Henderson on the Latest Nobel Prize in Economics

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.

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