Daron Acemoglu

Turkish-American economist, professor at MIT, and by citation count one of the most widely cited economists alive. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2024, jointly with Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson, for research on how institutions shape long-run prosperity. His best-known books are Why Nations Fail (2012, with Robinson) and The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty (2019, with Robinson).

Acemoglu’s research spans economic growth, political economy, labour economics, and the economics of technology. Before MIT he studied and taught at the London School of Economics. His long collaboration with Robinson — begun in the mid-1990s — has produced dozens of papers on the colonial origins of comparative development, the political economy of democracy, and the conditions under which liberty survives.

Core positions

Institutions, not geography or culture, are the primary driver of long-run prosperity. Acemoglu distinguishes inclusive institutions — property rights, rule of law, open access to economic and political participation — from extractive institutions, which concentrate power and surplus in the hands of a narrow elite. The distinction explains why places that were prosperous in 1500 are often poor today (they attracted extractive colonial settlements) and why nominal democracies produce very different outcomes depending on the institutional substrate beneath them.

His theory of liberty, developed in The Narrow Corridor, centres on the dynamic between state capacity and social mobilisation — what he calls the Red Queen effect. Neither strong states nor strong societies alone produce freedom; liberty requires both, in competitive tension. Lose either side of that balance and you slide back into despotism or anarchy. He is sceptical of purely cultural or religious explanations: Byzantine Christianity, he notes, produced no liberal tradition despite high institutional capacity, because the bottom-up participatory element was missing.

On technology, he has argued since at least 2019 that the dominant direction of AI automation threatens to be labour-displacing rather than labour-augmenting, and that this requires active institutional response — a view he has developed into sustained public commentary on the political economy of AI.

In the wiki

• Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society — Conversations with Tyler, Ep. 81: colonial institutions, the narrow corridor, China’s innovation experiment, and the limits of prediction