Daron Acemoglu

• 1. Introduction

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  Daron Acemoglu is a Turkish-American economist whose papers have been cited nearly 250,000 times, according to Google Scholar. On the Open Syllabus Project's count, only Greg Mankiw and Paul Krugman appear more often on college economics syllabi. For all that reach, his driving question is plain. He has said that most of his research has been motivated by trying to understand the sources of poverty.

  Why do some countries grow rich while their neighbors stay poor? Does democracy actually pay, or does it just feel right? When a new machine arrives in a factory or an office, who ends up with the gains? Acemoglu answers these questions with one recurring idea, that the rules a society lives under matter more than its climate, its culture or its map position. He also speaks about governments he thinks have gone wrong in strikingly direct terms, in his adopted country and in the two countries he calls home.

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• 2. From Istanbul to MIT

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  Istanbul is where Kamer Daron Acemoglu was born, on the 3rd of September 1967, to Armenian parents. His father, Kevork, who lived from 1938 to 1988, was a commercial lawyer and a lecturer at Istanbul University. His mother, Irma, was a poet and also the principal of Aramyan Uncuyan, an Armenian elementary school in Kadıköy. Daron attended that school. He then graduated from Galatasaray High School in 1986, by which point he had grown interested in politics and economics.

  The University of York gave him a BA in economics in 1989. At the London School of Economics he earned an MSc in econometrics and mathematical economics in 1990 and a PhD in 1992. His thesis was titled Essays in Microfoundations of Macroeconomics: Contracts and Economic Performance, and his advisor was Kevin W. S. Roberts. One examiner, James Malcomson, judged that even the weakest three of its seven chapters were "more than sufficient for the award of a PhD." The commentator Arnold Kling called him a wunderkind, since the doctorate arrived by the age of 25.

  After a year as a lecturer at the LSE, Acemoglu joined MIT in 1993 as an assistant professor. Promotion came quickly. He became the Pentti Kouri Associate Professor of Economics in 1997, won tenure in 1998 and reached full professor in 2000. From 2004 to 2010 he held the Charles P. Kindleberger chair in applied economics, and in 2010 he moved to the Elizabeth and James Killian chair. In July 2019, MIT named him an Institute Professor, the highest faculty honor it gives.

  By 2019 he had mentored more than 60 PhD students, among them Ufuk Akçiġit, Robert Shimer, Mark Aguiar, Pol Antràs and Gabriel Carroll. From 2011 to 2015 he edited the journal Econometrica, and he is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

  He is a naturalized US citizen, fluent in English and Turkish, and he speaks some Armenian. His wife, Asuman "Asu" Ozdağlar, is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. She is the daughter of İsmail Özdağlar, a former Turkish government minister, and the couple have written several articles together. As of 2015 they lived in Newton, Massachusetts, with their two sons, Arda and Aras.

  Much of the work that made him famous was written with a single collaborator based at the same London school where he had trained.

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• 3. Institutions Over Geography

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  A 2001 paper called "The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development" is by far the most cited work of Acemoglu's career. He wrote it with James A. Robinson and Simon Johnson. Their argument is that Europeans built extractive institutions in colonies where they did not settle, unlike in places where they did, and that those institutions lasted. They estimated that "differences in institutions explain approximately three-quarters of the income per capita differences across former colonies." Graham Mallard called it an "excellent example of his work: an influential paper that has led to much debate."

  Robinson is a British political scientist and a peer of Acemoglu's at the London School of Economics. Acemoglu has described their partnership as a "very productive relationship." Most of their joint articles and books concern growth and development, and Johnson has worked extensively alongside them both.

  Their 2012 book Why Nations Fail took the argument to a general audience. Growth at the technological frontier, they say, needs political stability and creative destruction. The Mayan civilization, named as one example, lacked that stability. Creative destruction, in turn, cannot happen without institutional limits on granting monopoly and oligopoly rights. They credit the English Bill of Rights 1689 with supplying such limits, which is why they say the Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain.

  The authors insist that development gaps between countries come exclusively from differences in political and economic institutions. They reject explanations based on culture, weather, geography or ignorance of the best policies. Their example is Soviet Russia, which grew rapidly while catching up with advanced technologies but "was running out of steam by the 1970s," for lack of creative destruction.

  Warren Bass, writing in The Washington Post, called the book "bracing, garrulous, wildly ambitious and ultimately hopeful," and "a bit of a masterpiece." Clive Crook, at Bloomberg News, thought it deserved most of its "lavish praise." Jeffrey Sachs, in Foreign Affairs, accused the authors of systematically ignoring domestic politics, geopolitics, technological discoveries and natural resources. He also argued that the book sold on readers' wish to hear that "Western democracy pays off not only politically but also economically." Bill Gates called it a "major disappointment" and its analysis "vague and simplistic." Ryan Avent, an editor at The Economist, replied that the authors might not be entirely right, but "at least they're engaged with the right problem." Liberal and conservative economists alike received the book well.

  The Narrow Corridor, published in 2019, shifted the question from wealth to liberty. Acemoglu and Robinson argue that a free society emerges when the power of the state and the power of society grow in rough balance. The book coins the "red queen effect," the idea that liberty survives only while both sides keep evolving to check each other.

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• 4. Democracy and Its Limits

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  Cambridge University Press published Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy in 2006, with Robinson as co-author. Its title nods to Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, a 1966 book by Barrington Moore Jr. The authors argue that democracy consolidates when elites have no strong incentive to overthrow it. That depends on six things: the strength of civil society, the structure of political institutions, the nature of political and economic crises, the level of inequality, the structure of the economy, and the form and extent of globalization.

  Romain Wacziarg praised the book for fusing two traditions. One is Marxist dialectical materialism, in which institutional change comes from struggles between a rich ruling class and a poor majority. The other is the work of Barry Weingast and Douglass North, who saw reform as a way for elites to commit credibly to future policies. William Easterly called it "one of the most important contributions to the literature on the economics of democracy in a long time." Edward Glaeser described it as "enormously significant."

  Does democracy pay? Acemoglu and his co-authors found that it "has a significant and robust positive effect on GDP," and suggested that democratizations raise GDP per capita by about 20% in the long run. A second paper found a robust effect on tax revenue as a fraction of GDP, but no robust effect on inequality. The authors argue that democratic institutions help growth by expanding education, improving public capacity and encouraging investment.

  In their 2008 article "Income and Democracy," Acemoglu and Robinson went after an older assumption. Countries with higher incomes are strongly correlated with democracy. Yet once the authors controlled for country fixed effects, they found "no causal effect of income on democracy." Their 2022 paper "Non-Modernization" pressed the point further. Modernization theory, they wrote, presumes a definite endpoint such as an "end of history," and ignores how institutions and culture shape each path.

  Acemoglu names three obstacles to growth under authoritarian rule. Such regimes tend to become more authoritarian, they use power to halt "Schumpeterian creative destruction," and internal conflicts breed instability. In his view Saudi Arabia would resemble a poor African country without its oil. He says Russia is kept going only by a boom in natural resources and clever handling of the media.

  In an op-ed for Foreign Policy, he claimed that President Donald Trump shared goals and strategies with Hugo Chávez, Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In a 2019 interview with Der Spiegel he said: "Surely, Trump and the Republicans are no Nazis. But they are exploiting the same political sentiment."

  China, he argues, grew by picking up the low hanging fruit from the world technology frontier. The next step, harnessing innovation, will be impossible unless economic institutions open up, and he calls the extractive political institutions there a barrier. With Robinson he wrote for the HuffPost that the limited rights China gives its citizens place major restrictions on its longer-term prosperity.

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• 5. Machines and Wages

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  A 2001 article by Acemoglu made a case that surprised many readers about the minimum wage. He argued that minimum wages and unemployment benefits shift employment toward high-wage jobs. Because the free market is inefficiently biased toward low-wage jobs, he wrote, these rules can raise average labor productivity. He added that minimum wages can increase training, by inducing firms to train their unskilled employees.

  That same year, he and Philippe Aghion examined unions. They concluded that deunionization in the US and UK since the 1980s was not the underlying cause of rising inequality. It did amplify the effect of skill-biased technical change, by removing the wage compression that unions had imposed. Acemoglu and Robinson also credit unions with a historic role in creating democracy, especially in western Europe, and in balancing established business interests against political elites.

