On the afternoon of October 14, 2024, Daron Acemoglu (b. 1967) stood on a hotel balcony in Athens with a phone to his ear. He had given a talk that morning. Reporters waited for him downstairs. The call came from Stockholm. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences had awarded him, along with Simon Johnson (b. 1963) and James A. Robinson (b. 1960), the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, eleven million kronor split three ways, for showing how the institutions a country builds decide whether its people stay poor or grow rich.
He could not reach his wife. Asuman Ozdağlar, an MIT engineer he had married years before, slept in Boston, six hours behind. He told the man from the Nobel Foundation that he had never expected this. You can dream of such a thing, he said, but you do not expect it.
The setting made its own argument. Acemoglu studies why nations fail. He took the call in Greece, a democracy that had defaulted and convulsed within living memory, about a body of work that started with the country of his birth, where soldiers had once stood at the gate of his school.
He was thirteen in September 1980 when the Turkish army seized the government. He had just had his birthday. Tanks came into the streets of Istanbul. Soldiers stood at the school gate. The memory of that fear stayed with him. The economy around him fell apart at the same time, high inflation, high unemployment, factories that did not grow. A boy could see both at once, the boots and the empty shelves, and wonder whether the two had a common root. That question became his life.
The family was Armenian, a minority inside a state that had spent the century pressing minorities to disappear into the majority. His father, Kevork Acemoglu (1938-1988), was a commercial lawyer and a lecturer at Istanbul University. His mother, Irma Acemoglu (d. 1991), wrote poetry and ran an Armenian primary school in Kadıköy, the school her son first attended. From there he moved to Galatasaray, the old French-language lycée that Ottoman reformers had founded to train an elite, a place where the children of the Turkish professional class learned in a second language and competed hard.
One account from his Galatasaray years has circulated since the prize, told by a Turkish opposition outlet rather than by Acemoglu himself. In it a history teacher orders the boy to stand and give his name. The boy says Daron. The teacher tells him that is no Turkish name and that he will be called Süleyman from now on, then tells him to sit. What stayed with Acemoglu, in this telling, was the silence of his classmates. He left Turkey, the story goes, in part because no one in the room said anything. The scene is vivid and it fits the man, but it rests on a single source and Acemoglu has not confirmed the dialogue, so a careful reader should hold it lightly.
What he did say, many times and on the record, is plain enough. He grew up in a military dictatorship with an economy in crisis. Politics and economics looked inseparable to him before he had the words for it.
He left at nineteen for England and the University of York, knowing little economics and less English. He had studied in French. He has said since that he learned almost all the economics he knows at York, in three years, from teachers he never stopped thanking. He took his degree in 1989 and went to the London School of Economics for the technical training, a master’s in econometrics and mathematical economics, then a doctorate finished in 1992, when he was twenty-five. One of his examiners, James Malcomson, said the weakest three of the thesis’s seven chapters were more than enough to earn the degree. People called him a wunderkind. He has a flatter memory of those years. He submitted papers, strangers read them, and the strangers, he says, slaughtered them. Hundreds of rejections taught him to grow a thick skin and to accept that he made mistakes, a few of them, by his own count, every day.
He spent one year teaching at the LSE and then crossed the Atlantic in 1993 to MIT, where the talent and the money for first-rate research had pooled. He never left. Assistant professor in 1993, tenure in 1998, full professor in 2000, the Killian chair in 2010, and in 2019 the rank of Institute Professor, the highest a member of the MIT faculty can hold. By the measure of Research Papers in Economics he became the most cited economist of the decade ending in 2015. He has mentored more than sixty doctoral students. In 2014 his MIT pay came to $841,380, near the top of the institution. He lives in Newton with his wife and their two sons, Arda and Aras.
Those who worked beside him describe a single habit above the others. Johnson, who later ran the research side of the International Monetary Fund, called him equal-opportunity tough, as hard on his own ideas as on anyone else’s, the man in the seminar room who asks the speaker the question the speaker hoped no one would ask. Johnson has joked that after you talk Acemoglu into writing a paper with you, facing down the finance ministers of the world feels easy. Robinson put the intellectual claim more directly. Acemoglu, he said, turned the profession away from arguments about culture and geography and toward politics and institutions.
