As I do every year, I get up at about 3:00 a.m. PDT every Columbus Day (aka Indigenous People’s Day or Canadian Thanksgiving) to see who won the Nobel Prize in economics. I then estimate whether I know enough about his, her, or their work to write a piece in the morning for the Wall Street Journal to run. This year was no exception.
The editors titled my op/ed “A Nobel Prize in Economics for the ‘Inclusive’ Free Market,” Wall Street Journal, October 14, 2024.
When 30 days are up, I’m allowed by my contract to run the whole thing.
Meanwhile, here are 2 paragraphs:
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences to three economists. The recipients are Turkish-born Daron Acemoglu and British-born Simon Johnson, both of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and British-born James A. Robinson, an economist and political scientist at the University of Chicago. They received the award “for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.”
And:
As I noted in my 2013 review of “Why Nations Fail,” Adam Smith observed that natural resources were less plentiful in the future Canada and the U.S. than in Latin America. But the economic institutions that Spain’s government set up in Latin America were less geared toward the free market and property rights than those that the British set up in the northern part of North America. It’s a pity that Messrs. Acemoglu and Robinson didn’t cite Smith’s insight. Nor did they cite economist Mancur Olson’s 1982 book, “The Rise and Decline of Nations,” which anticipates the Nobelists’ hypothesis.
I wish I had been aware of co-blogger Pierre Lemieux’s devastating critique (scroll down at the link) of Acemoglu’s and Johnson’s Power and Progress before writing my WSJ piece.
P.S. I go after Acemoglu in the last paragraph for his support of the Brazilian government’s attack on free speech.
READER COMMENTS
Roger McKinney
Oct 15 2024 at 10:36am
I’ve read only Why Nations Fail and noticed their irrational criticisms of free markets at the end. After praising free markets and property rights through most of the book, I figured they had to kneel before the image of Marx at the end to keep their jobs. Like Krugman, they would never have received the prize had they not done penance for their earlier sin of promoting free markets and property.
Craig
Oct 15 2024 at 1:50pm
We really should take any Keynesian or leftist economist’s prize and bury it in a cave to stimulate some local economy somewhere, shouldn’t we?
Procrustes
Oct 16 2024 at 8:01am
“P.S. I go after Acemoglu in the last paragraph for his support of the Brazilian government’s attack on free speech.”
As you should. I quite admire Acemoglu – despite his more statist bent – but the whole anti free speech stance has seriously tarnished his reputation for me.
David Henderson
Oct 16 2024 at 5:01pm
Thanks, Procrustes.
Darrin
Oct 20 2024 at 12:13pm
The “State” really isn’t the State. The “State” consists of elitists who seek personal utility maximization to the detriment of freedom and liberty of others. In the US, we see this unfolding via the tossing of a duly elected party nominee for president and the installation of a non-duly elected candidate. This silences the voices of nearly 14.5 million voters who selected the tossed candidate, replaced by an elitist machine operating in the background. This is normally called a coup. But the US press, instead of exercising its responsibility under the 1st Amendment to investigate and report, has bought in hook, line, and sinker, and at best accepted the coup, ever worse supported the coup.
As for the general silencing of speech, witness statements that emanate from current politicians in the US, from the WHO, from the WEF seeking to muzzle free speech. Be they so-called Marxists or Fascists, elitists seek to eliminate dissent, political, medical or otherwise, through silencing their opponents. In low tech environments, this is usually marked by thugs beating heads. In the modern era of technology, this is enacted by Big Tech thugs censoring speech on social expression sites.
Supporting or validating states that silence free speech, e.g., Acemoglu on Brazil, blemishes the person and any prize they might win.