"Is the Nobel Prize in Economics More Similar to the One for Physics or the One for Literature?"

"While nearly all of the Nobel Prize categories were established in the will of the Swedish scientist Alfred Nobel, the award for economics, which this year will be announced on Monday, October 10, was not created until decades after his death. In the late 1960s, Sweden's central bank was actively pushing for the country to pursue a more market-friendly approach, and the prize, which was established in 1968 to commemorate the bank’s 300th anniversary, became a tool with which to support this campaign."

Jeremy Venook at The Atlantic talks with Avner Offer and Gabriel Söderberg about Offer and Gabriel Söderberg's new book, The Nobel Factor: The Prize in Economics, Social Democracy, and the Market Turn.

"The Scope of Economics as a Field Has Been Reduced to a Study of the Market"

"One reason is the deep influence of the so-called Chicago school. The economics department at the University of Chicago has long been a leader in the field; it has garnered the most Nobel Prizes of any university economics department and a significant number of John Bates Clark medals in economics. But inequality has never been a priority for the Chicago school, to say the least. It has a strong libertarian bent, focusing on how to promote competition and economic growth and the benefits of a free market. 'In general, the [American] economics profession has avoided the subject of class conflict. All issues of distribution have been regarded as less pertinent than ideas of growth,' Arthur Goldhammer, a senior affiliate at Harvard's Center for European Studies who studies French and American politics and history, told me. 'Distributive questions in economics just raise hostility, and ultimately, growth is the important issue.'"

Alana Semuels at The Atlantic asks, "so why aren't American economists more preoccupied with wealth inequality?"

"A Satirist of Economics Almost as Much as a Practitioner"

"But while some of the particulars of his vision may seem out of place today, his argument that there is something absurd about a society that can afford tremendous mansions, private jets and elite colleges while cities close firehouses, shut down bus lines and debate whether their crumbling public schools can even stay open five days a week seems as relevant as ever. So does his willingness to poke fun at those who recite platitudes about the market."

Kim Phillips-Fein in The Nation reviews four republished books by John Kenneth Galbraith.

Anti-Elitism in American Life

"'Elitism' is thus a crime not of society's actual elite, but of its intellectuals. Mr. Obama has 'a dash of Harvard disease,' proclaims the Weekly Standard. Mr. Obama reminds columnist George Will of Adlai Stevenson, rolled together with the sinister historian Richard Hofstadter and the diabolical economist J.K. Galbraith, contemptuous eggheads all. Mr. Obama strikes Bill Kristol as some kind of 'supercilious' Marxist. Mr. Obama reminds Maureen Dowd of an . . . anthropologist."

New Wall Street Journal columnist Thomas Frank assesses the reaction to Barack Obama's borrowing of the thesis to What's the Matter with Kansas?

John Kenneth Galbraith, 1908-2006

The Associated Press reports the death of America's most prominent liberal economist.

John Nichols provides an appreciation in The Nation.

In Foreign Affairs, J. Bradford DeLong argues in a review of a biography by Richard Baker that Galbraith has little contemporary influence.

But in The Nation, Eric Alterman links Galbraith with Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg and the Rev. William Sloane Coffin.

And John F. Harris in The Washington Post explores the friendship of Harvard faculty and Kennedy administration members Galbraith and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

Galbraith versus Friedman: or, Fact versus Faith, part two?

Writing in The Boston Globe, Harvard fellow Richard Parker contrasts two icons of twentieth-century economics.