Is winning the Noble Prize hereditary? Everybody knows that i | Professor M

Is winning the Noble Prize hereditary?

Everybody knows that insanity is hereditary—you get it from your children. I’m curious if winning the Nobel Prize is hereditary, too. Do you also get it from your children?

Josh Angrist (MIT) co-won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics (like we talked about here). Here’s what his son Noam has been up to:
— “Noam Angrist is the Executive Director and co-founder of Young 1ove, one of the largest youth-led NGOs dedicated to scaling-up programs backed by rigorous randomized trial evidence that enable youth to thrive. The organization, headquartered in Botswana, has reached over 100,000 youth across ten countries and has run randomized trials in partnership with J-PAL, solidified multi-year partnerships with UNICEF, USAID and the Brookings Institution, and signed an MOU with the Botswana government to scale-up evidence-based programs nationally.” (Source)

Well. Frankly, it does look like winning the Nobel Prize has a hereditary component. (In the past, we also talked about speaking and eating habits of Nobel Prize winners.)

Not every Nobel Prize winner has a book out there explaining their work in simple terms. Angrist does. If you’re curious, explore “Mastering Metrics: The Path from Cause to Effect” (Amazon). Econometrics, after all, is the original data science.