Juliet Sellgren, a senior economics major at the University of Virginia, has a podcast titled “The Great Antidote.” In October, she interviewed me about the 2024 Nobel Prize winners in economics: Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson. She contacted me because, as I have done most years since 1996, I had written an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal about the Laureate’s contributions to economic thought. It’s “‘Inclusive’ Free Market Wins Nobel Prize in Economics,” Wall Street Journal, October 14, 2024. The WSJ article is gated, but will be posted here in the next few days.
Juliet does a great job. It shows what someone with knowledge of economics and curiosity can do.
This episode and its home can be found on our sister site AdamSmithWorks.
Here are the issues we discussed, along with approximate timestamps.
1:21: Advice I would give to my younger self.
3:02: Juliet’s response – Bimodal distribution of students who seek help and those who do not.
5:55: This year’s Nobel Prizes were awarded for important themes, not for “technically brilliant” things.
7:15: The process of researching and writing an editorial in about 7 hours.
9:15: Why I wish the award had gone to Doug Irwin and Jagdish Bhagwati.
11:58: We summarize the work of three economists and their challenging view that democracy matters. (That doesn’t mean I don’t support democracy.)
15:22: Acemoglu’s unwarranted beliefs about industrial policy.
16:20: Acemoglu doesn’t understand Hayek’s information problem or the problem of incentives in politics.
18:30: Acemoglu and Robinson were incredibly ignorant about the robber barons.
22:09: Why it’s hard to generalize about how the Nobel committee thinks and makes decisions.
25:34: Where do this year’s prizes rank in the rankings? Arnold Herberger and Thomas Sowell would understand that. And Armen Alchian, Harold Demsetz, and William Baumol should have understood that too.
28:54: Swedish economist Asser Lindbeck’s role in awarding free market-oriented economists.
31:21: Why you shouldn’t arrange your career to maximize your chances of winning a Nobel Prize.
33:25: Paul Samuelson thinks Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises deserves the award.
39:12: A sweet story about Claudia Goldin, who was working on her Ph.D. paper.
41:15: You need to write and discuss important issues. and the relevance of Thomas Sowell’s research for determining the claim that the federal government sent large numbers of people to Springfield, Ohio.
44:29: What I am working on to improve myself.
Note:
My book review on “Why Nations Fail” is “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations,” Regulation, Spring 2013.
My review for the Liberty Fund of the book about Asar Lindbeck’s role in the Nobel Prize is “The Nobel Factor: What Does the Prize Get in Return?” Econlib, April 5, 2021.
I wrote an article for Econlib about the so-called robber barons. It’s “Robber Baron: Neither Robber nor Baron,” Econlib, March 4, 2013.
