The Sveriges Riksbank (Swedish Central Bank) Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel—the so-called Nobel Prize in Economics—was first awarded in 1969, a full sixty-eight years after the Nobel Foundation, in accordance with the will of Alfred Nobel, established five Nobel Prizes in the fields of physics, chemistry, literature, peace, and physiology or medicine. Unlike the authentic Nobel Prizes, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize was funded from outside Nobel’s estate, and with the partisan aim of ideologically reinforcing neoclassical economics against radical currents emergent in the late 1960s. The prize was thus reserved from the first for proponents of neoclassical economics and has been heavily controlled throughout its history by conservative economists associated with the right-wing free-market Chicago School. In times of crisis, the Riksbank Prize has been awarded to economists who have been particularly adept at apologetics, countering left analyses, and defending capitalist institutions, sometimes purporting to represent more mainstream liberal analyses. Thus, Paul Krugman was awarded the Riksbank Prize at the time of the 2008 financial crisis for his role as a relatively progressive neo-Keynesian economist and strong defender of the existing order, and William D. Nordhaus was awarded the prize in 2018, at the time of the gearing up of the global climate movement, for his economic model on the climate, which downplayed the economic effects of the climate crisis and the need for strong action in relation to avert catastrophe (“Notes from the Editors,” Monthly Review 68, no. 7 [December 2016]).
Hence, it should not be altogether surprising that, at the very time that Israel as a settler colonial state was carrying out genocide directed at Palestinians in Gaza, killing and injuring masses of Palestinians every day with weapons largely supplied by the United States, the Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was awarded to economists whose research supported the notion that settler colonialism had generated superior, more “inclusive” political-economic institutions. Thus, the recipients of the 2024 Riksbank “Nobel” Prize were Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson (commonly referred to collectively as “AJR”) for their work on the “Colonial Origins of Comparative Development.” In the 2024 press release for the “Nobel” Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, released by the Swedish Academy, it was stated that the recipients had established the basis on which some countries were destined to prosper and others to fail. In “some places [like in most of Africa] the aim [of European colonizers] was to exploit the indigenous population and extract resources for the colonisers’ benefit.” Economic development in such countries ultimately failed. In contrast, in settler colonial countries where Europeans settled in large numbers, such as the United States, Canada, and Australia, “inclusive institutions” were introduced promoting economic development. No mention is made, of course, in the discussion of inclusive institutions, either by the Swedish Academy or in the work of the Riksbank laureates, of the fact that the same settler colonial countries had engaged in the erasure and exclusion of the Indigenous populations, nor is any attention drawn to the U.S. slave-plantation system—or to the institutions of Jim Crow; what Mark Twain called “the United States of Lyncherdom” (Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson, “The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation,” American Economic Review 91, no. 5 [December 2001]: 1369–1401; Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, “The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2024,” press release, October 14, 2024, nobel.org; Mark Twain, “The United States of Lyncherdom” [1901], Wikisource, en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_United_States_of_Lyncherdom).
As the Swedish Academy press release indicated, the argument of the 2024 “Nobel” laureates was that good economic performance is based on inclusive institutions (by which they mean institutions of private property and capitalism, ironically rooted in expropriation and exclusion). But why did these so-called inclusive institutions become dominant in some nations rather than others? AJR’s answer was that such inclusive (capitalist) institutions arose where there were large numbers of European settler colonists, which occurred only in those parts of the globe where climate and disease did not inhibit settler migration. In colonies, primarily in the tropics, where European mortality from disease was high, European colonists, rather than engaging in settler colonialism, established purely “extractivist” colonies in which the gains were sent back to the mother country. In contrast, where large European settlements occurred due to a favorable climate and low settler mortality, “inclusive institutions” or strong private property relations were established. This, then, is seen as explaining why the settler colonies of the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were able to promote internal capitalist development while other colonies failed.
