Words are important for communicating ideas. In announcing the award of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics to Daron Acemogly, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences declared:
This year’s laureates in economics… have demonstrated the importance of social institutions for a country’s prosperity.
The Nobel Foundation may have been tainted by the look and feel of some of its new laureates. I reviewed Acemoglu’s two latest books: The narrow corridor with James Robinson, and Power and progress with Simon Johnson. Acemoglu’s naive and pre-public choice conception of the state has become clearer: if this was not evident in his earlier work, it is certainly the case in these two books and especially in the last. The words and expressions used sometimes reveal Acemglu’s progressive agenda. In my review of Power and progressI wrote:
In another book by Acemoglu with James Robinson, The narrow corridorthe state becomes increasingly powerful, but is magically kept in check by an increasingly powerful ‘civil society’. … In a few places in both books the magical ‘social’ mutates into ‘social’, which only has the appearance of something more scientific.
As I explained in a previous post (“The word ‘societal’, EconLog, September 7, 2021), the strange word ‘societal’ as a replacement for ‘social’ was, as far as we know, invented by a minor Hugo (probably the pseudonym of Luke James Hansard), a 19th-century utopian British communist and follower of Charles Fourier. It is now used by fashionable intellectuals who perhaps hope to demonstrate that they know more about social matters than the plebs – and also more than the long tradition of economic analysis.
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A popular intellectual speaks about ‘social’ matters