A Societal Nobel Prize in Economics
For communicating ideas, words have their importance. In announcing the award of the 2024 Nobel economics price to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson, the Royal Sweedish Academy of Sciences declared:
This year’s laureates in the economic sciences … have demonstrated the importance of societal institutions for a country’s prosperity.
The Nobel Foundation may have been contaminated by some of its new laureates’ look and feel. I reviewed the two latest books of Acemoglu: The Narrow Corridor with James Robinson, and Power and Progress with Simon Johnson. Acemoglu’s naïve and pre-public-choice conception of the state has become more obvious: if this was not apparent in his earlier work, it certainly is in these two books and especially in the last one. The words and expressions used sometimes betray Acemoglu’s progressive agenda. In my review of Power and Progress, I wrote:
In another book by Acemoglu with James Robinson, The Narrow Corridor, the state becomes more and more powerful but is kept in check by a more and more powerful “civil society” in a manner that seems magical. … In a few places in both books, the magical “social” mutates into “societal,” which only has the look and feel of something more scientific.
As I explained in a previous post (“The Word “Societal,” EconLog, September 7, 2021), the strange word “societal” as a substitute for “social” was, as far as we know, invented by a Minor Hugo (probably the pen name of Luke James Hansard), a 19th-century utopian British communist and follower of Charles Fourier. It is now used by fashionable intellectuals who perhaps hope to show that they know about social matters more than the plebs—and also more than the long tradition of economic analysis.
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A popular intellectual speaks about “societal” matters