Like every year, every Columbus Day (also known as Indigenous People’s Day or Canadian Thanksgiving) I get up at about 3 a.m. PDT to see who won the Nobel Prize in Economics. I then assess whether I know enough about his, her or their work to write a piece for the morning Wall Street Journal run. This year was no exception.
The editors called my opinion piece “A Nobel Prize in Economics for the ‘inclusive’ free market,” Wall Street JournalOctober 14, 2024.
Once the thirty days are up, my contract allows me to run the entire business.
In the meantime, 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 prize ‘for research into how institutions are formed and influence prosperity.’
And:
As I noted in my 2013 review from ‘Why Nations Fail’, Adam Smith noted that the future Canada and the US would have fewer natural resources than Latin America. But the economic institutions that the Spanish government had established in Latin America were less focused on free markets and property rights than those that the British had established in the northern part of North America. It is a pity that Mr Acemoglu and Mr Robinson did not mention Smith’s insight. They also did not cite economist Mancur Olson’s 1982 book, “The Rise and Decline of Nations,” which anticipated the Nobelists’ hypothesis.
I wish I had known about fellow blogger Pierre Lemieux’s scathing criticism (scroll down the link) from Acemoglu’s and Johnson’s Power and progress before I write my WJ part.
PS I’m going to go after Acemoglu in the last paragraph for his support of the Brazilian government’s attack on freedom of expression.