  In the late 2010s, Acemoglu turned toward automation and artificial intelligence. With Pascual Restrepo, he studied industrial robots in the United States. Their 2020 study, "Robots and Jobs: Evidence from U.S. Labor Markets," found that regions more exposed to robots saw larger falls in employment and modest cuts in wages. Their 2022 paper "Tasks, Automation, and the Rise in U.S. Wage Inequality" argued that automation has fed wage inequality. It replaces many middle-skill tasks while raising demand for higher-skill labor. Acemoglu holds that policy and institutions decide whether new technology complements human work or substitutes for it.

  Power and Progress, written with Johnson and published in 2023, carries the subtitle Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity. It asks how new machines affect wages, how technology could be steered toward social good, and why enthusiasm for artificial intelligence runs so high. Its answer is that technology does not automatically yield social goods, and that benefits tend to flow to a narrow elite. The book takes a critical view of AI, stressing its largely negative effect on jobs, wages and democracy.

  The authors do offer a hopeful model, the Progressive Era. Their proposed policies include changed market incentives, breaking up big tech, tax reform, investing in workers, privacy protection with data ownership, and a digital advertising tax.

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• 6. Markets With Rules

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  Simon Johnson once explained why his long-time collaborators draw praise from both left and right. He said the point is not only that things turn awful when government goes off track, which is a right-leaning concern. They also worry about powerful people who fight to seize the state, a left-leaning one. Journalists and economists often call Acemoglu a centrist.

  He holds that the market economy is the only system that creates prosperity. He also holds that markets work only with regulation and predictable laws, since every market is regulated to some degree. In his phrase, free markets are not unregulated markets. Socialist regimes, he wrote, "from Cuba to the eastern bloc have been disastrous both for economic prosperity and individual freedom."

  In September 2008, he signed a petition condemning the Bush administration's bailout plan for the US financial system. He blamed policy makers for being "lured by ideological notions derived from Ayn Rand's novels rather than economic theory." Greed, he wrote, can drive innovation under sound laws, but without proper institutions it degenerates into rent-seeking, corruption and crime. He pointed to a setting in which 40 percent of US corporate profits sit in the financial sector.

  Inequality worries him mainly as a political problem. In 2012 he named polarization caused by economic inequality as the biggest problem facing the US. His reasoning is that "democracy ceases to function because some people have so much money they command greater power." He accepts inequality that rewards social contribution, calling it a "price that we pay for providing incentives." His solution is social mobility, "providing an opportunity for the bottom to become rich, not forcing the rich to become poor." He praised Occupy Wall Street for bringing the 1% to public attention, and to scholars such as Tony Atkinson, Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez.

  A 2012 paper with Robinson and Verdier, "Can't We All Be More Like Scandinavians?", suggested something odd. A "cutthroat" American society may be what makes the "cuddly" Scandinavian societies possible. In a 2015 New York Times op-ed he argued against the US adopting the Nordic model, warning that Denmark-level taxation would reduce rewards for entrepreneurship. Lane Kenworthy countered that American growth preceded the divergence in these policies. In 2019 Acemoglu called social democracy "a phenomenal success." He credited labor institutions that protect workers and encourage job creation, not heavy taxing and redistribution.

  His specific policy positions are plain. He favors raising and indexing the minimum wage. He calls universal basic income "expensive and not generous enough" and prefers a guaranteed-income program paying only people whose monthly income is below $1,000. He also backs a negative income tax, universal health care and an expanded earned income tax credit. He supported the successful 2013 Colorado Amendment 64, which legalized recreational marijuana sales, and calls the US war on drugs a "total and very costly failure." In a 2016 National Public Radio interview, he described US infrastructure as being in a "pitiful state."

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• 7. Home and Abroad

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  In March 2011, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu offered Acemoglu the post of Turkey's permanent representative to the OECD in Paris. He turned it down to stay in academia.

  His view of Turkey's past is blunt. He describes the Republic formed by Atatürk in 1923 as "very continuous with the Ottoman Empire," with concentrated power and economic activity carried over. He says the Republican period has been marked by unwillingness to accept ethnic minorities. In 2014 he condemned anti-Armenian rhetoric in Turkish textbooks and demanded that they be pulled. After the crackdown on the Gezi Park protests, a 2013 New York Times op-ed argued that the belief in Turkey as a maturing democratic role model had become untenable. In a May 2014 Foreign Affairs piece he called Erdoğan's drift from democracy lamentable but an "almost predictable, stage of Turkey's democratic transition." In the late 2010s his criticism of Turkish economic policy won him popularity with the opposition.

  In October 2022 he met Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, leader of the opposition Republican People's Party, and in December 2022 Kılıçdaroğlu named him among his economic advisers. Pro-Erdoğan circles attacked the move, and one pro-government columnist pointed to Acemoglu's Armenian roots. Finance professor Özgür Demirtaş called that tweet "both racist and presumptuous." The pro-government newspaper Yeni Şafak ran a headline mocking him over Armenia's economic crisis.

  Armenia draws the same directness. At the Armenian Economic Association's October 2013 conference at Yerevan State University, he joined by video and argued that Armenia's problem is political, not geographic, cultural or geopolitical. He urged its government to become more responsive to citizens so the country would cease to be an oligarchy. At a September 2016 conference in Toronto he criticized the Armenian diaspora for legitimizing successive governments. In April 2017, at the USC Institute of Armenian Studies, he said Armenia could have resembled the Czech Republic or Estonia. Instead, he said, it looks more like Azerbaijan or Uzbekistan, "which is a real shame."

  After the 2018 Armenian revolution, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan wrote on Facebook that Acemoglu was ready to help "restore and develop" the economy. The two spoke over the internet in June 2018, and in July 2019 Acemoglu met Deputy Prime Minister Tigran Avinyan in Boston. In 2020 he publicly stressed the importance of institutional reform for Armenia's long-term development.

  His commentary has also reached other countries. After Ukraine's 2014 revolution, he urged in The Globe and Mail that its leaders spread political power and economic benefits widely, including to Russian speakers. He traced the Greek debt crisis to weak institutions and clientelistic politics, and said Europe must either integrate its fiscal and banking systems more deeply or abandon monetary integration.

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• 8. Recognition and the Nobel

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  In a 2011 survey of 299 economics professors in the US, Acemoglu ranked third, behind Paul Krugman and Greg Mankiw, among "Favorite Living Economists Under Age 60." Data from Research Papers in Economics named him the most cited economist of the decade leading to 2015. Foreign Policy placed him 88th on its 2010 list of Top 100 Global Thinkers, "for showing that freedom is about more than markets." Readers of Prospect Magazine voted him the world's top thinker for 2024.

  Fellow scholars have been generous. Francis Fukuyama calls him and Robinson "two of the world's leading experts on development." Clement Douglas wrote that the scope, depth and volume of his scholarship are "nothing short of breathtaking, verging on implausible." Angus Deaton called him a "young superstar" and a model of how economics should go, where you do history but know enough mathematics to model it.

  The honors form a long list. The Econometric Society made him a Fellow in 2005, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences elected him in 2006, and the National Academy of Sciences followed in 2014. The American Economic Association gave him the John Bates Clark Medal in 2005. Other prizes include the John von Neumann Award in 2007, the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics in 2012 and the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in 2016. The Jean-Jacques Laffont Prize followed in 2018, the Kiel Institute's Global Economy Prize in 2019, and the British Academy named him a Corresponding Fellow in 2021. Turkish President Abdullah Gül awarded him the Presidential Culture and Arts Grand Award in Social Sciences in 2013. Honorary degrees run from Utrecht University in 2008 to the University of Oxford in 2026.

  He had long been considered a prospective Nobel laureate. In 2024 he shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Robinson and Johnson, for comparative studies of prosperity among nations. The committee recognized their work on how institutions shape development, separating inclusive institutions that spread participation and growth from extractive ones that concentrate power and wealth in a few hands. Acemoglu became the second ethnic Armenian laureate, after Ardem Patapoutian. He is also the third Turkish national, following Orhan Pamuk and Aziz Sancar.

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