Friday, October 20, 2006

mohammed yunus and nobel prize

october 20th, 2006

i think this man is right. they could have given the economics nobel to yunus. but as usual they would have given it to some white guy who produced some dicey theory. let us remember that there were two nobel prize winners in economics in that massive failure Long Term Capital Management which had to be bailed out by the us govt.

speaking of nobel prizes this year (although they are not all that meaningful), once again a disappointment that jagdish bhagwati did not win the economics prize. but even sadder, there's nobody in india who is anywhere close to winning a nobel in any science.

and now for a bit of california chauvinism: stanford got 2 (chemistry and medicine) and berkeley got 1 (physics). take that, ye atlanticists of the northeast! :-)

SIR — Mr Yunus and Grameen should have been granted the Nobel award for economics. The work of spreading microcredit through the developing world has improved millions of lives. And this contribution to development in the real word is likely to be of far greater importance than that of any ivory-tower theorist.

Lee Shephard

Oakland, California

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