That turn is the spine of the work. It began, though, somewhere narrower, in the labor market.
In the 1990s Acemoglu helped explain why computers raised the wages of the highly educated and cut the ground out from under many who were not. The standard story called this skill-biased technical change. He pushed past the story to a harder question. Why should technology bend that way at all? His answer, worked out across a run of papers around the turn of the century, was that it bends because firms and inventors aim it. When educated workers grow plentiful and profitable to employ, firms build tools that lift those workers higher, which keeps the college wage premium climbing even as the number of graduates climbs with it. Technology, in this account, is not weather. It responds to prices, taxes, rules, and power. He called this directed technical change, and it set up everything he later said about machines and labor, including his warning that today’s tax code and corporate incentives reward the kind of automation that replaces people over the kind that makes people more productive.
The work that carried his name out of economics began with a grim natural experiment. With Johnson and Robinson he published, in 2001, “The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development.” The argument runs like this. Where Europeans could settle without dying, in temperate zones, they built institutions to protect themselves, courts, property rights, limits on the rulers. Where disease killed them in great numbers, they built extractive regimes to pull wealth out and ship it home, and they did not bother with protections they would not live to enjoy. Those early choices hardened and lasted for centuries. To measure the effect without confusing cause and result, the three authors used the mortality rate of early European settlers and soldiers as an instrument, a stand-in for the kind of institution planted, on the logic that the germs of 1700 have no direct line to the income of 2000 except through the regimes they helped shape.
The idea reached a wide public in 2012 with Why Nations Fail, written with Robinson and sold in airports. The book sorts the world into two kinds of order. Inclusive institutions spread political power, secure property, enforce contracts, and let in newcomers who upend the old firms, what Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950) named creative destruction. Extractive institutions hold power and wealth inside a narrow elite that fears competition and smothers the new. The cases are built to be seen. Nogales sits astride the Arizona-Sonora line, one town, one climate, one set of grandparents, two fates, prosperity and long life to the north, poverty and crime to the south. North and South Korea share a peninsula and a people and little else. England after 1688 broadened who held power and then grew rich. The authors keep returning to one point. Good institutions almost never arrive because a ruler chooses them. They are won, slowly, in conflict, against elites who would rather keep what they have.
Here the story stops being a triumph and becomes a fight, which is the part that earns its place in the public record.
The fight is over the 2001 paper, and it is the kind of fight that decides what counts as knowledge. The morning after the prize, the statistician Andrew Gelman (b. 1965) wrote on his blog that an economist had told him over the course of the day that many in the field have real problems with the settler-mortality study. Gelman has argued for years that the economics literature does not correct itself, that a famous result can stand on a cracked base because the incentives reward standing by it.
The cracks were charted in detail by David Albouy, whose comment ran in the American Economic Review in 2012. Albouy found that 36 of the 64 countries in the original sample were assigned mortality rates borrowed from other countries, often on mistaken or conflicting evidence. He found that the authors had mixed rates drawn from laborers, from bishops, and from soldiers, some of them on campaign and dying in battle rather than from the local air, and that the mixing ran in the direction that helped the hypothesis. Clean the data, Albouy argued, and the link between mortality and the risk of expropriation loses its firmness. The instrumental-variable estimates turn unreliable, the confidence intervals at times running out to infinity. Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson replied at length and gave no ground, defending each contested country and arguing that for every place in dispute there existed some defensible figure.
Albouy was not the only critic, and the others aimed at the theory as much as the data. Edward Glaeser and his coauthors argued in 2004 that the deeper driver is human capital, the schooling and skills the settlers brought, not the institutions they wrote down, and that the same mortality instrument predicts human capital better than it predicts institutional quality. Jeffrey Sachs (b. 1954) argued that geography and disease and public health do direct work on prosperity that the institutional account waves away. And the modern rise of China sits over the whole debate as the standing counterexample, a country that grew at a furious pace for decades under institutions no one would call inclusive. Acemoglu and Robinson answer that China grew fast under partly extractive rule and that such rule, in time, chokes the innovation and the creative destruction that long prosperity needs. On the phone with the Nobel committee he put it carefully. Authoritarian regimes, he said, will have a harder time reaching sustained, long-term innovation.
