Recent Nobel prizes for economics seem rich in irony

This year’s Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was awarded “for having explained innovation-driven economic growth,” with one half to Joel Mokyr “for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress” and the other half jointly to Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt “for the theory of sustained growth through creative destruction.”

- NARAYAN RAMACHANDRAN

This Nobel Prize in economics awarded for innovation comes at an interesting time in the political history of the world. Much of the world today is dominated by what authors Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way call “competitive authoritarianism.” Levitsky and Way define it as a hybrid regime where democratic institutions exist, but are undermined by authoritarian practices, making elections real but most often unfair. They introduced the concept in their influential 2002 essay and expanded on it in their 2010 book of the same name. Recently, the authors argued in Foreign Affairs magazine that the US has now become a poster child of competitive authoritarianism. The primary feature of such regimes is that they use the power of the executive and state to keep the chimera of elections alive, but then game the electoral competition with self-serving biases. The usual blueprint for this is to use the state and its agencies as instruments against free and fair rivalry. Political incumbents routinely abuse state resources, manipulate the media, harass the opposition and thereby skew electoral processes.