Last Monday saw The Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences from the Nobel Institute granted to Israeli-American professor and economist Joshua Angrist, alongside two others Guido Imbens and David Card. The trio was awarded the esteemed prize for pioneering the use of “natural experiments” or real-life situations, to understand the causal relationship between economic policy and other events.
Angrist, who was born in Columbus, Ohio made Aliyah in 1982, though returned three years later to get his master’s degree and Ph.D. from Princeton University. He returned to Israel in 1995 to work at Hebrew University, and in 1996, joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, where he still works. Angrist shared half of the $1.13 million dollar prize with his good friend Imbens “for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships.” Angrist was also nominated for a Nobel Prize in 2019.
Angrist is a prime example of Israeli brain drain. Quoted in a Jerusalem Post article in 2006, he was reportedly “tired of the situation” where “talented people who might like to work in Israel have to pay a high price for that financially. It’s hard to retain people with that kind of system.”
Of the 900 Nobel Peace Prizes awarded, about 20% were Jews. The first Nobel Prize awarded to an Israeli was in 1966 in literature to Shmuel Agnon for his “profoundly characteristic narrative art with motifs from the life of the Jewish people.” A total of 13 prizes were awarded since then in chemistry, peace, and economics. The last prize was awarded in 2013 in chemistry to Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel for “the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems.”
