Good Nobel year for the U.S.

If Nobel prizes are any indication of a country's relative academic strength, the U.S. doesn't have much to worry about. With Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson winning the economics Nobel today (or the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel if you're not into the whole brevity thing) Americans have won or partially won all the prizes this year with the exception of literature.

The literature prize has earned something of a reputation for anti-Americanism recently with only one U.S. author (Toni Morrison) winning in the last 20 years despite a number of perennial contenders like Phillip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates.