Daron Acemoglu

Kamer Daron Acemoğlu (born September 3, 1967) is a Turkish-American economist of Armenian descent who has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1993, where he is currently the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics, and was named an Institute Professor at MIT in 2019. His primary research fields include political economy, development economics, and labor economics. He received the John Bates Clark Medal in 2005, and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2024.

Acemoglu ranked third, behind Paul Krugman and Greg Mankiw, in the list of "Favorite Living Economists Under Age 60" in a 2011 survey among American economists. In 2015, he was named the most cited economist of the past 10 years per Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) data. According to the Open Syllabus Project, Acemoglu is the third most frequently cited author on college syllabi for economics courses after Mankiw and Krugman.

In 2024, Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson were awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for their comparative studies in prosperity between states and empires. He is regarded as a centrist with a focus on institutions, poverty and econometrics.

Early and personal life

Kamer Daron Acemoğlu Acemoğlu is the Turkified version of the Armenian last name Ajemian (Աճէմեան). Its root derives from the Arabic term ajam, used for non-Arabs, especially Persians. Most of Turkey's Armenians changed their last names due to the 1934 Surname Law. His first name is the Western Armenian version of Taron, a male given name from a historic region. was born in Istanbul to Armenian parents on September 3, 1967. He became interested in politics and economics as a teenager.

Acemoglu is a naturalized US citizen. and speaks some Armenian. He is married to Asuman "Asu" Ozdağlar, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, who is the daughter of İsmail Özdağlar, a former Turkish government minister. Together, they have authored several articles. , they live in Newton, Massachusetts, with their two sons, Arda and Aras.

Academic career

thumb|Acemoglu in 2009

thumb|Acemoglu in his office, January 2020

Acemoglu was a lecturer in economics at the London School of Economics from 1992 to 1993.

, he has mentored over 60 PhD students.

Acemoglu is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2005. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006, and to the National Academy of Sciences in 2014. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and a member of several other learned societies. He edited Econometrica, an academic journal published by the Econometric Society, from 2011 to 2015.

Acemoglu has authored hundreds of academic papers. He noted in 2011 that most his research of the past 15 years concerned with what can be broadly called political economy. His influences include Joel Mokyr, Kenneth Sokoloff, Seymour Martin Lipset, The book's title is derived from Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, a 1966 book by Barrington Moore Jr.

Romain Wacziarg praised the book and argued that its substantive contribution is the theoretical fusion of the Marxist dialectical materialism ("institutional change results from distributional struggles between two distinct social groups, a rich ruling class and a poor majority, each of whose interests are shaped primarily by economic forces") and the ideas of Barry Weingast and Douglass North, who argued that "institutional reform can be a way for the elite to credibly commit to future policies by delegating their enactment to interests that will not wish to reverse them." 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" work and a "great contribution to the field."

Why Nations Fail

thumb|120px|Why Nations Fail was included in the Shortlist of the 2012 [[Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award.]]

In their 2012 book, Why Nations Fail, Acemoglu and Robinson argue that economic growth at the forefront of technology requires political stability, which the Mayan civilization (to name only one) did not have, and creative destruction. The latter cannot occur without institutional restraints on the granting of monopoly and oligopoly rights. They say that the Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain, because the English Bill of Rights 1689 created such restraints.

Acemoglu and Robinson insist that "development differences across countries are exclusively due to differences in political and economic institutions, and reject other theories that attribute some of the differences to culture, weather, geography or lack of knowledge about the best policies and practices." For example, "Soviet Russia generated rapid growth as it caught up rapidly with some of the advanced technologies in the world [but] was running out of steam by the 1970s" because of a lack of creative destruction.

The book was written for a general audience. Warren Bass wrote of it in The Washington Post: "bracing, garrulous, wildly ambitious and ultimately hopeful. It may, in fact, be a bit of a masterpiece."

Clive Crook wrote in Bloomberg News that the book deserves most of the "lavish praise" it received. In his review in Foreign Affairs Jeffrey Sachs criticized Acemoglu and Robinson for systematically ignoring factors such as domestic politics, geopolitics, technological discoveries, and natural resources. He also argued that the book's appeal was based on readers' desire to hear that "Western democracy pays off not only politically but also economically." Bill Gates called the book a "major disappointment" and characterized the authors' analysis as "vague and simplistic." Ryan Avent, an editor at The Economist, responded that "Acemoglu and Robinson might not be entirely right about why nations succeed or fail. But at least they're engaged with the right problem."

The Narrow Corridor

In The Narrow Corridor. States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty (2019), Acemoglu and Robinson argue that a free society is attained when the power of the state and of society evolved in rough balance. The book introduces the concept of the "red queen effect," which suggests that liberty is maintained only when both the state and society continually evolve to keep each other in check.

Power and Progress

Published in 2023, Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity is a book by Acemoglu and Simon Johnson on the historical development of technology and the social and political consequences of technology. The book addresses three questions, on the relationship between new machines and production techniques and wages, on the way in which technology could be harnessed for social goods, and on the reason for the enthusiasm around artificial intelligence.

Power and Progress argues that technologies do not automatically yield social goods, their benefits going to a narrow elite. It offers a rather critical view of artificial intelligence (AI), stressing its largely negative impact on jobs and wages and on democracy.

Acemoglu and Johnson also provide a vision of how new technologies could be harnessed for social good. They see the Progressive Era as offering a model. They also discuss a list of policy proposals for the redirection of technology that includes: (1) market incentives, (2) the break up of big tech, (3) tax reform, (4) investing in workers, (5) privacy protection and data ownership, and (6) a digital advertising tax.

Papers

In a 2001 article, Acemoglu argued that the minimum wage and unemployment benefits "shift the composition of employment toward high-wage jobs. Because the composition of jobs in the laissez-faire equilibrium is inefficiently biased toward low-wage jobs, these labor market regulations increase average labor productivity and may improve welfare." Furthermore, he has argued that "minimum wages can increase training of affected workers, by inducing firms to train their unskilled employees."

Democracy and economy

Acemoglu et al. found that "democracy has a significant and robust positive effect on GDP" and suggested that "democratizations increase GDP per capita by about 20% in the long run." In another paper, Acemoglu et al. found that "there is a significant and robust effect of democracy on tax revenues as a fraction of GDP, but no robust impact on inequality.". The authors argue that democratic institutions contribute to economic growth by expanding education, improving public capacity, and encouraging investment.

Acemoglu and Philippe Aghion argued in 2001 that although deunionization in the US and UK since the 1980s is not the "underlying cause of the increase in inequality", it "amplifies the direct effect of skill-biased technical change by removing the wage compression imposed by unions."

According to Acemoglu and Robinson, unions historically had a significant role in creating democracy, especially in western Europe, and in maintaining a balance of political power between established business interests and political elites.

Nordic model

In a 2012 paper titled "Can't We All Be More Like Scandinavians?", co-written with Robinson and Verdier, he suggests that "it may be precisely the more 'cutthroat' American society that makes possible the more 'cuddly' Scandinavian societies based on a comprehensive social safety net, the welfare state and more limited inequality." They concluded that "all countries may want to be like the 'Scandinavians' with a more extensive safety net and a more egalitarian structure," however, if the United States shifted from being a "cutthroat [capitalism] leader", the economic growth of the entire world would be reduced. He argued against the US adopting the Nordic model in a 2015 op-ed for The New York Times. He again argued: "If the US increased taxation to Denmark levels, it would reduce rewards for entrepreneurship, with negative consequences for growth and prosperity." He praised the Scandinavian experience in poverty reduction, creation of a level playing field for its citizens, and higher social mobility. This was critiqued by Lane Kenworthy, who argues that, empirically, the US's economic growth preceded the divergence in 'cutthroat' and 'cuddly' policies, and there is no relationship between inequality and innovation for developed countries.

Colonialism

"The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development", co-written by Acemoglu, Robinson, and Simon Johnson in 2001, is by far his most cited work. Historical experience dominated by extractive institutions in these countries has created a vicious circle, which was exacerbated by European colonization. In "Non-Modernization" (2022), they further argue that modernization theory cannot account for various paths of political development "because it posits a link between economics and politics that is not conditional on institutions and culture and that presumes a definite endpoint—for example, an 'end of history'."

Automation and labor markets

Beginning in the late 2010s, Acemoglu expanded his research to focus on the economic effects of automation and artificial intelligence on labor markets. In collaboration with Pascual Restrepo, he examined how industrial robots affected employment and wages in the United States. Their study "Robots and Jobs: Evidence from U.S. Labor Markets" (2020) found that regions with greater exposure to industrial robots experienced larger declines in employment and modest reductions in wages, suggesting that the economic benefits of automation were not evenly distributed. Acemoglu and Restrepo extended this analysis in "Tasks, Automation, and the Rise in U.S. Wage Inequality" (2022), arguing that automation has contributed to rising wage inequality in the United States by replacing many middle-skill tasks while increasing demand for higher-skill labor. This body of research has influenced broader discussions on the future of work, emphasizing that technological change does not automatically benefit workers and can lead to unequal outcomes if incentives favor labor-replacing technologies. Acemoglu has argued that policy and institutional frameworks play an important role in determining whether new technologies complement human labor or substitute for it.

Views

Journalists and economists have described Acemoglu as a centrist.