And the 2024 Economics Nobel Goes to…
The 2024 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (or simply THE Nobel Prize, as I call it) was awarded this morning to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson “for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.” I called last year’s prize to Claudia Goldin “a surprise to no one.” This year’s prize is even less of a surprise. Acemoglu is the second-most-cited living economist.
At the heart of Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson’s (AJR) work is a simple question: How do political institutions fundamentally shape the wealth of nations? This immediately raises a crucial follow-up question—what shapes these institutions? AJR won the prize for the back-and-forth between those questions. Really, not for the questions asked or for the answers given, but for the empirical and theoretical tools used to answer those questions.