The Nobel in Economics this year went to the dapper Frenchman pictured here, Jean Tirole , a member of the Toulouse School of Economics, and with the Institut d'Economie Industrielle (IDEI). In fact, he chairs the board of directors of IDEI. Nonetheless, if you are an Anglophone, even if you are reasonably well informed about contemporary academic economics, the odds are good you've never heard of him. Which is just as well. The selection of a more widely-known figure, Krugman, Kahneman, Mundell, to take recent examples, doesn't really teach us anything. The selection of Tirole naturally leads some of us to wonder why, and so to teach ourselves something. In that teaching-moment respect, the choice is akin to that of Elinor Ostrom a few years back. Tyler Cowen got the goods, collecting a lot of material about Tirole quickly and effectively on his blog on the morning of the announcement. About a third of third of the way down Cowen's blog piece, this caught m...