Speaker

Dani Rodrik

Dani Rodrik

Turkish-American economist and Professor of International Political Economy at the Harvard Kennedy School, among the most influential and most cited economists working on globalisation, trade, and economic development. Born and raised in Istanbul, he came to Harvard as an undergraduate intending to study engineering, discovered the social sciences in its library, and has spent his career as the discipline’s most rigorous internal critic of free-trade and free-market orthodoxy. His best-known books are The Globalization Paradox (2011), Economics Rules (2015), and Straight Talk on Trade (2017).

Rodrik’s research spans international trade, industrial policy, economic growth, and — more recently — the institutional prerequisites of liberal democracy. He earlier held the Albert O. Hirschman chair at the Institute for Advanced Study, fitting for an economist who shares Hirschman’s possibilism — the conviction that development is never fully determined by structure, that roughly half of a country’s fate remains in its own hands.

Core positions

Manufacturing is special, and its decline matters. Rodrik’s work on premature deindustrialisation shows poor countries today shedding their factory share of jobs and output at far lower income levels than the early industrialisers did — losing the one engine, rapid industrialisation, that reliably produced decades of fast convergence. Manufacturing earns its privilege concretely: its technology travels across borders, it absorbs unskilled labour straight off the farm, and it is tradable, so a country can master one segment on world markets without an economy-wide productivity revolution.

His best-known idea is the globalisation trilemma: deep economic integration (hyperglobalisation), national sovereignty, and democracy cannot all be held in full at once — any two, never three. The eurozone, on this view, must choose between deeper political union and looser economic union so long as it means to keep its democracy. He defends a pragmatic, employment-focused industrial policy — not picking winners but a government asking the private sector what it can do to unlock activity that would not otherwise start — while conceding the returns to it have fallen.

Beneath these sits a methodological stance. Economics is a science of models, not universal laws; its central craft is diagnosis — knowing which model fits the case in hand. From his teacher Avinash Dixit he takes the second-best dictum, ‘the world is second best at best’: where one distortion already exists, fixing another in isolation can make things worse, and the first-best textbook optimum is rarely on offer. He is correspondingly hostile to ‘best practice’ — the lazy faith that a recipe which worked somewhere can be copied wholesale — and sceptical that randomised controlled trials, strong on internal validity but weak on external, deserve their current dominance over theory.

In the wiki