3 economists win Nobel Prize for studies on institutions and prosperity
US-based academics Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson won the 2024 Nobel Economics Prize “for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity”, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said on Monday.
The prestigious award, formally known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, is the last one to be awarded this year and is worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million).
“Reducing the enormous gap in income between countries is one of the greatest challenges of our time. The laureates have demonstrated the importance of social institutions to achieve this,” said Jakob Svensson, chairman of the committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences.
“Societies with poor rule of law and institutions that exploit the population do not lead to development or change for the better,” the prize organisers said on their website. Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, while James Robinson is at the University of Chicago.
Acemoglu and Johnson recently collaborated on a book surveying technology through the ages, showing how some technological advancements were better than others at creating jobs and spreading wealth.
The economics prize is not one of the original prizes for science, literature and peace created in the will of dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel and first awarded in 1901, but an additional award established and funded by Sweden’s central bank later in 1968.
Past winners include a number of influential thinkers such as Milton Friedman, John Nash — played by actor Russell Crowe in the 2001 film “A Beautiful Mind” — and, more recently, former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.
Last year, Harvard economic historian Claudia Goldin won the prize for her work uncovering the causes of wage and labor market inequality between men and women.
While the economics prize has been dominated by American academics since its inception, US-based researchers also make up a large proportion of winners in scientific fields, for which the 2024 laureates were announced last week. This series of awards began on Monday with US scientists Victor Ambrose and Gary Ruvkun winning the prize for medicine and ended on Friday with Japan’s Nihon Hidankyo winning the prize for peace, an organisation of survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who campaigned for the abolition of nuclear weapons.
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