Semiotics, Status, Krugman receiving the Nobel Prize, and Mankiw's reaction

I should preface this by saying I'm a complete nonexpert on this topic.

However, this is what the 2008 Nobel Prize for Economics award seems like to me.

1. Conservative academic economists value the nobel prize as a status and achievement symbol. They also value speculating on and predicting who will win it each year.

2. Swedes value feeling higher status than Americans, and two ways they get to experience this is by awarding nobel prizes, and by being regarded as having HDI due to the valuing of economic/social rights not recognized by Americans.

3. There is a cohort of economists where there is general consensus that they are nobel prize worthy in achievements. Some are liberal, some are conservative, some are neither or nonideological.

4. Krugman is a member of this cohort. It is more notable that of this cohort he has been the loudest critic of American conservatives than that he has had the most prodigious achievements within economics.

5. The Swedes in charge of deciding this year's nobel prize winner for economics chose Krugman to send a message to conservatives: in particular conservative economists. The message was something like: we're picking Krugman as a status performance. We're saying we're higher status than you because we disapprove of your politics, we approve of Krugman's criticism of it, and because we get to pick the nobel prize winner of economics and can use it to make points like that.

6. Conservative economists have more or less accepted this status performance because they want the nobel prize in economics to retain and increase its stature and prestige -and they fear a diminishment if they battled over its award this year to Krugman.

That's my layman's suspicion of the nontransparent semiotics and status performances regarding the nobel prize award to Krugman.

Comments

[Carl Shulman]

If you care you could check the political views of the handful of committee members individually:

http://nobelprize.org/prize_awarders/economics/committee.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Economic_Sciences#Economics_Prize_Committee_members

[Hopefully Anonymous]

Carl, you're using this blog perfectly (as a data dump, a point of reference, where we can place things that we can use and expand upon later). Like a wiki. TGGP also does this. Note to my regular emailers, I'd rather you use this blog/me in that way.

[Douglas Knight]

It's kind of a compromise. They could have given him the prize in, say, 2004. Every year, some people have predicted that he would get the prize for purely political reasons. This way he gets rewarded for being politically active, but the timing doesn't make it look like the Swedes are trying to make him more powerful for any particular goal. (note that, per Carl's link, the committee doesn't change much from year to year. it's not like this was a particularly liberal or politically active committee)

[TGGP]

Long before the Nobel righty economists were paying compliments to Krugman. Bryan Caplan used him and Alan Blinder as examples in his book of how even lefty economists agree with him. I myself like to link to Ricardo's Difficult Idea whenever I have the opportunity. Even at CafeHayek when they criticize Krugman's columns they often use older Krugman ("back when he was an economist" as some say) to refute it. I think they are interested in the stature of economics as a field (even if the modal economist is a moderate democrat, the right is better represented in it than pretty much any other high status academic field) rather than the Nobel per se.

The John Bates Clark award is considered more prestigious than the Nobel among economists. The list of winners, with dates for when they won the Nobel (for the 12 that later did) is at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bates_Clark_Medal

[Josh]

Gotta love right wing conspiracy theorists