NOBEL prizes may be the ultimate attention-grabbers. When Theodore Roosevelt became the first American to win one, in 1906, he already had a bully pulpit — the White House — and he thumped it gleefully.

But Thomas J. Sargent of New York University and Christopher A. Sims of Princeton, who were awarded the Nobel in economics on Monday, aren’t accustomed to the media spotlight. And they didn’t entirely relish it last week.

Asked by a Nobel representative how he would deal with being certified as an economic sage in a time of global economic distress, Professor Sargent was puzzled: “Well, I, sorry, I don’t know what’s involved in that. You know, we’re just bookish types that look at numbers and try to figure out what’s going on,” he said. “So I don’t know what to say to that!”

Speechifying didn’t appeal to Professor Sims, either. At a news conference at Princeton, he was asked to comment on the fiscal and financial rescue operations in the United States.