Have they lost the plot? What should be the mandate of the Nobel Committee?

Lot of people consider the Nobel prize the pinnacle of professional achievement in science. It is has a truly world-wide reputation and laymen take it at face value. This reputation can be lost, however. The committee has no international legitimacy, it is a strictly Swedish affair. What confers credibility is process: they collect information and opinions from around the world. There can be long debates about what the exact procedure for selection should be. Some people are in favour of pure bibliometric exercises, like citation counts. Others think that it should be the representative opinion of academics in the field. Yet others, that it should be based on impact on society. All of these are valid options and the optimal solution is probably a mixture of them. As the criteria are not fully clear, there is a lot of room for the Swedish academicians to steer the choices towards their personal preferences. But there is a limit. When they decide that their job is not to aggregate opinion, rather to propagate their own by honouring a person who is unknown in the profession and has had no measurable impact on society, they lose their legitimacy. The prize becomes one representing the Swedish Academy, no longer the entire humanity. It would be a pity. I have dreamed about getting the Nobel prize but my children probably won’t (though they are smarter than me).