Is this poll by Prospect - a magazine I usually enjoy - what is technically known as a piss-take?

It's billed as a list of the world's top 100 public intellectuals.

Pathetic. Has no one there ever heard of Milton Friedman?

Whatever one's view of him - in my view he is incomparably the greatest living human being, given his contribution to increasing freedom and prosperity - he is on any definition one of "the world's top 100 public intellectuals".

But, of course the unspeakably vile Eric Hobsbawm, supporter of mass murder, is there.

UPDATE: I've been contacted by someone from Prospect who tells me this:

[W]e have in fact heard of Milton Friedman, as you would have realised had you taken the time to read the blurb accompanying the list in the magazine: "Candidates needed to be alive, and still active in public life... this ruled out the likes of Solzhenitsyn and Milton Friedman, who would have been automatic inclusions 20 or so years ago." And an individual's inclusion on the list should not, as I think is clear but as I worry you may believe, be taken as a Prospect endorsement of their views - forget Hobsbawm - what about al-Qaradawi, Naomi Klein or Negri?

I think it's a fair point about the likes of al-Quaradawi and Hobsbawm, however distateful I might find it. But to argue that Milton Friedman is effectively dead is simply perverse. He might not be the man he was 30 years ago, but he writes with all the elan - and influence - of old. So leaving him out, even on their own criteria, is bizarre.

As for my not taking the trouble to read the criteria; perhaps Prospect should take the trouble to provide a link to their (flawed) criteria somewhere on the page they are sending out with the list. There is no indication anywhere on it as to how or why they came up with the names.