Trio of economists win Nobel for work on inequality between countries: meet the winners
A 620-page book called “Why Do Nations Fail? The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty” resulted in the 2024 Sveriges Riksbank Prize for Economic Sciences (also known as Nobel Prize for Economicsdespite not being delivered by the Swedish academy) for two of the three winners, Daron Acemoglu e James Robinson. Simon Johnson he joins this trio of researchers whose work focuses on wealth inequality among the world’s nations, especially those where dictatorships prevail.
“In global terms, the work we have done favors democracies”, explained Acemoglu at the award ceremony, explaining that the fairest and most egalitarian economies live in a democratic regime, adding that “Authoritarian growth is often more unstable and, in the vast majority of cases, does not translate into rapid and original innovations.”. And look at the second largest economy in the world: “China is a challenge because it has recently started investing a lot of resources in some sectors like Artificial Intelligence, but my perspective is that for these authoritarian regimes, for a series of reasons, it will be more difficult to achieve long-term sustainable innovation results.”
The studies of this trio show that theThe 20% of the richest countries in the world currently have 30 times more wealth than the poorest 20%and the disparity between the two is persistent. And while poorer countries have become richer in recent years, they are failing to become more prosperous.
Jakob Svensson, member of the jury awarding the prize, explains that “this year’s winners have pioneered new approaches, both empirical and theoretical, that have significantly advanced our understanding of global inequality.”. “Reducing the huge income differences between countries is one of the biggest challenges of our time,” he said.
At the awards conference, Acemoglu stated that the rise of authoritarianism shows that democracies are “going through a difficult phase” at the moment. “If we look at data from surveys that ask people their opinion on authoritarianism, dictatorship or democracy, we see that support for democracy among the population is at its lowest level ever,” he explained.
The economics prize is not one of the original prizes created by Alfred Nobel in 1901, which included Science, Literature and Peace. The Economic Sciences award was given by the Swedish central bank in 1968. Of the 93 winners of this award so far, only three have been women. The first to win it was Elinor Ostrom, in 2009.
The profile of the award-winning trio
But, after all, who are the three economists and what do they do? Acemoglu and Johnson are professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), while Robinson teaches at the University of Chicago.
Daron Acemoglu, 57 years old, was born in Istanbul, Turkey, and went to study in London, where he completed his master’s and doctorate at the London School of Economics (LSE), where he began his career. The Turkish-American economist later joined MIT, another of the world’s most highly regarded economics and finance universities. In the United States of America, in 2005, he won the John Bates Clark Medal, given by the American Economic Association to the most promising American economists under the age of 40. It was there that he met Robinson, the co-author of best-seller published in Portuguese by Temas e Debates with the title ‘Why do nations fail?’.
James Robinson, 64, graduated from the LSE and Warwick before completing his PhD at Yale. He has been at the University of Chicago since 2015. Simon Johnson, 61, was born in Sheffield, England, but spent his entire professional life in the United States of America. On his CV, he has a stint at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), where he was chief economist between 2007 and 2008. He received his doctorate at MIT, after earning a master’s degree at the University of Manchester and a bachelor’s degree at Oxford.