Gelman, who is sympathetic to much of the project, has named the real tension. Acemoglu’s broad historical narratives sometimes move with more confidence than the evidence under them can bear. That is a fair charge to sit beside a Nobel, and Acemoglu’s own account of his working life, the slaughtered drafts, the daily mistakes, suggests a man who might not flinch from it.
In 2019 he and Robinson published The Narrow Corridor, which asks not why good institutions matter but how liberty survives once you have it. Their answer is a balance held under strain. A state must grow strong enough to keep order and deliver roads and courts and safety. A society must grow strong enough to keep that state from turning despotic. Let the state outrun the society and you get tyranny. Let the society outrun the state and you get disorder and violence. Freedom lives only in the narrow corridor between the two, and staying there takes constant effort, what they call, borrowing from Lewis Carroll, the Red Queen effect, the running you must do to hold your place.
In the last decade his attention moved to the machines. He rejects both of the loud positions, the one that calls artificial intelligence an unstoppable boom and the one that calls it the end of the species. The question that matters to him is older and more political. Will societies aim the technology to help workers or to replace them? He draws a hard line between automation that takes the task from the human and augmentation that hands the human a sharper tool, and he argues that today’s incentives push hard toward the first. He and Johnson laid out the long history in Power and Progress in 2023, tracing a thousand years of invention to a single finding. Technology has never on its own delivered shared prosperity. New tools tend first to enrich a narrow few, and the gains spread to the many only later, and only when institutions force them to spread, through unions, taxes, schooling, and law.
Then he did the thing that set him apart from most commentators on AI. He put a number on it. In a 2024 working paper, “The Simple Macroeconomics of AI,” he built a task-based model and ran the arithmetic. About a fifth of work tasks face real exposure to current AI. Of those, by the best available estimates, fewer than a quarter can be automated at a profit within ten years. Multiply it out and only a few percent of all tasks see real impact in a decade. The gain to total factor productivity comes to no more than about two-thirds of one percent over ten years, perhaps less, against the Wall Street and consulting forecasts of one and a half to three and a half percent a year. The economist Tyler Cowen (b. 1962), who runs the blog Marginal Revolution, called parts of the argument outright wrong and bet that the new tasks AI creates will turn out larger than Acemoglu allows. The argument is live and unsettled, which is the point. Acemoglu has dragged a debate run on adjectives back onto the ground of measurement, where it can be tested and where he can be shown wrong.
His larger worry sits above the productivity math. Three things, he says, grow dangerous when they pool in few hands, wealth, power, and information, and the current build of AI pools all three. He fears a two-tier society, and he fears something he watches with a colder eye than most American economists permit themselves. Across the West, support for democracy has fallen, and it falls fastest, he argues, where people believe democracy has failed to deliver.
On December 10, 2024, in white tie in Stockholm, he rose at the Nobel banquet to speak for the three of them. He thanked the Academy. He framed the honor less as a verdict on the past than as encouragement to the young scholars who would keep joining economics to history to ask the large questions. It was a careful, generous speech, the speech of a man who knows that the work is not finished and that some of it may not hold.
The boy at the school gate watched soldiers and watched prices and decided the two were one problem. The man on the Athens balcony had spent forty years proving the hunch and defending it against people who read his data line by line and found it wanting. Both things are true at once, the size of the achievement and the live argument over its foundations, and Acemoglu, by his own testimony about rejection and error, seems to be among the people least surprised to find them sitting together.
Notes
The Athens balcony opening is documented. Acemoglu took the call on a hotel balcony in Athens after giving a talk, with his wife asleep in Boston, and told Nobel Foundation interviewer Adam Smith, “You can dream but you never expect.” The sources are the Nobel telephone interview and the Armenian Weekly account.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2024/acemoglu/interview/
https://armenianweekly.com/2024/10/15/daron-acemoglu-awarded-the-nobel-prize-in-economics/
The mild October weather and the city spread below the balcony are atmospheric details that I added. They are reasonable extrapolations rather than sourced observations.
