Generally intellectual
Noam Chomsky. Francis Fukuyama. Anthony Giddens. Christopher Hitchens. Slavoj Zizek. All names that didn’t even make the top 10 in Prospect’s contest to crown 2008′s public intellectual of the year. So who did? Moving on from previous attempts to list the world’s 100 greatest living public intellectuals, this year we decided to name those who had the most impact in 2008 alone. We took soundings—from friends, here on First Drafts and on our Facebook group—to bring up a shortlist. From there it was down to our panel of judges. A three-way contest emerged, between economist Nouriel Roubini, social scientists Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, and General David Petraeus. Our judges voted according to type: the wonks liked the Nudge duo, the more economically minded wanted a thinker linked to the credit crunch, while foreign policy watchers thought the soldier-philosopher deserving of the nod. On our website we provide
Jackhammer
Prospect declares Chomsky to be one of the “disappointments” in 2008. While dismissing Chomsky is a common practice in punditry, you might have given the guy a slight break, as his wife had a horrible ordeal with cancer and finally died this week. He has been less available for global travel in recent times, and ordinarily overseas media institutions give him far more access than in the closed corporate media landscape of the USA. Chomsky has produced a radical critique of the Obama phenomenon and clearly that is out of step with many mediacrats who have been uncritical amidst joy for the coming post-Bush epoch.
Kevin
I’m sorry but Roubini doesn’t even deserve to make the runners-up list. His long-term record is mediocre at best -see this article:
http://www.erictyson.com/articles/20081024_1. You should ALWAYS be suspicious of prognisticators who crow loudly after the fact about supposedly being right.
Robert Wong
How many more civilians to be killed will be considered wrong?
I vote professor for top #1.
Benedict Lush
I am a very small person among giants here, but I wonder who is responsible for Peru having the highest GNP of any other nation for 2008?
I would like to hear from that person.
Charles
The plagiarism in the counterinsurgency field manual did not concern the panel?
David Price has made a convincing argument (in Counterpunch) that the field manual is much less impressive a piece of scholarship than it has been portrayed. Members of the military argue that military documents should not be expected to have the clean citations of an academic paper. Price freely conceded this, but points out that the unattributed quotations in Chapter 3 were a symptom of the “weak intellectual foundation” of the writers. Some of their quotations perhaps mean things different than they intended, because they were cut-and-pasting rather than digesting the meanings of their sources.
If the field manual were an ordinary document, the failure to attribute would not be a big deal, but it was published as a peer-reviewed piece by the U. Chicago press and otherwise heralded as evidence of the genius and original thinking of General Petraeus. Some of the debate between Price and Petraeus flack Nagl gets lost in the kerfuffle, because Price has, separately, ethical concerns about the involvement of anthropologists in making war. This is a concern of which the military will have none. But Price ties the “weak ethical foundation” of the anthropologist-writers in their plagiarism to their ethically-weak willingness to help the US military make war on the people they are studying. Whether one agrees with him on that or not, there seems to be no question that the scholarship of the field manual is compromised.
Other chapters of the field manual have not been subjected to the same scrutiny as Chapter 3. Perhaps someone ought to do so before handing out prizes.
Charles
Regarding Nouriel Roubini… Kevin, I read Tyson’s piece and was not persuaded. I read Roubini’s blog daily for over two years, and had occasion to look back into his archives. There’s no doubt that he made a miscall on a recession early on. But I found his predictions incredibly accurate and useful. For example, almost no one thought we were in recession in 1Q 2008, and indeed we were showered with contrary data. Roubini believed were were, and stuck to his guns despite being hit with tons of incredibly rude flak on his weblog.
Tyson’s reading is tendentious. For example, he quotes Roubini saying that Katrina might cause the economy to tip into recession– and then counts that as a recession call. That’s ridiculous! “Might” means “might.” Tyson’s claim that Roubini called for a recession in 2006 actually involves a quote regarding the dollar– there’s nothing in the quote about recession! Tyson also implicitly accuses Roubini of resume inflation. I don’t see it.
I listened to many, many voices in trying to understand what was about to unfold in the economy. The voice I found most helpful was Roubini’s. This call by the Prospect seems sound to me.
Johnson
Oh come on Charles – you sound like a shill for Roubini
Read the source material and Tyson’s is 110% accurate. And, he said hedge funds would force the closure of markets for weeks – WRONG again!