Trio wins economics Nobel for work on wealth inequality

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 yesterday.The prestigious award, formally known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, is the final prize to be given out this year and is worth 11mn Swedish crowns ($1.1mn)."Reducing the vast differences in income between countries is one of our time’s greatest challenges. The laureates have demonstrated the importance of societal institutions for achieving this,” said Jakob Svensson, Chair of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences."Societies with a poor rule of law and institutions that exploit the population do not generate growth or change for the better,” the award organisers added 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 which demonstrated how some technological advances were better at creating jobs and spreading wealth than others.The economics award 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 a later addition established and funded by Sweden’s central bank in 1968.However, like for the other Nobel science prizes, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences decides the winner and follows the same selection process.Past winners include a host 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 US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke.Last year, Harvard economic historian Claudia Goldin won the prize for her work highlighting the causes of wage and labour market inequality between men and women.The economics prize has been dominated by US academics since its inception, while US-based researchers also tend to account for a large portion of winners in the scientific fields for which 2024 laureates were announced last week.That crop of prizes began with US scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the prize for medicine on October 7 and concluded with Japan’s Nihon Hidankyo, an organisation of survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki who campaigned for the abolition of nuclear weapons landing the award for peace on Friday.South Korea’s Han Kan won the literature prize – the only woman laureate so far this year.The Nobel Prizes consist of a diploma, a gold medal and the cash sum.They will be presented at ceremonies in Stockholm and Oslo on December 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of scientist and prize creator Alfred Nobel.