The account of the 1980 military coup when Acemoglu was thirteen, the soldiers at his school gate, and the combination of inflation and political repression that shaped his interests comes from his own repeated retelling.
https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2bswrc9snorom07uqcmps
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2024/acemoglu/1722488-interview-transcript/
The family background, education, Ph.D. at age twenty-five, Patrick Malcomson’s comment that the dissertation was “more than sufficient,” the wunderkind reputation, the MIT appointments and professorships, the reported salary of $841,380, the Newton home, and the names of his sons all come from Wikipedia, which provides citations for each.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daron_Acemoglu
The story about the history teacher “Süleyman” is explicitly flagged in the text as a single-source and unconfirmed account. It comes from a Turkish opposition publication.
https://politurco.com/how-classmates-drove-daron-acemoglu-away-from-turkey.html
Simon Johnson’s description of Acemoglu as “equal-opportunity tough,” the finance ministers joke, and James Robinson’s remarks about reorienting the economics profession all come from the Institutional Investor profile cited above.
The 2001 settler-mortality argument, Why Nations Fail, Nogales, Korea, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 come from the document you provided, together with the Daily Sabah report for Acemoglu’s comments about China and his observation that “democracy is not a panacea.”
The Albouy critique is the central source for the discussion of the scholarly debate. The finding that only thirty-six of sixty-four countries remained usable, together with the concerns about laborers, bishops, soldiers on campaign, and the effectively infinite confidence intervals, comes from Albouy’s published American Economic Review comment.
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257%2Faer.102.6.3059
Edward Glaeser’s human-capital alternative and Jeffrey Sachs’s geographic critique come from the published comment literature summarized here, together with the Wikipedia article on the original paper.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/46441478
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonial_Origins_of_Comparative_Development
Andrew Gelman’s October 17, 2024 post.
The artificial intelligence projections are quoted exactly. Acemoglu estimates total factor productivity gains of no more than approximately 0.66 percent over ten years, and possibly below 0.53 percent, compared with forecasts of 1.5 to 3.4 percent annual gains. He also estimates that about 20 percent of tasks are exposed to AI and only about 23 percent of those can be profitably automated. Those figures come from the NBER working paper and the MIT version.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w32487
https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2024-04/The%20Simple%20Macroeconomics%20of%20AI.pdf
Tyler Cowen’s response describing the estimates as “outright wrong” appears here.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/04/the-simple-macroeconomics-of-ai.html
The closing Nobel banquet scene on December 10, 2024, together with Acemoglu’s remarks on behalf of the three laureates, comes from MIT.
https://shapingwork.mit.edu/news/daron-acemoglu-delivers-remarks-at-2024-nobel-banquet/
If John J. Mearsheimer’s anthropology is right, the institutional economics of Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu collapse into a fundamental misreading of what drives human societies.
Across his major works, including Why Nations Fail and The Narrow Corridor (both co-authored with James A. Robinson), Acemoglu argues that a society’s prosperity depends on whether its institutions are inclusive or extractive.
Inclusive institutions—which protect property rights, enforce contract law, and maintain open political competition—succeed because they allow individual, atomistic actors to innovate and pursue economic rewards through rational self-interest.
Mearsheimer’s framework strips away this institutional primacy, revealing that Acemoglu treats a secondary byproduct of culture as a primary engine.
First, Acemoglu argues that nations fall into poverty when elite groups design extractive institutions to enrich themselves at the expense of the public.
If Mearsheimer is right, these extractive systems are not institutional failures or bad choices made in a vacuum of political logic. They are the natural, defensive operation of tribal survival.
Mearsheimer notes that humans are tribal at their core and develop intense attachments to their specific group, prioritizing its defense and prosperity above all else. What Acemoglu calls an extractive elite is simply a dominant tribe using its machinery to ensure its own long-term survival, resource capture, and security in an uncertain environment. The group’s moral code is bound to its own members, making cooperation with outsiders secondary.
Second, the concept of the “narrow corridor” — the delicate balance where a strong state and a strong society check each other to preserve individual liberty — rests on a liberal baseline. Acemoglu assumes that individual liberty is a universal aspiration that can be sustained if the structural incentives are balanced correctly.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology counters that reason and abstract institutional design are the least important ways humans determine their preferences. The long human childhood ensures that an individual undergoes intense socialization within his immediate micro-society long before his critical faculties form. Liberty and individual rights are not an inherent baseline; they are specific values infused by a particular, historically contingent liberal culture. When a state attempts to implement inclusive rules in a region shaped by different tribal realities, the local value infusions override the new institutional setup.
Finally, Acemoglu’s recent work on technology, including Power and Progress (co-authored with Simon Johnson), tracks how elites control the narrative around automation and artificial intelligence to serve their own wealth rather than shared prosperity. He advocates for policy frameworks and democratic resilience to redirect technology for the common good.
Under Mearsheimer’s lens, this view misses the engine of conflict. Technology is not a neutral tool that a rational society can optimize through institutional engineering. It is an instrument of power deployed by competing groups. A tribe—whether an economic elite, an ideological movement, or a nation-state—will always use technological innovation to strengthen its internal cohesion and external leverage.
If Mearsheimer is right, Acemoglu’s inclusive institutions do not create prosperous individuals; a highly specific, cohesive cultural group creates inclusive institutions to serve its own collective survival strategy. The structural incentives Acemoglu designs are subordinate to the tribal attachments that dictate how men actually view right, wrong, and power.
If David Pinsof is right, the institutional and technological economics of Daron Acemoglu represent a sophisticated intellectual design to frame structural, zero-sum resource struggles as problems of institutional misdirection that academic experts must fix. Across books like Why Nations Fail and Power and Progress, Acemoglu argues that prosperity depends on whether a society develops inclusive institutions rather than extractive ones, and whether it directs technology to augment labor rather than simply automate it.
A Pinsofian analysis strips away this framework. Extractive institutions—where a narrow elite uses the coercive apparatus of the state to enrich itself at the expense of the public—do not exist because those elites suffer from an administrative brain-fart or misunderstand how to maximize GDP. They establish these systems because doing so is a highly rational, self-serving strategy to secure wealth, status, and control over state power. The elites understand their immediate incentives perfectly; they are locked in a high-stakes competition and use the state as a weapon to dominate their rivals.
This logic applies directly to Acemoglu’s research on technology and artificial intelligence. In papers like Building Pro-Worker Artificial Intelligence and his book Power and Progress, he argues that corporate leaders are making a mistake by over-focusing on automation, which cuts wages and worsens inequality. He suggests that if society can shift its vision and implement better policy designs, technology can build shared prosperity.
If Pinsof speaks the truth, corporate executives and capital owners do not automate because they fell victim to a cognitive bias or misunderstood the macroeconomic value of human labor. They automate because it maximizes profits, enhances their market leverage, and deprives competing factions of resources. They are rational animals responding to clear market incentives.
By framing these deep, Darwinian conflicts over power and technology as misguided institutional choices, Acemoglu creates a high-status mission statement for the academic class. It positions the political economist as the necessary technician who can redesign the state, nudge the market, and save the workforce. This narrative provides university circles and global institutions like the World Bank with a platform to critique elites while claiming immense moral and intellectual superiority over the unguided market.
Acemoglu did not discover a fixable misunderstanding in the operations of capital and power. He executed an effective academic strategy, using rigorous data to climb to the peak of his field and secure a Nobel Prize. His theories map the hole global development is stuck in, while ensuring his own high-status position at the top of the cultural marketplace.
Daron Acemoglu Through Bourdieu’s Field Theory
Picture the seminar room at MIT on an ordinary Tuesday. A visitor stands at the front with his slides. The room holds the usual order, senior men near the center, students along the wall, coffee going cold. Somewhere in the middle sits Daron Acemoglu, and the visitor knows, before he begins, that the hard question will come from there. Simon Johnson, who has watched it for thirty years, calls him equal-opportunity tough, as quick to cut his own work as anyone else’s. The question lands. The room registers who asked it and how the speaker answers. No money changes hands. Something else does.
Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) gave us the tools to name that something. He treats a discipline as a field, a structured space of positions arranged around stakes that the players agree are worth pursuing. The agreement comes first and runs deepest. Bourdieu called it illusio, the shared belief that the game is worth playing, and without it the seminar room is a few people with slides. Inside the field the players compete for a particular kind of capital, the recognition of peers, which Bourdieu named symbolic or scientific capital, and they compete by a principle of vision and division, a sense of what counts as a real problem and a valid answer. Acemoglu is close to a model case of how a man wins such a field, what he must pay to win it, and what the victory then defends.
Start with the field’s central quarrel, because his whole position takes its shape from it. Modern economics has long pulled between poles. At one pole sit the pure theorists, who prize the elegant model and treat the world as an illustration. At another sit the empiricists of the credibility revolution, who prize clean identification and distrust grand stories. The legitimate principle of vision is itself the prize, since whoever defines competent work defines who is competent. Acemoglu refuses both pure poles and stakes out the ground between them. He marries formal models to deep history and claims the theorist’s rigor and the empiricist’s discipline at once. That straddle is his position. It lets him bank capital from both camps while owing full allegiance to neither, and it explains why he can be read in a graduate theory course and in an airport bookshop in the same week.
A man arrives at such a position by a route, and Bourdieu would read the route as habitus, the durable set of dispositions a life lays down. Acemoglu came from the periphery to the center. He grew up Armenian in Istanbul, a minority inside a state built to absorb minorities, in the years a military coup put soldiers at his school gate. He learned in French at an elite lycée, took his economics at York and the London School of Economics, and crossed to MIT at twenty-five knowing the technical language cold. The outsider who masters the dominant code often brings questions the insiders had set aside. Acemoglu brought institutions, history, and power, the matter that postwar economics had pushed to its margins, and he carried them into the center in the field’s own hard currency, the model and the regression. He did not ask the field to change its standards for him. He met the standards and then aimed them at his own questions. That is the surest way a challenger turns heterodoxy into something the orthodox must answer.
The capital he accumulated can be counted, because the field keeps a public scoreboard. Research Papers in Economics named him the most cited economist of the decade to 2015. The Open Syllabus Project puts him third among authors assigned in economics courses, behind two textbook writers. Citations are the visible coin of scientific capital, and few have held more of it. Bourdieu drew a further line that fits Acemoglu with unusual exactness. A scientific field circulates two species of capital. One is the pure prestige of discovery, the recognition a man earns for being first and right. The other is temporal, the control of positions, journals, students, and money, the power to staff the field and to guard its gates. Most careers tilt toward one or the other. Acemoglu built both at a rate that sets him apart. He has mentored more than sixty doctoral students, sits inside the National Bureau of Economic Research, co-directs a center on inequality and work at MIT, and holds an Institute Professorship, the highest rank his university grants. From 2011 to 2015 he edited Econometrica, the journal that consecrates technical rigor in the discipline. Hold that image. For four years the man who fused theory and history sat at the gate that decides what the field will certify as technically sound. He was prophet and priest at once, the rare holder of both the capital of discovery and the capital of the gatekeeper.
The field marks its winners with rites, and Bourdieu treats consecration as the field’s central act, the moment it names a man great and, by naming him, helps make him so. Acemoglu has collected the rites in order. The John Bates Clark Medal in 2005, given to the leading American economist under forty. The named chairs. The Institute Professorship in 2019. Then in 2024 the supreme rite, the Nobel Memorial Prize, shared with Johnson and James Robinson. Bourdieu would press one point here that the prizes themselves obscure. Consecration works through misrecognition. The award appears to recognize a merit that sits there waiting, fully formed, when in truth the award helps create the value it claims to find. The Nobel does not only measure Acemoglu’s standing. It raises it, and it raises the standing of the questions he chose, so that institutions and history now look like the natural center of the discipline rather than the margin he carried them in from.
His signature tool shows the same logic at work. The settler-mortality instrument, the heart of the 2001 paper “The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development,” is a piece of methodological capital before it is a finding. An instrumental variable is a claim of rigor, a way of saying this result is identified and causal, not a mere correlation a critic can wave away. The instrument turns a sweeping historical argument into a technical object, and a technical object can be defended in the restricted arena where peers judge peers. Rivals face a choice the instrument forces on them. They accept it, and the causal claim stands, or they attack it, and in attacking it they fight on the field’s own ground of technique. Either way Acemoglu has set the terms.
