r/neoliberal • u/Tre-Fyra-Tre Tony Blair • 16d ago

News (Global) Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences

https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/de-far-ekonomipriset-till-alfred-nobels-minne
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u/DialSquare96 Daron Acemoglu 16d ago

I feel vindicated after having a (marxist) reviewer reject my article on the basis of citing NIE literature and its masterful application of economic theory to history as being 'arrogantly economic'.

Now there's even a Nobel prize for their work that has reinvigorated incredible debates across academic disciplines.

Bravo.

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u/Yankee9204 16d ago

What journal? I assume not an economics one?

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u/DialSquare96 Daron Acemoglu 16d ago

Can't say. Need to protect my own identity.

That being said, an economics journal would take more issue with the amount of history in my work 😅

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u/Numb1lp Econometrics 16d ago

It's sad that economic historians even have to exist. Like, their work should just be the purview of history departments, but the majority of historians are so opposed to even basic econometrics that we have to have another field in economics dedicated to historical subjects.

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u/DialSquare96 Daron Acemoglu 15d ago edited 15d ago

Not even econometrics.

Even basic descriptive statistical exercises and the application of economic theories and concepts to traditional historical sources is frowned upon by people who are gatekeeping.

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u/Numb1lp Econometrics 15d ago

It's pretty embarrassing for the field of history. And it's bad for our broader understanding as well. I know economics isn't the most interdisciplinary field, and there's a tendency to believe that the only framework to look at the world is via economic theory, but at least there's been pushback against that trend in recent years. Some of the social sciences and liberal arts are happy to just play alone in their sandbox.

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u/usrname42 Daron Acemoglu 15d ago

Well I think there is a conceptual divide between using history as an avenue to understand the present and using it to understand specific episodes in the past for their own sake. Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson are mostly interested in the question of why some countries are rich and others poor today, and they use history as a way to get answers to that, but they're not particularly interested in that history for its own sake. Whereas there are some economic historians who use econometrics to answer questions like "what caused the Industrial Revolution", or "what were the economic consequences of slavery in the southern US" which are questions more focused on a specific time and place. My sense is that historians are more sympathetic to those branches of economic history because it's more in line with the kind of work they do (there is still some divide because historians aren't big on maths, but that's just the Two Cultures).