“This year’s award—properly known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel, a later addition to the Nobel line-up—is unusual in that the underlying research couldn’t be more timely given the current state of the U.S. economy. While it’s an easy criticism of conventional economics that it makes too many unworldly assumptions about equilibrium and perfect knowledge in pursuit of a theory, that’s not the case for this year’s winners. … With U.S. unemployment unusually high and likely to remain stubbornly so over the next few years, economic policy-makers are faced with difficulty in constructing the right mix of responses.”