Louis Goodman over the the Foreign Policy blog takes a look at this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize, and discovers that the prizes for less science-centric, more socio-culture specific areas are going to people from the developing world.

At first glance, this year’s crop of Nobel prizes came out quite nicely for the United States. Americans, after all, swept the prizes in medicine, physics, chemistry and economics. But a closer look suggests room for improvement. Americans dominate in the “easy” sciences????????fields where it is comparatively less difficult to establish consensus????????but lag in the arguably more complex realms of advancing culture and establishing peace.
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In fields where it is more difficult to establish consensus, by contrast, the two winners were from non-western developing countries. Orhan Pamuk of Turkey won the Nobel for Literature, for “discover(ing) new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.” And the Nobel Peace Prize went to Muhammed Yunus, the Bangladeshi architect of micro-credit programs for his “efforts to create economic and social development from below.”

Decoding the forces driving cultural differences or alleviating poverty, it turns out, is far more difficult than, say, advancing our understanding of the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription. The last Americans to be recognized by the Nobel Foundation in these “hard” subjects were Peace laureate Jimmy Carter in 2002 and Literature winner Toni Morrison in 1993.

And Jimmy Carter isn’t much of something to be proud of, either. The advances that Americans make in the fields of all sciences is a testament to the power and capabilities of the country. The Western world has given us a system of governance which has allowed for the freedom and development to come this far, producing some of the best minds in the entire world.

However, it must be assumed that, perhaps some day, a better system than even democracy as-we-know-it may come about. This system will inevitably come from the developing world, where its best minds are dealing with complex solutions to the ever-changing realities of our world. They are modernizing in a different time and place than we did.

Our reality for so long, just until this decade, has been reliance on huge international institutions to inject aid into developing countries in order to help them out. In the end, the money is in many cases stolen by dictators, used to fuel war, and lost without a trace of accountability. Policymakers are just beginning to realize the mistakes they made in the past. Maybe the World Bank wasn’t such a good idea after all?

Muhammed Yunus was award the Nobel Peace Prize because he is part of a growing strain of thought regarding economic and social development. People must build themselves up — they just need a little help — and government cannot be relied on to give it to them. Micro-credit to buy some land, or a tractor, or start a small business, is the new way of doing things, and so far it has shown more effectiveness than any scheme that the World Bank or the IMF have come up with. $100 here, $200 there, and more than 97% of the loans are paid back on time.

Of course, with anything, there are problems. Yet micro-credit has shown that it both a working business model as well as a way of helping people out without giving them handouts. It’s part of a revolutionary wave of new ideas which will transform the developing world over the following decades. We better start noticing or — who knows? — these countries could soon be taking the prize for sciences as well!