However, all of that doesn’t mean the proposal Ryan spearheaded is unimportant, nor does it mean that there are no worthwhile analyses to explain that significance. On the contrary, the proposal is quite important because it endorses an economic war waged by the upper class against everyone else. Two simple studies make this war painfully obvious.

To properly contextualize those studies, first keep in mind three facts: 1) According to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, “The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year” and control 40 percent of the nation’s total wealth, 2) the bottom 80 percent of Americans own just 7 percent of the nation’s wealth, and 3) Stiglitz notes that “while the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall.”

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It was just a day after Krugman’s debate with MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough on the Charlie Rose show had media, social and otherwise, abuzz, especially after Krugman blogged that he wasn’t quite as sharp as he’d like to have been, unprepared, he said, for “the blizzard of misleading factoids and diversionary stuff” uttered by the cocksure, blown-dry, blustery congressman-turned-TV-host.

While the right has legions of mouthpieces reading from the same economic playbook, Krugman has emerged as the go-to guy for mainstream shows when they seek a progressive voice. So I asked him to assess, as a communicator, what progressives need to do to even up the score. Here’s his reply:

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Mo says he does not believe censorship should stand in the way of truth, but that it can be used, or is sometimes even necessary, to stop rumors and defamation.

China's first writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature is in Stockholm, where he is set to receive the prestigious prize next week.

Mo dodged questions about fellow writer and compatriot Liu Xiaobo, who won the Peace Prize in 2010 but remains in prison. Mo has previously said that he hopes Liu will be free soon, but he refused to elaborate Thursday while meeting with journalists in Stockholm.

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The work of Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley has sparked a "flourishing field of research" and helped improve the performance of many markets, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

Roth, 60, is a professor at Harvard University in Boston. Shapley, 89, is a professor emeritus at University of California Los Angeles.

"This year's prize concerns a central economic problem: how to match different agents as well as possible," the academy said.

Shapley made early theoretical inroads into the subject, using game theory to analyze different matching methods in the 1950s and `60s. Together with U.S. economist David Gale, he developed a mathematical formula for how 10 men and 10 women could be coupled in a way so that no one would benefit from trading partners.

While that may have had little impact on marriages and divorces, the algorithm they developed has been used to better understand many different markets.

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These questions will doubtless be raised about Mo Yan, the latest literary Laureate, but issues specific to China will also come up, such as how he compares to previous winners with ties to that country, like Pearl Buck, who wrote stories set there, and Gao Xingjian, the Chinese writer who won the prize after leaving his country to live and write in France. 

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The reasoning behind the award selection seems both transparent and politics-driven. Thorbjorn Jagland, the former Norwegian prime minister who is chairman of the panel awarding the prize, has openly expressed concern about the European Union's future in light of the debt crisis and attendant upheavals.

"There is a great danger ... We see already now an increase of extremism and nationalistic attitudes. There is a real danger that Europe will start disintegrating. Therefore, we should focus again on the fundamental aims of the organization,” said Jagland.

And indeed, following Jagland's logic, a number of commentators have praised the Nobel choice as an important boost and encouragement for the beleagured 27-nation bloc.

Heather Grabbe, director of the Open Society Institute in Brussels, told the BBC:

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The Norwegian prize committee said the EU was being honored Friday for six decades of contributions "to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe."

"The stabilizing part played by the European Union has helped to transform a once-torn Europe from a continent of war to a continent of peace," Nobel committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland said.

The EU grew out of the tremendous devastation of World War II, fueled by the conviction that ever-closer economic ties would make sure that century-old enemies never turned on each other again. It's now made up of 500 million people in 27 nations, with other nations lined up, waiting to join.

But the European project is now facing its greatest challenge yet -- a debt crisis that has stirred deep tensions between north and south, caused unemployment to soar, and prompted hundreds of thousands of its citizens to take to the streets protesting tax hikes and job cuts. The bloc's financial disarray is threatening the euro -- the common currency used by 17 of its members -- and even the structure of the union itself.

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Unlike a substantial percentage of the back-foot club, however, I've got no problem with the Academy's choice, or its history of selecting purportedly "obscure" recipients for the prize. From the handful of articles and reviews I've read in my frantic scramble to get caught up, Mo Yan seems to write the kind of novels I enjoy (and I really did love "Red Sorghum"). "Hallucinatory realism"? "A world of magic, sexual exploitation, ignorance and senseless violence"? Individual stories told against a backdrop of political and social turmoil? Sign me up.

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The Swedish Academy, which selects the winners of the prestigious award, in Thursday praised Mo's "hallucinatory realism," saying it "merges folk tales, history and the contemporary."

European authors had won four of the past five awards, with last year's prize going to Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer.

As with the other Nobel Prizes, the prize is worth 8 million kronor, or about $1.2 million.

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A release from the Nobel Committee said that the scientists' work "revolutionized" science. In 1962, Gurdon showed that the genetic information inside a cell taken from a frog's gut contained all the information needed to clone a whole frog. He took the genetic information and placed it inside a frog egg. The resulting clone developed into a normal tadpole. This technique was later used to create the first cloned mammal, Dolly the sheep.

In 2006, Yamanaka showed how mature cells in mice could essentially be reprogrammed and turned back to earlier cell states. This discovery presented an alternative to the use of embryonic stem cells, considered by some to be ethically problematic.

It is hoped that stem cell research, still in its early stages, could provide cures for diseases including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

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Even after a terrible financial crisis exposed their folly, the High Priests of Old Time Economics still speak the cold, barren language of self-interest. Acting solely in your own interest, they preach, is the key to efficiency and human well-being.

Not Joseph Stiglitz. Wednesday night, the Nobel Prize-winner spoke to a packed chapel at New York City’s Union Theological Seminary, which, along with the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), a New York-based think tank, hosted the first conversation in a brand-new series meant to change the way we understand economic issues.  Union Theological Seminary president Dr. Serene Jones, INET Executive Director Robert Johnson, Professor Gary Dorrien of Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University, and Betty Sue Flowers, Director of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum, joined Stiglitz to talk about the topic at hand: “Economics & Theology.”

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Lynn Parramore: An argument has been made, particularly since the end of the Cold War, that capitalism is great at producing things that can improve our lives, and so we ought to therefore tolerate some unfairness. What's wrong with that narrative?

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