UMass Economist Isabella Weber Recognized with 2024 Ellen Meiksins Wood Prize

Isabella Weber, associate professor of economics, has been awarded the 2024 Ellen Meiksins Wood Prize by the Broadbent Institute, a Canadian progressive policy and training organization.

The prize, established by Ed Broadbent and the Broadbent Institute in 2017 in honor of distinguished author and academic Professor Ellen Meiksins Wood, recognizes outstanding academic contributions in political theory, social or economic history, human rights and sociology.

As part of the honor, which was originally announced April 12 at the 2024 Broadbent Institute Progress Summit, Weber delivered a lecture May 30 during the Canadian Economics Association Conference at Toronto Metropolitan University titled “Profits, inflation and survival in an age of emergencies: Why we need a new paradigm.”

Weber has gained international acclaim for research that she and doctoral student Evan Wasner pioneered on corporate power in systemically important sectors and what that means in times of overlapping emergencies. The concept, called “sellers’ inflation,” has reshaped the debate on the drivers of inflation produced and concrete policy shifts in the U.S. and Europe. President Joe Biden picked up on the inflation analysis in his State of the Union Address and Weber has been invited to brief the Biden administration’s Council of Economic Advisors and the Federal Trade Commission on her work.

Weber’s work “has been vital for Canadian progressives to offer policies and alternatives that push back against anti-democratic policy decisions, and help to empower workers,” wrote Broadbent Institute Executive Director Jennifer Hassum.

Prize recipients are chosen for work that is “emblematic of Wood’s two-fold belief that democracy is always fought for and secured from below, not conferred from above; and, that the egalitarian values of democracy are in ongoing conflict with the unequal outcomes of capitalism” according to the institute.