Nevertheless, a devastating critique of the work of the 2024 “Nobel” Prize laureates in economics can be found in a 2025 article in Human Geography by Shahram Azhar, associate professor of economics at Bucknell University. Azhar’s article is pointedly entitled “Daron Acemoglu’s or Paul Baran’s Prize?: A Critique of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics.” The entire core argument of the 2024 Riksbank “Nobel” recipients, as Azhar points out, was anticipated by Paul A. Baran in The Political Economy of Growth in 1957. Moreover, Baran approached these issues within the context of a wider analysis, including not only climate (and by implication disease/mortality of immigrants), but also such factors as the levels of development and of resistance that the European colonists encountered. Baran’s argument led to conclusions that are the opposite to those of the Riksbank Prize winners. “This essay,” Azhar writes with regard to his article, “counterposes AJR’s theory with the seminal work of eminent Marxist economist Paul Baran, [in] The Political Economy of Growth, [viewed] as the foundational text for the understanding of the problem of long-run economic divergence between countries: a contribution that, till this date, remains unrecognized in AJR’s work. I argue that Baran’s (1957) contribution, which predates AJR[‘s work] by approximately five decades, is the first to posit the problem of long-run patterns of divergence as being intricately tied with the issue of European settlement” (Shahram Azhar, “Daron Acemoglu’s or Paul Baran’s Prize: A Critique of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics,” Human Geography [January 25, 2025]: 2; Paul A. Baran, The Political Economy of Growth [New York: Monthly Review Press, 1957], 141–42).
Baran had written that “one cannot distinguish sharply enough between the impact of Western Europe’s entrance into North America (and Australia and New Zealand) on one side, and the ‘opening up’ by Western capitalism of Asia, Africa, or Eastern Europe,” on the other. He indicated that not only “climate and the natural environment,” but also the existence of established civilizations and the degree to which Indigenous societies were able to resist settler invasions all contributed to determining where European setter colonialism was able to take hold. Where the environmental conditions impeding European settlement were too great (as in Africa) or where Indigenous societies and populations could not be as easily overcome (often because of the level of development, as in large parts of Asia), Europeans “rapidly determined to extract the largest possible gains from the host countries, and to take their loot home.” For Baran, all colonization was ruthless exploitation and/or exterminism, and constituted part of what Karl Marx had called the “so-called primitive [or original] accumulation of capital” around the globe. None of this had to do with so-called inclusive institutions; rather the systems governing the development of capitalism and imperialism were invariably based on exclusion (Baran, The Political Economy of Growth, 141–42; see also John Bellamy Foster, “Imperialism and White Settler Colonialism in Marxist Theory,” Monthly Review 76, no. 9 [February 2025]: 1–21).
With respect to monopoly capitalism/imperialism, Azhar observes, AJR’s “Eurocentric account” is completely vacuous:
AJR do not consider “capitalism,” let alone global “monopoly capitalism,” as an appropriate conceptual entry-point in their analysis. Economic institutions, we are told, must be seen in abstraction from the logic of capital and the historical world system that gave birth to these institutions in the first place.
Thus, to appreciate the significance of Baran’s original contribution, and why AJR’s (2001) account is a mystified bourgeois version of it, we must pay close attention to…the moment of colonial interaction with global capitalism. It is here that AJR at once borrow heavily from Baran, mystify his historical materialist account, and turn it on its head by converting it into a neoliberal institutional ideology…a convenient empiricist ruse for the owners of capital. (Azhar, “Daron Acemoglu’s or Paul Baran’s Prize?,” 3–4)
But the full extent of the apologetics and irrationality in the work of the 2024 Riksbank “Nobel” Prize winners becomes apparent only when it is recognized that they use data on soldier mortality as a proxy for settler mortality, drawing on the research of Philip D. Curtin in his 1989 Death by Migration, “a quantitative study of the relocation costs among European soldiers in the tropics between 1815 and 1914.” Although such a proxy might be justifiable in some ways, the mortality rate of soldiers is much greater than settlers. In addition, referring to the former as the latter downplays the extermination aimed at the Indigenous. It thus serves to ignore what the soldiers were there to do, that is, erase the original inhabitants. Soldiers, moreover, invariably had higher mortality rates from disease and dysentery during campaigns than they did when remaining in their barracks. But while data distinguishing soldier mortality in barracks and campaigns exists in Curtin’s work, AJR largely ignore the distinction, and often take the mortality of soldiers in campaigns, not in barracks, as their basis for settler mortality in the attempt to bolster their case. The mortality rates associated with colonization, in their analysis, never include reference to the mortality rates of the Indigenous themselves, whose deaths are not considered significant in the context of an argument on the economic benefits of settler colonialism associated with its inclusive institutions. It is only the mortality rate of settlers/soldiers that matters in their argument (Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson, “The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation,” 1370, 1382; Philip D. Curtin, Death by Migration: Europe’s Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989], xiii, emphasis added; David Y. Albouy, “The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation—Comment,” American Economic Review 102, no. 6 [October 2012]: 3059–76; Azhar, “Daron Acemoglu’s or Paul Baran’s Prize?,” 5).
