Simon Johnson, the esteemed British American MIT economist, missed the phone call from Stockholm on Monday night telling him he had won a Nobel Prize. He was asleep. “I only found out when my colleague started texting me,” he told me. He also heard from an MIT staffer whose job, apparently, is to be especially attuned to the Swedish white smoke at this time of year, since MIT professors have won so many prizes. (More than one hundred and counting…) Johnson, his colleague Daron Acemoglu, and the University of Chicago’s James Robinson won the prize for their extraordinary research into the policies and realities that dictate the fortunes of countries—why some turn out wealthy, and others impoverished.