Read and watch the “confession” first, and then the “claim” and think... Who does want to give a prize to "priceless" research, or what is the price of this prize?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBQzHJq5cpQ
16:06: PAUL ALIVISATOS (President of the University of Chicago; John D. MacArthur Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Chemistry):
“James, you shared with me earlier how there were some moments where you first realized what methods would be needed for you to make your discoveries and so on. Just say a little bit about some of the moments when the research really advanced and what that was like for you.”
16:24: JAMES ROBINSON (The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2024, of University of Chicago. Prize motivation: “for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity”):
“Well, I think—when we started working on these
problems that we got the Nobel Prize for --Daron
and I--, Daron grew up in Istanbul, and my father was a sort of itinerant engineer who spent most of his life working overseas, so I lived overseas when I was young. So we were very interested in these problems, but we
found it very difficult to approach them because what we had all these intuitions, but the intuitions didn't sort of coincide with the way people studied the problems. So I think we had to find a kind of entry point, in some sense. And we, both of us, read when we were undergraduates Douglass North and Robert Thomas's book: The Rise of the Western World, which was about the kind of institutional transformation
that created the Industrial Revolution and this sort of
so-called phenomenon of the great divergence. So we both of us had
independently read that book,
and I just mentioned how we first started talking
about Douglass North's work two hours after we first met. But how do you-- how
do you approach that? How do you measure these things, and how do you-- So we
started working on that, and we started reading a lot of history and sort of
thinking about how to approach it. And we started putting data together but it
has all of these problems that was talked about in terms of how do you know
what's causing what, and what's the sort of forcing variable here? And then we
were very fortunate because Daron was-- so we had all this data, and we started
working with Simon and one of Daron's colleagues also, the now Nobel laureate, Josh Angrist. Josh sort of understood most of these things before anybody else in the economics profession, how you dealt with these issues of causal inference. And so Daron started co-teaching labor economics at MIT with Josh; so none of us had any idea how to conduct an empirical study, in fact.
Veysel
Batmaz claimed that, there is no
independent variable for Daron Acemoglu (variable that measures the CAUSE).
Every assertion that shows a causal link should contain a measurement as an
independent variable. If not, every variable can account for every other
variable, leading to a huge tautology. He is dealing with three variables to be
played in a very libertarian way, in a causal relationship: INSTITUTIONS,
CHOICE, and POWER. In the equation he creates, each of these variables is an
inter-correlated and mostly spurious dependent variable. (For
an excellently worded elaboration on this: See, Daniel Sarewitz, “Economists Being
Economists.” Issues in Science and
Technology 40, no. 2 (Winter 2024): 102–104. https://doi.org/10.58875/KZIV5162)
“Transferring inclusive institutions to colonized
countries by the power (state) of the colonizer makes prosperity” (see the Swiss Central Bank’s press release); then what is the cause?
Power (because it is transferring); or institutions (because inclusive,
or produced power in the first place in the benevolent colonizer who introduced
inclusive institutes to the colony; if so, the cause is again power). One
wonders if power might be the institutions themselves! And that means one
cannot get rid of power because only power makes decisions (i.e., choices).
Or, sharing prosperity by the inclusive institutions of the colonized and
colonizers power because colonized wisely accepted (chose) the power’s choice
(inclusive institutions)? Or none of the above. Or, more correctly, all of the
above (Acemoglu’s choice). If one cannot choose, I can pinpoint a very deep and
unseen cause as well: Ripping off the surplus value of the colonizer due to the
low "rule of law" (uninclusive institution) among the poor (in the
colonized—they definitely need inclusive institutions)! This plausible
statement was not among the control variables, but what the heck!
Seriously enough, I think constructing hypotheses
without an independent variable and using all of the variables at hand that
might be (in Acemoglu’s case are) extraneous, component, intervening,
antecedent, suppressor, and distorter as dependent variables (choice is yours),
with no controls accounted for, is worth a Nobel Prize (see: Morris Rosenberg, The
Logic of Survey Analysis).
Instead of constructing a
causal relationship with a robust independent variable accounted for with the
controlled variables, Acemoglu makes the following equation:
With rational CHOICES (coming from the holy spirit,) POWER takes
decisions (I think the first
CHOICE is to choose to go to the colonized country, so to decide to establish
institutions or transfer them to poor countries, mercy of Jesus, must be the
second one. Whether this is a choice or one of the ten commandments is also
unknown because it is coming from materialistically protestant ethics, here we
need to explain the German situation and ask: Is German rule of law not enough?
Or, being the most protestant of all, why was she late to behave in benevolence?
Or the colonized people did not listen to Germans at all because of the
Vatican? (Please do not overlook the propaganda department of the Vatican—Sacra
Congregatio de Propaganda Fide!) to
construct (the verb
"create" is more appropriate) social structures (institutions;
this time I believe the third choice just because to decide and construct are
two different phenomena), and POWER
again gains POWER through the things (institutional
structures, as structuralist-functionalists assert) POWER establishes as INSTITUTIONS (this might be the fourth
choice: to regain power—hospitals, charities, and schools, but firstly,
administrative institutions such as assigning benevolent governors who are
responsible for exported democratic institutions, but I assume factories,
plantations, and mines are institutions as well, or at least their
administrative parts are institutional; let’s name them as exploitative
institutions) which uses technology
by CHOICE and distributes its surplus value as revenue for the poor people
which makes them “more” prosperous. (because
all of them are “sacred” choices.) [Don’t read in the parenthesis if you are
pro-Acemoglu. My comment is not only based the Press Release of the Central
Bank of Sweden.]
This is all clear-cut but it's unclear, though, when and why it became
apparent as power can become so almighty, and choices and institutions are all
benevolent. God’s providence? Marx argues that the mode of production and
property relations establish power. I claim that the technology makes modes of
production and property relations from which power stems, in Digitalism vs. Capitalism.
