Andrew Leonard

It’s been a bad year for the University of Chicago Economics Department. And I’m not just talking about Alan Greenspan’s remark to Congress that he “made a mistake” about the ability of markets to self-regulate themselves. I’m talking hard, cold, quantifiable facts: Neither themost recent Nobel prize for economics nor the John Bates Clark award given to the best economist under the age of forty went to a card-carrying member of the “Chicago School.”

For any other economics department, missing out on the big prizes wouldn’t be such a big deal. You can’t win ‘em all, you know; any economist knows that down to the marrow of his or her rationally-expecting bones. And the John Bates Clark award, up until this year, was only given out every other year, which makes one’s chances of grabbing one even tougher. Still, for the University of Chicago, these awards have practically become a birthright. No other econ department has racked up nearly so many.