The 2024 Nobel Prize in economic sciences made headlines earlier this month. And the winner was? If the names escape, do not be concerned. With each passing year, the Nobel in economics seems to be losing its glow, fading off into near irrelevance as it is ritually overshadowed by vigorous ideological and theoretical clashes.
For the record, the 2024 were Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and James A. Robinson at the University of Chicago. Sweden’s Nobel committee said their research demonstrated how “Societies with a poor rule of law and institutions that exploit the population do not generate growth or change for the better.
” In the 2013 book , Acemoglu and Robinson examined different economic outcomes during the European colonization era. They found that in countries where property rights and the rule of law were introduced, prosperity followed. It didn’t take long for the post-award ideological warfare to begin.
Unfortunately for the winners, most of the commentary ultimately turned negative. In The Wall Street Journal, the Hoover Institution’s David Henderson concluded that while it is “good to see a Nobel Prize awarded to economists who understand the importance of property rights and the rule of law,” unfortunately the Nobel winners’ understanding of economics was “incomplete.” In another , Henderson painted Daron Acemoglu as a government interventionist.
He has recently endorsed Brazil’s move to restric.