Israel is back on the map with the Nobel Prize in economy: Prof. Josh Angrist from MIT

After eight years of parking, Israel is back on the map with the Nobel Prize - but as in the previous time, this time too it is a "semi-Israeli" win: Prof. Josh Angrist from MIT, an Israeli-American, became the 13th Israeli to win the most prestigious award , Even though he dropped out of his first year as a graduate student at the Hebrew University.
The announcement in Stockholm of Prof. Angrist's win joins the winning of 12 other Israelis. So far, the prize is awarded annually to selected personalities for their contribution to science, literature and humanity as a whole, the author SY Agnon, the statesmen Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, the biochemists Avraham Hershko and Aharon Ciechanover, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, the mathematician Israel Oman, and the scientists Ada! , Dan Shechtman, Arie Warschel and Michael Levitt.
At a Zoom press conference following the announcement in Sweden of Angrist's winning the award along with Prof. Gido Imbans and Prof. David Card, he said that "I still do not believe that only a few hours have passed, it is the greatest honor a person can receive." Angrist, 61, won the Nobel Prize for "his methodological contribution to factor-outcome analysis." He will receive 2.5 million Swedish kronor - $ 275,000. "I have not yet thought what I will do with the money," he admitted.
"I was not the most successful high school student at first," he said of the beginning. "I left high school early and started working, before deciding that I should go to college. In 1982, after graduating with a bachelor's degree in the United States, I made aliyah and became an Israeli citizen. I started my time in Israel as a graduate student at the Hebrew University, and it was a great success for me "I met my future wife Mira - but it was not a great success academically. I dropped out after about a year of school. Then I served two years in the army. Then I managed to convince my wife Mira to return to the United States and graduate there."
He missed the conversation from Sweden about winning the Nobel: "I took a short break from sailing, I woke up early in the morning and saw some text messages. At first I did not pay much attention to it, but then I saw there were many messages and realized I should get up. I missed the conversation from Sweden because it was About 6 a.m. US time, but luckily I have a lot of friends and colleagues who won the Nobel, so I was able to get the Nobel Committee phone, so I called them. At first they did not answer, but in the end I found the right person. "
On the years in Israel, he said: "I lived in Israel for certain periods and worked at the Hebrew University in the 1990s for five years. My wife and two children had a good life there. But then I got the call from MIT, and that is the dream of every young researcher."
In an interview 15 years ago, the Nobel laureate explained why he did not continue to live in Israel. "I am tired of the situation here, the Israeli system does not reflect the reality of differential payment by field. It is a public system, and it is not very flexible," Angrist said in an interview with the Jerusalem Post in 2006.
Thus the Israeli Nobel used the example of professors at the university, and said that professors in fields such as computer science and economics where there is a high demand receive the same salary as professors in fields such as literature. In other countries, he noted, the market determines lecturers' salaries. "Talented people who may want to work in Israel have to pay a high price financially. It is difficult to keep people in such a system," he said at the time.
The last Israeli win in the Nobel Prize was in Chemistry, given in 2013 - and even then it was a "semi-Israeli" Nobel Prize. Prof. Arie Warschel and Prof. Michael Levitt then received the award for their research in the development of computer models for understanding complex chemical systems. Warschel, who was born in Kibbutz Sde Nahum and studied at the Technion and the Weizmann Institute, left the country after the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Levitt, who was born in Pretoria, South Africa, divides his time between the country and abroad and has a family and a home on the streets.