Massachusetts Institute of Technology professors share Nobel Prize in economics
STOCKHOLM - The Nobel Prize in economics was awarded to three Americans Monday for their research into why some countries succeed and others fail. Two of the three economists are professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
Nobel Prize economics
Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson "have demonstrated the importance of societal institutions for a country's prosperity," the Nobel committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said at the announcement in Stockholm.
"Societies with a poor rule of law and institutions that exploit the population do not generate growth or change for the better. The laureates' research helps us understand why," it added.
Acemoglu and Johnson work at MIT and Robinson conducts his research at the University of Chicago.
"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," Jakob Svensson, Chair of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences, said.
He said their research has provided "a much deeper understanding of the root causes of why countries fail or succeed."
Professor Johnson spoke about the impact artificial intelligence could have on economies in the future.
"People are both too optimistic and too pessimistic if they believe AI can do more things than it really can, but they haven't thought through the way in which it could really wipe out middle-skill, middle-education, middle-income jobs. That's the middle class right? If you wipe out the middle class, the middle class has already had a pretty rough four decades I would say. If you are putting more pressure on it when it comes to AI, you're not gonna like, nobody is gonna like the forms of polarization that come out of that," Johnson said to WBZ.
"Never expect something like this"
Reached by the academy in Athens, Greece, where he was to speak at a conference, Acemoglu, 57, said he was surprised and shocked by the award.
"You never expect something like this," he said. Their research found that freer, open societies are more likely to prosper.
"I think broadly speaking the work that we have done favors democracy," he said in a telephone call with the Nobel committee and reporters in Stockholm. But, he added: "Democracy is not a panacea. Introducing democracy is very hard. When you introduce elections, that sometimes creates conflict."
In an interview with The Associated Press, Robinson, 64, said he doubts that China can sustain its economic prosperity as long as it keeps a repressive political system.
"There's many examples in world history of societies like that that do well for 40, 50 years," Robinson said by phone. "What you see is that's never sustainable. ... The Soviet Union did well for 50 or 60 years.''
The economics prize is formally known as the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. The central bank established it in 1968 as a memorial to Nobel, the 19th-century Swedish businessman and chemist who invented dynamite and established the five Nobel Prizes.
Though Nobel purists stress that the economics prize is technically not a Nobel Prize, it is always presented together with the others on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896.
Nobel honors were announced last week in medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace.
Last year, Harvard University professor Claudia Goldin was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics.
Associated Press reporters Daniel Niemann, Mike Corder and Paul Wiseman contributed to this report.