MIT’s Diamond Hopes Nobel Prize Tips the Scale

Courtesy of Center for American Progress on Flickr

Recently Massachusetts Institute of Technology Faculty Member Peter A. Diamond won the Nobel Prize in Economics for 2010.  We really shouldn’t be surprised that another winner with Cambridge area affiliations has won the prize.  We wrote a while back of Cambridge’s impressive legacy of Nobel Prize winners.  We even should not be surprised that Diamond like many other MIT and Harvard educated individuals is being nominated for an important post in the US government.  I must say I was surprised(or maybe more confused) at the strange opposition that Diamond has received from Senator Shelby.

After further investigation into the matter it seems the Republicans have been blocking Diamond’s appointment to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.  The public basis for the opposition is his lack of experience which may obviously be helped by his winning of the Nobel Prize in Economics.  The underlying reason there seems to be opposition to Diamond’s appointment though is because his work implies he may favor another stimulus package.  Another theory is that the Republicans want to retaliate for the Democrats not giving Randall Kroszner a full term.

Either way it would seem to me Diamond’s winning of the Nobel Prize should tip the scale a bit in his favor.  His work on unemployment seems well timed for what is happening in the U.S. today.  Trying to understand the mismatch in the people searching for jobs and the job openings that exist is simple yet quite eye opening at the same time.  As one who worked in a previous life in recruiting you can definitely see how hard finding the right individual and the right position for an individual can sometimes be, even when there appear to be so many people that should be willing to jump on any job opening.

I found an eye opening discussion about Diamond’s work and it’s possible implications on the PBS NewsHour website.  Jeffrey Brown talks to reporter Catherine Rampell of the New York Times about his work so that some of us laypeople can understand it better: