Daron Acemoglu argues institutions, not climate or culture, decide which nations get rich
An Istanbul-born economist of Armenian descent finished his PhD at the London School of Economics by age 25 and has taught at MIT since 1993. With James Robinson and Simon Johnson he built a case that political and economic rules explain the wealth gap between countries, work that won the three of them the 2024 Nobel economics prize.
Acemoglu grew up in Istanbul, the son of a commercial lawyer and a poet who ran the Armenian elementary school he attended. After a BA at York in 1989 he took a master's and then a doctorate at the LSE, finishing in 1992; one examiner remarked that even the three weakest of the seven thesis chapters would have earned the degree on their own. He lectured at the LSE for a year, joined MIT as an assistant professor, gained tenure in 1998 and was named an Institute Professor, the school's top faculty honour, in July 2019.
His central partnership is with Robinson, a British political scientist. Their 2006 book on the economic origins of dictatorship and democracy asked when elites stop trying to overturn democratic rule, pointing to factors such as inequality, crises and the shape of the economy. Why Nations Fail, from 2012, made the argument for a general audience: sustained growth needs political stability and creative destruction, and Britain industrialised first because the Bill of Rights of 1689 limited grants of monopoly. Jeffrey Sachs faulted it for ignoring geopolitics and natural resources, and Bill Gates found it disappointing, while other reviewers praised its ambition.
Later books widened the frame. The Narrow Corridor in 2019 described liberty as surviving only when state and society keep evolving to check each other, a dynamic the authors call the red queen effect. Power and Progress, written with Johnson in 2023, contends that new technology does not spread its gains automatically and takes a sceptical view of artificial intelligence's effects on jobs, wages and democracy, proposing remedies from tax reform to breaking up big tech.
His empirical work has estimated that democratisation lifts GDP per capita by around 20% over the long run. He received the John Bates Clark Medal in 2005, edited Econometrica from 2011 to 2015, and in 2015 was ranked the most cited economist of the previous decade by RePEc data.
Source: Daron Acemoglu
