Critiquing the Nobel Prize

The Washington Post is unimpressed with Jean-Marie Le Clezio's Nobel acceptance speech, which focused on literature and poverty and the disjunction between the two.  Calling it "pablum," Washington Post Book World editor Marie Arana writes that Le Clezio's speech was "not worthy of one of the most important pulpits in the modern world." Arana continues:

At a time when we need to understand what literature can offer the technologically advantaged as well as the disadvantaged, all he gave us was something we already know.

At the MIT Press blog, they're thinking about how the Nobel laureates in economics stack up. Trevor Pinch, coauthor of the Press' "Living in a Material World: Economic Sociology and Technology Studies," writes about how the winners of the Nobel in economics compare to their eras -- particularly what they say during, and about, economic hard times. And he goes on to make a plug for his field, sociology. But first:

At the time of the Great Depression leading economists from Harvard and Yale ran rival economic forecasting services but neither predicted the severity or length of the Great Depression. Worse, economists armed with today’s supposedly much more sophisticated forecasting tools would, according to [Harvard professor N. Gregory] Mankiw, have scarcely done better.

The machinery of economics -– the ways markets and financial instruments are set up and perform -- actually have the economic thinking of the day embedded within them. This makes it even more crucial to examine why and under what circumstances economics works, why it fails, and what is missing from economics....

Pinch half-jokingly suggests "clawback," a regular reevaluation of Nobel Prize winners; if their work "doesn't stand the test of time," they'd have to give the prize back, medals, money and all. What chaos that might bring for any prize, literature included.

-- Carolyn Kellogg