle but Calleo considers it forty years, Ravi Battra thinks it is sixty years, and J. W. Forrester considers it to be seventy years.  I found the cycle to be exactly 54 years without a doubt in the industrial revolution period since 1750.    The three great manifestations of the cycle were in the three worlds of the natural cycle, the economic cycle, and the war or political cycle.  No one but me dared to think all three cycles were actually the subsets of the one great cycle.  Here the enemy was academic disciplinary silos.  Linking the economic and political cycles was problematic but relatively straight forward.  Linking the economic and natural cycles was quite difficult and took me three years to figure out in detail.  When I was done, global warming theory had met and merged with empire theory.  What also emerged was a super long cycle of hundreds of years that greatly varied in length.  This natural cycle was bounded in amplitude, hugely variant in period, and had five turning points in the last three thousand years.  This super cycle explained much of modern human civilization history quite well.  Global warming theory doesn't exactly fit the mold of Nobel's will, but it is a political scientific mixture like my own work, good enough to award Al Gore the Peace Prize.  Here is the link to my most googled, most popular academic article on line:

https://www.academia.edu/6002772/WEATHER_CYCLE_7_p.

Nature of my Fans and Doubters

            Jerry Rust was my earliest supporter in December 1985, offering to nominate me to the Pulitzer Committee, but I've never considered myself a great writer, just a great scientist in the sense of the STEM skills.  What sets Jerry apart is his practical side, as an early Peace Corps volunteer and later leader of the Hoedads, a tree planting cooperative.  You have to know your science to be a good tree planter and overseas volunteer helping others.  Then he added the political side, parallel in a rough way to my own development.  I started as a wargamer math wiz who went into engineering accounting and business before my political career.  We are both pragmatic idealists who got into politics.

            Another early supporter who got me into teaching a college class was a CPA in the Beyond War movement.  Another was the founder of Radio for Peace International who got me to come to Costa Rica and later offer my course on his shortwave radio.  Always the mixture of technical skills, politics, and idealism in my key supporters, including the incoming and outgoing congresspersons in Eugene in 1986, when I published my first book, Peace Economics.

            Doubters usually do not have the math and science skills I have.  When I joined MENSA in 1977, a woman who wondered why I was there later came to appreciate my skills and published a poem of mine in "From Oregon With Love, Volume II".

            This is a 90% numbers-phobic world, so my strong skew to math skills leaves many word people to doubt me.  Economics and business are so looked down upon by most in the peace community that peace economics doesn't fit into either of the two main camps, the environmentalist anti nukes and the human rights anti interventionists.  One tormentor who headed Physicians for Social Responsibility was so focused on nuclear weapons and global warming to the exclusion of everything else, he could not see the resemblance to my work and the Copernican Revolution.  Copernicus died unpublished, with his daughter finding his work in the attic leading to his fame.  Unfortunately, many are not recognized in life but only after death, and I sometimes wonder if that will be my fate.

            Another doubter recognizes my innovation but compares me to other peace writers and says I fall short.  Here again, the hidden strength of my math and science ability does not transfer well with my weaker writing skills.  To judge me by my writing is to miss the main point of my science.  New ideas are always resisted as Thomas Kuhn points out in the Nature of Scientific Revolutions.  Another doubter writes against anarchism, clearly biased against the business community I have long been associated with.

            Two of my current supporters are a mathematician and an information technology professor, again, if you don't relate well to numbers, you probably won't understand me.  And the IT professor took a very long time to appreciate the global warming cycle aspects of my theory.  This isn't easy stuff, or they would all understand me.  Another long time critic has a doctorate in history.  History is the field you go into if you are afraid of math requirements, because those degrees let you avoid math courses.  Number phobia strikes again, he even casts aspersions at me with the term numerology.  After 9/11 he said in a speech that Boeing stock went up.  Actually it went down, because Boeing is only part defense contractor, it is mainly a commercial airplane manufacturer.  Flying became dangerous to many after 9/11 and airplane sales went down as the airlines suffered.

Peace Prizes

The Nobel Peace Prize is one of seventy peace prizes listed on wikipedia.  Guidelines for the prize are here:  http://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/peace/  Social Science Professors, Congresspersons, and many others eligible to nominate can send their nomination here:  postmaster@nobel.no . 

Reasons to nominate this Peace Economist can be found here:  https://www.academia.edu/4485636/NOBEL_Prize_Pathways_2014

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