Columbia Economics - One For the Thumb

As a balance to my negative coverage of the antics up at Columbia and how such behavior is abetted by the intellectually supine Lee Bollinger, I would like to note the wonderful news that a fourth member of the Columbia University Economics faculty has won a Nobel prize in the last ten years. What is also notable and laudable is the broad idealogical spectrum (uncharacteristically broad in my opinion for an Ivy League university) that the four Columbian Nobelists represent. William Vickrey, the 1996 winner, has been dubbed a paleo-Keynesian for perhaps being "more Keynesian than Keynes himself". Robert Mundell (1999) can arguably be regarded as the father of supply-side thought, having been such a seminal influence on editorial viewpoint of Bob Bartley's WSJ Op-Ed page. In 2001 the prize went to stalwart interventionist, and Rubinomics's Economist in Chief, Joe Stiglitz. Finally in 2006, we have Edmund Phelps, who undercut the orthodoxy of the Phillips Curve (simpatico with Milton Friedman's views) and who, today in the WSJ, writes a strong defense of the vibrant sort of capitalism that we practice here in the US.

Columbia Economics can now adopt the slogan of the post 1980 Pittsburgh Steelers, "One for the Thumb." Even if the Nobel committee doesn't give out rings, it still fits.