Juliette Sellgren, a senior and economics major at the University of Virginia, has a podcast titled “The Great Antidote.” In October, she interviewed me about the winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize in economics: Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson. She contacted me because I wrote, as I have done in most years since 1996, the Wall Street Journal op/ed on the winners’ contributions to economic thinking. It’s “A Nobel Prize in Economics for the ‘Inclusive’ Free Market,” Wall Street Journal, October 14, 2024. The WSJ piece is gated but I’ll be able to post it here in a couple of days.
Juliette does a great job. It shows what someone with knowledge of economics and curiosity can do.
Here’s the episode and its home at our sister site, AdamSmithWorks.
And here, with some approximate time stamps, are the issues we discussed.
1:21: A piece of advice that I would give my younger self.
3:02: Juliette’s response–the bimodal distribution of students asking, or not asking, for help.
5:55: This year’s Nobel Prize was given for an important topic rather than for something that’s “technically sweet.”
7:15: My process for researching and writing the op/ed in about 7 hours.
9:15: Why I wish the prize had been awarded to Doug Irwin and Jagdish Bhagwati.
11:58: Summarizing the work of the three economists and challenging their view that democracy is important. (Which doesn’t mean that I’m not a fan of democracy.)
15:22: Acemoglu’s unjustified belief in industrial policy.
16:20: Acemoglu doesn’t get Hayek’s information problem and doesn’t get the incentive problem in politics.
18:30: Acemoglu’s and Robinson’s incredible ignorance about the robber barons.
22:09: Why it’s hard to generalize about how the Nobel committee thinks and decides.
25:34: Where this year’s prize fits in the ranking; Arnold Harberger and Thomas Sowell should get it; and Armen Alchian, Harold Demsetz, and William Baumol should have gotten it.
28:54: The role of Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck in awarding prizes to free-market oriented economists.
31:21: Why you shouldn’t arrange your career to maximize your probability of winning a Nobel Prize.
33:25: Paul Samuelson’s view that Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises deserved the prize.
39:12: A sweet story about Claudia Goldin as she worked on her Ph.D. dissertation.
41:15: We should write and talk about important issues. And the relevance of Thomas Sowell’s work for judging the claim that the federal government sent a lot of 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,” Regulation, Spring 2013.
My review, for Liberty Fund, of a book on Assar Lindbeck’s role in the Nobel Prize, is “The Nobel Factor: What Does the Prize Reward?” Econlib, April 5, 2021.
I did an article for Econlib on the so-called robber barons. It’s “The Robber Barons: Neither Robbers nor Barons,” Econlib, March 4, 2013.