If soldier mortality is the proxy used by the 2024 Riksbank “Nobel” laureates for settler mortality, the proxy for inclusive institutions is the creation of private property arrangements that involve low “risk of expropriation” (for those owning private property). (No mention is made here of the fact that the property with this low risk of expropriation, standing for inclusive institutions, was originally expropriated from the Indigenous inhabitants.) The whole analysis thus boils down to the notion that where soldier mortality was low, the disease barriers to settler colonialism were low, leading to Europeans to establish inclusive institutions in the form of private property with low risk of expropriation, which then sparked economic development. Even though AJR’s analysis of settler colonialism rests on the mortality rate of European soldiers, particularly in campaigns fought against Indigenous peoples, the Indigenous have only a ghostly presence in their argument (the Indigenous are the unexamined “other” whom the soldiers sought to kill). As Azhar observes, one “may legitimately shiver with horror at the linguistic synonymizing of the comforting term ‘inclusivity’ with the genocide of Indigenous peoples, [but] such ‘value judgements’ do not concern our Nobel laureates,” who manage to ignore not only the genocide associated with settler colonialism, but also the reality of antebellum slavery in the United States (Azhar, “Daron Acemoglu’s or Paul Baran’s Prize?,” 2).
The fact that all of this is intimately connected to the ongoing settler colonial genocide in Palestine (both for the 2024 laureates, and undoubtedly for those on the Riksbank Nobel committee that made the decision) was made abundantly clear by an article, entitled “Uncultured,” that Acemoglu and Robinson wrote in Foreign Policy in 2012. There (and in their book, Why Nations Fail) they argued that the “New Israelis,” Jewish migrants coming to Israel, brought with them “inclusive institutions” of an economic character, emanating from Europe, that promoted education, technology, and development. In contrast, “Palestinians,” we are told, “have not done well at creating the type of inclusive…institutions that are critical for generating economic development.” Israel, they claimed, was “the Middle East’s first democracy, but did not spread it to the Palestinians,” leading to conflict between a democratic/inclusive state (Israel) and a relatively “uncultured” authoritarian/undeveloped nation (Palestine). This resulted in turn in war and expropriation of Palestine’s poorly managed lands in the West Bank and elsewhere by Israel’s supposedly more inclusive, democratic, and economically developed society. In the process, untold numbers of Palestinians (though this is not acknowledged) were erased. Exterminism, the argument of the 2024 Riksbank “Nobel” laureates suggests, is good for capitalism, so it is good for the world. Yet, while such a crude ideological ploy, concealed behind the veil of the so-called “Nobel” prize in economics, has as its aim the justification of settler colonialism as an “inclusive” form of development, this is convincing only to a relatively small portion of the global population in the hegemonic imperialist states. The vast majority of the world’s people, free from all such illusions, are able to perceive this genocide denial for what it really is (Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, “Uncultured: Mitt Romney Don’t Know Much About Economic History,” Foreign Policy [August 1, 2012]; Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail [New York: Crown Business, 2012], 142–43).
Michael Burawoy, one of the world’s most prestigious Marxist sociologists, was killed by a hit-and-run driver near his home in Oakland, California, on February 3, 2025, at age 77. Burawoy was a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was most famous for his 1979 book, Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism, an ethnographic study of how workers routinely consent to their own exploitation, which was based on his work experience in a Chicago machine shop. As president of the American Sociological Association in 2004, he made his theme the advancement of public sociology, extending beyond the academy. He served as president of the International Sociological Association from 2010–2014. In the April–June 1990 issue of Socialist Review, Burawoy published an article titled “Marxism Is Dead, Long Live Marxism,” which was reprinted shortly afterwards in William K. Tabb, ed., The Future of Socialism: Perspectives from the Left (Monthly Review Press, 1990). There he strongly criticized what he called “the ‘Marxism is dead’ school,” arguing that as long as capitalism exists Marxism will be its nemesis, since the contradictions of the system will constantly reproduce the need for socialism.
Comments are closed.