CHICAGO
One of the world’s most influential schools of economics has done it again.
The nearly 120-year-old University of Chicago, once the academic home of free-market advocates such as Milton Friedman, can boast of yet another Nobel prize in economics.
With Monday’s naming of University of Chicago professor Roger B. Myerson as one of three winners of this year’s prize, the school claims ties to 24 Nobel prize winners in economics more than a third of the 61 individuals so honored since the first Nobel in the field was given in 1969.
Academics and admirers credit a combination of factors, including the school’s ability to peg and recruit up-and-coming economics stars and its tradition of grooming fiercely independent thinkers who in their relative Midwest isolation aren’t shy about challenging prevailing trends.
“Good ideas eventually get recognized, and Chicago has produced more than any other university,” said David Boaz, an executive vice president at the Cato Institute, a free-market oriented think tank in Washington, D.C.
Part of the explanation for the school’s influence and fame in recent decades is that many of its economists like Friedman, who won in 1976 began advocating free-market prescriptions as far back as the mid-20th century, when the notion of unfettered markets was distinctly out of favor in government and academia.
