Juliette Sellgren, an economics major at the University of Virginia, has a podcast called “The Great Antidote.” In October, she interviewed me about the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics winners: Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson. She contacted me because, as I have done for most years since 1996, I had the Wall Street Journal opinion piece about the winners’ contributions to economic thinking. Are “A Nobel Prize in Economics for the ‘inclusive’ free market,” Wall Street JournalOctober 14, 2024. The WSJ piece is closed, but I can post it here in a few days.
Juliette is doing great. It shows what someone with knowledge of economics and curiosity can do.
Here is the episode.
And here, with some estimated timestamps, are the issues we discussed.
1:21: Some advice I would give to my younger self.
3:02: Juliette’s answer: the bimodal distribution of students who do or do not ask for help.
5:55: This year’s Nobel Prize was awarded for an important subject and not for something “technically beautiful.”
7:15: My process for researching and writing the op-ed in about 7 hours.
9:15: Why I wish the award had been given to Doug Irwin and Jagdish Bhagwati.
11:58: Summary of the work of the three economists and questioning their view that democracy is important. (Which doesn’t mean I’m not a fan of democracy.)
15:22: Acemoglu’s unwarranted belief in industrial policy.
4:20 PM: Acemoglu doesn’t understand Hayek’s information problem, nor the incentive problem in politics.
6:30 PM: Acemoglu’s and Robinson’s incredible ignorance of the robber barons.
22:09: Why it’s difficult to generalize about how the Nobel Committee thinks and decides.
25:34: Where this year’s award fits in the rankings; Arnold Harberger and Thomas Sowell should get it; and Armen Alchian, Harold Demsetz and William Baumol should have gotten it.
28:54: Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck’s role in awarding prizes to free-market economists.
31:21: Why you shouldn’t structure your career in such a way that your chances of winning a Nobel Prize are maximized.
33:25: Paul Samuelson’s opinion that Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises deserved the prize.
39:12: A sweet story about Claudia Goldin as she works on her Ph.D. thesis.
41:15: We need to write and talk about important issues. And the relevance of Thomas Sowell’s work in assessing the claim that the federal government sent many people to Springfield, Ohio.
44:29: What I’m working on to improve myself.
Notes:
My book review of Why Nations Fail is “The wealth and poverty of nations,” Regulationspring 2013.
My review, for the Liberty Fund, of a book about Assar Lindbeck’s role in the Nobel Prize, is “The Nobel Factor: What Does the Prize Reward?” EcolibApril 5, 2021.
I wrote an article for Econlib about the so-called robber barons. It’s ‘The Robber Barons: Neither Robbers nor Barons’ EcolibMarch 4, 2013.