They received the Nobel Prize in Economics this year
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Monday that Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson have been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics. The prize was awarded “for the study of the formation of institutions and their impact on welfare”. The official name of the award is the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economics in Memory of Alfred Nobel” and it is worth 11 million Swedish kroner, about HUF 387 million.
“The awardees proved the importance of social institutions for the well-being of a country. Societies with poor rule of law and institutions that exploit the population do not generate growth or change for the better. As research, it helps to understand why”…
Reducing the huge income differences between countries is one of the biggest challenges of our time. The awardees proved the important role that social institutions play in achieving this
– he wrote Jakob Svensson, chairman of the Economics Prize Committee, in the official announcement.
An award founded in ’68
The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics was established by the Swedish central bank, the National Bank of Sweden (Sveriges Riksbank), in 1968, on the occasion of its 300th anniversary. Its purpose is to complement the awards founded by Alfred Nobel to recognize achievements in the field of economics.The names of the honorees are engraved on the side of the 66 millimeter diameter 18-karat gold coin. This once caused a scandal: in 1975, the coins of the Soviet Leonid Kantorovics and the American Tjalling Koopmans were accidentally exchanged during the presentation of the award. This only came to light when the two scientists had already traveled home, and it took a long time before they could correct the mistake.The handwritten diploma in Swedish is a uniquely designed work of art, bound in brown leather, which includes the honoree’s name and motivation. This year, the prize comes with a reward of eleven million Swedish kronor (about HUF 387 million).
Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson received this year’s Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics from the Swedish Academy of Sciences
Image: Reuters/Tom Little
The prize was awarded for the 56th time, out of the 96 recipients, 26 received the award alone, 20 times in pairs, and ten times shared with three.
According to the compilation of MTI, the youngest recipient of the award so far is the French-American Esther Duflo, who received the award in 2019 at the age of 46, and the oldest is the American Leonid Hurwicz, who received the award in 2007 at the age of 90. The oldest living Nobel Memorial Prize laureate in economics is the 97-year-old American Vernon L. Smith, who was awarded in 2002.So far, three women have received the award: in 2009 the American Elinor Ostrom, in 2019 Esther Duflo and last year the American Claudia Goldin, the latter of whom is the only one who received the award alone.
Among Hungarian-born scientists, in 1994 the American John C. Harsányi (János Harsányi, 1920-2000) was awarded a shared Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics “for his pioneering work in the field of equilibrium analysis in the theory of non-cooperative games”.
In the case of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, there is also an example of a “family” prize: the younger brother of the first awardee, the Dutchman Jan Tinbergen, who was awarded in 1969, Nikolaas Tinbergen, received the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology in 1973, the wife of Gunnar Myrdal, who was awarded in 1974 , Alva Myrdal received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982. Five years ago, Esther Duflo and her husband, the Indian-American Abhijit Banerjee – the only married couple in the history of the award – received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.
