Endearingly egocentric comment of the week

Jagdish Bhagwati, an economics professor at Columbia, on the awarding of the Nobel in economic science to Paul Krugman, of Princeton:

Lots of people are saying to me, "Why didn't you get it?" Given the fact that I didn't get it, this is the next best thing.

Some people took as egotistical Krugman's own comment to the Times, where he's a columnist, that he sort of expected to win the Nobel someday -- but that just sounds like a reasonable thought coupled with unusual candor. As Harvard's Edward Glaeser wrote, after the news of Krugman's selection broke: "I, for one, had bet on him in Harvard's Nobel Prize winner pool." No word on how many votes Bhagwati got.