In World War II the Nazis continued to kill Jews even as their fortunes declined in the war. How much did that contribute to the decline of England as a world power or was it the loss of their colonial empire those are questions would be good to know I'd love to know. In Gulag when Stalin's imprisoning millions of people and many of them maybe the most creative and talented what did that do to Russian and Soviet economic output? We live in a world right now in academic world where people who try to answer those questions are discouraged but we ought to encourage them yeah absolutely.
Author and economist Branko Milanovic of CUNY talks about the big questions in economics with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Milanovic argues that the Nobel Prize Committee is missing an opportunity to encourage more ambitious work by awarding the prize to economists tackling questions like the rise of China's economy and other challenging but crucial areas of scholarship. In the conversation, he lays out what those questions might be and discusses what we know and don't know in these areas.