Nobel Lectures in Political Economy: A Reading Group

This reading group explores the political economy tradition through the Nobel Prize lectures of its most influential contributors. Spanning eight thematic sessions, we draw exclusively from the lectures delivered by laureates of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences — texts that are at once scholarly milestones and accessible distillations of each thinker’s life work. The sessions are organized not chronologically but thematically, tracing a coherent arc from the foundations of market theory and public choice, through institutions, collective action, human capital, and development, to a capstone confrontation between the two great methodological and ideological antagonists of the twentieth century. Each session pairs two or more lectures in productive tension, inviting participants to read across traditions and identify the deep questions that unite them.

Session 1 — Tuesday, June 9 - Markets, Prices & Information

BUSN 327, 3:30–5:00 PM

How do prices coordinate decentralized decisions, and what happens when information is imperfect or asymmetric? This session establishes the market as the central object of political economy, and immediately complicates it. Friedman and Stigler offer the Chicago defense of price mechanisms and the critique of regulation; Stiglitz mounts a systematic challenge by showing how information failures generate market dysfunction and political implications.

Session 2 — Tuesday, June 17 - Public Choice & Institutions I

BUSN 327, 3:30–5:00 PM

What happens when we apply economic logic to political actors? Buchanan extends the assumption of self-interest from markets to governments, bureaucracies, and legislatures, laying the groundwork for constitutional political economy. North complements this by asking why institutions persist even when they are inefficient, and how history shapes the constraints within which political and economic actors operate.

Session 3 — Tuesday, June 23 - Institutions & Development

BUSN 327, 3:30–5:00 PM

How do institutions shape long-run prosperity — and where do they come from? Coase grounds the analysis in transaction costs and property rights; Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson push the question into history, showing how colonial institutions created divergent developmental paths that persist centuries later. Together these lectures span the micro-foundations and macro-consequences of institutional choice.

Note: The three 2024 lectures form a unified argument and can be read selectively. Acemoglu’s is the essential starting point; Johnson and Robinson provide complementary evidence and extensions.

Session 4 — Tuesday, June 30 - Collective Action & the Commons

BUSN 327, 4:00–5:30 PM

Can communities govern shared resources without privatization or state control? Ostrom’s empirical work on polycentric governance challenges the standard tragedy-of-the-commons narrative. Sen brings welfare economics and social choice into the picture, asking how we aggregate preferences and measure freedom. Banerjee and Duflo shift the terrain to global poverty, arguing that field experiments can identify what actually works — and what policies fail the poor.

Session 5 — Tuesday, July 7 - Human Capital & Policy

BUSN 327, 4:00–5:30 PM

How do investments in people shape economic outcomes, and how should we evaluate the policies designed to support them? Becker extends economic reasoning to education, family, and social behavior, establishing human capital as a unifying framework. Heckman builds on this by confronting the challenge of causal inference in policy evaluation — asking not just what programs do on average, but for whom they work and why.

Session 6 — Tuesday, July 14 - Growth, Development & Inequality

BUSN 327, 4:00–5:30 PM

What drives sustained economic growth, and why do living standards diverge so dramatically across time and place? Deaton examines consumption, poverty measurement, and the limits of development interventions. Mokyr traces the deep roots of the Industrial Revolution in the culture of knowledge and scientific openness. Aghion and Howitt formalize the mechanism of creative destruction, showing how innovation displaces incumbents to generate long-run growth — and what policies sustain or undermine it.

Session 7 — Tuesday, July 21 - Gender & Labor Markets

BUSN 327, 4:00–5:30 PM

Why do gender gaps in pay and career trajectories persist even as women’s educational attainment has surpassed men’s? Goldin traces the long arc of women’s economic participation across two centuries of American history, identifying the role of expectations, occupational structure, and the value placed on time flexibility. Card brings the tools of natural experiments to bear on labor market institutions — minimum wages, immigration, and education — showing how credible causal design transforms what we can claim to know about policy.

Session 8 — Tuesday, July 28 - Knowledge, Planning & Ideology

BUSN 327, 4:00–5:30 PM

The final session returns to the deepest questions in political economy: what can we know, and what should we therefore dare to do? Hayek’s lecture is a devastating critique of the epistemic pretensions of economic planners and technocrats — and a defense of the price system as a mechanism for transmitting dispersed knowledge that no central authority can possess. Myrdal, who shared the 1974 prize with Hayek, offers a strikingly different vision: one in which global inequality is a moral scandal that demands active intervention, and in which the values embedded in economic analysis must be made explicit rather than hidden. Together they stage the fundamental tension — between epistemic humility and political urgency — that runs through the entire reading group.