2026-08-25
11 分钟Hello and welcome to Editor's Picks.
Ethan Wu here.
I'm one of the hosts of Money Talks, our business and finance podcast.
You're about to hear an article from the latest edition of The Economist.
Thanks for listening.
By the time the call came from Stockholm, it felt overdue.
In 2024, Daron Ajimolu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shared the Nobel Prize in Economics
with Simon Johnson and James Robinson for work on how institutions shape prosperity.
Mr Ajimolu is only 58 years old, but for some time he has been the discipline's colossus.
He has written seven books, including a new one about democracy and the economic impact of artificial intelligence,
not counting a couple of popular textbooks.
His hundreds of papers, more than ten of them published this year, are often stuffed with complex mathematics.
He competes with Andre Schleifer of Harvard University for top spot on a citation
ranking of economists produced by Ideas slash RPEC, a research database.
His views carry weight with other wonks and the media.
Give economists a few drinks, however, and some will venture their true opinions about this giant.
Much of his theoretical work is useful, but he uses his models to inform populist policies
that have been tried before and failed, blasts one well-known economist.
Some commentators do not require Dutch courage.
I've been yelling about Ajimolu for literally a decade, Noah Smith, an economics blogger,