Peter Diamond is one of the winners of the Nobel Prize for Economics this year. He was also one of Obama's appointees to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors that's being held up by Republican obstructions in the Senate. The Federal Reserve, you may recall, has a legal mandate to promote full employment. Diamond is one of the world's foremost scholars in researching why unemployment remains a persistent problem, lagging as it does well into so-called recoveries, so you might think that he'd be a useful person to have working on the problem -- actually, under current circumstances, what may be the biggest, most immediate problem we face right now. But a lot of people in business don't see any real problem with persistent longterm unemployment, and not just because bankers dread inflation. Unemployed workers drag the whole labor market down, which tilts the balance of power to capitalists, and capitalists have found, at least since the 1970s, that there is more profit to be made at the expense of labor than through growth that they would have had to share with labor. (You may also recall how helpful economists were back in the 1970s with their NAIRU theories: Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment, the idea that the only way to limit inflation -- which is to say, to protect the value of money -- is to throw people out of work.) I don't know that Diamond would go as far as I'm suggesting -- Paul Krugman, for instance, still seems to think that NAIRU is solid economics and not just class war -- but he clearly makes Republicans like Sen. Richard Shelby nervous.

Some relevant links:

• Jonathan Cohn: Peter Diamond, Still Blocked from Fed, Wins Nobel: Among other things, notes that Diamond was "a staunch defender of social insurance," and with Peter Orszag wrote up a proposal to "maintain the program's solvency without privatization."

• Tyler Cowen: Peter A. Diamond: Good reference compilation on Diamond's work.

• Tim Fernholz: The Nobel Prize Has a Well-Known Liberal Bias: I can think of plenty of exceptions to that title, starting with Milton Friedman, but nonetheless:

  Maybe Republicans are simply prone to the same kind of weird mental block that makes famous economists and anyone on the Fed forget that the institution has a purpose other than maintaining price stability (full employment, ahem), but if you needed any more indication at how broken the Senate is, I'm not sure you can find a better one than this: The United States, purportedly the world's most advanced economy, cannot put a Nobel-prize winning economist on the board of its central bank because of obstruction from a minority of one House of Congress.

• Ezra Klein: Peter Diamond wins the Nobel Prize, continues being blocked by the Senate: something suspicious about behavioral economics.

• Paul Krugman: What We Learn From Search Models: wonkish notes on search theory.

• Paul Krugman: Peter Diamond, Macro Maven: pre-Nobel prize:

  This is disgusting: Senate Republicans holding up Peter Diamond's nomination to the Federal Reserve Board on the grounds that he may not be qualified to make monetary policy. Aside from the fact that the same Senators cheerfully confirmed Bush nominees who didn't know much about economics of any kind, this is especially stupid right now. [ . . . ]

  Diamond is exactly the man we need -- which, given the way things have been going lately, probably means he won't get confirmed.

• Andrew Leonard: A Nobel prize-sized challenge to Senate Republicans

• Steven D Levitt: Congratuations to Peter Diamond on Winning the Nobel Prize in Economics: More of a memoir:

  The single most memorable moments with Peter Diamond always occurred in seminars. Diamond often would fall asleep in seminars, often for large chunks of time. What was amazing, however, is that he would open his eyes and then make by far the most insightful comment of the entire seminar! He also did something in seminars that almost no other economist does: he both posed tough questions that would undermine the entire thesis of the speaker, and he would provide the speaker the answer to the very question. Academic economists are far more adept at poking holes in other people's arguments than in constructing solutions, at least on the fly. But somehow Diamond was able to work out in his head complex models that would take others days or weeks and reams of paper to solve.

• Ian Millhiser: Fed Nominee Whom Sen. Shelby Deemed Too Unqualified to Confirm Wins Nobel Prize: more on Shelby than on Diamond.

• Chris Weigant: Nobel Prize Obstructionism:

  Over the past two years, Democrats have not made Republican obstructionism the political issue it should rightly be by now. They should have been screaming loudly about the abuse of the cloture (or "filibuster") by the current Senate -- abuse which is simply unprecedented in our history. Few know this, because Democrats have essentially given Republicans a free pass on the issue. The media has even begun to regularly say things like "you need 60 votes in the Senate to pass a law" which is not only false, but also reinforces the notion that what Republicans have been doing for the past two years is somehow normal, instead of unprecedented in all of American history.

• Matthew Yglesias: Peter Diamond Wins the Nobel Prize: Doesn't have much to say, but commenter FGS has it right:

  Richard Shelby neither knows nor cares a whiff about the actual qualifications of Diamond or any other appointee. He's stalling for the sake of stalling because he wants the country to be ungovernable.