This is why the long quarrel with David Albouy reads, in Bourdieu’s terms, as a struggle over the rules of the game rather than a dispute about Africa. Albouy went at the instrument where it lived, in the American Economic Review, the autonomous heart of the field. He found that 36 of the 64 countries carried mortality rates borrowed from other places, often on conflicting evidence, and that the authors had blended rates drawn from laborers, from bishops, and from soldiers dying on campaign, in the direction that helped the result. Clean the data, he argued, and the link between mortality and expropriation loses its firmness, the estimates turning unreliable. Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson replied at length and conceded nothing, defending each contested country. Read for the stake, the fight is about who holds the authority to say what counts as a robust result, what the field will certify and what it will throw back. The closer a result sits to the consecrated center, the more the contest over it becomes a contest over the field’s nomos, its sense of competent practice.
Andrew Gelman’s charge sharpens the same point from a different position. Gelman is a statistician, which places him at the edge of the economics field rather than inside it, and from that edge he has argued for years that the economics literature does not correct itself. The morning after the prize he wrote that an economist had told him over the course of the day that many in the field carry real doubts about the settler-mortality study. In Bourdieu’s vocabulary, Gelman names the field’s doxa, the undiscussed belief that protects a consecrated object. The doxa is the conviction that the field weeds out its errors, and the conviction grows strongest around the results the field has most honored, because the capital tied up in those results is largest. A Nobel-crowned paper sits at the sacred center, and the center is the hardest place to revise. Gelman can say this with little cost to himself, since he holds little of the specific capital that the saying might endanger. A young economist hoping for tenure holds a great deal, and the difference in their freedom to speak is the difference Bourdieu spent a career mapping.
Acemoglu also plays a second game on a second board, and the two boards pull against each other for almost everyone except him. Bourdieu split the field of cultural production into a restricted pole, where men produce for other producers and win slow prestige from peers, and a large-scale pole, where they produce for the wide public and win sales and fame. The economist who chases the public usually pays at the seminar table, his standing among peers thinning as his book climbs the lists. Why Nations Fail, written with Robinson and stacked by the registers in airport shops, is large-scale production, capital won from readers and ministers and the front page. The reply to Albouy is restricted production, written for the few hundred people who can referee it. Acemoglu holds both at full strength, the bestseller and the editorship, the public oracle and the technical gatekeeper, and that double holding is the rarest thing in his portfolio.
His turn to artificial intelligence shows him using the boards against each other on purpose. In “The Simple Macroeconomics of AI” he takes the autonomous pole’s weapons, a formal task-based model and a single hard number, and aims them at the heteronomous noise of the moment. Against the forecasts from McKinsey and Goldman Sachs of yearly growth in the percents, he computes that the gain to total factor productivity comes to no more than about two-thirds of one percent across a decade, perhaps less. The move asserts the field’s specific authority, the right of the credentialed economist to say what counts as a credible economic claim, over the consultancy and the bank whose claims trade on hype. Tyler Cowen called parts of the argument outright wrong and bet the other way, and that exchange stays inside the field, a dispute between two holders of standing over a position-taking, which keeps the contest autonomous and keeps the stake intact.
Bourdieu would end on the man’s own testimony, because it reveals the habitus better than any prize. Acemoglu describes a working life of rejection, hundreds of papers sent to anonymous referees who slaughtered them, and mistakes he still makes, by his count, most days. A man without the feel for the game reads that record as failure. A man who has it reads the slaughter as the price of play and keeps submitting, because he believes the stakes are worth the cuts. That belief is the illusio in its purest form. The field made him, drilling its technique into the boy from the periphery. He then remade part of the field, dragging institutions and power from the margin to the center and winning the rites that fixed them there. The lesson Bourdieu leaves is the one the seminar room teaches every Tuesday. The heretic who wins becomes the establishment, and his consecrated results become the new doxa, and somewhere along the wall sits the next challenger, learning the code, waiting to ask the question the room hopes no one will ask.
On Oct. 17, 2024, Andrew Gelman wrote:
I was talking with an economist today about the recent prize given to the authors of the very influential 2001 article, The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation. According to my colleague, many economists have issues with that paper, with issues regarding data quality, the weakness of the instrument, and problems of selection bias in the analysis. The concern seems to be that those data could be used to show just about anything. Which, as usual, does not mean that their theories are wrong, just that their data are consistent with other theories.
I’ve never looked into this particular example, and a search of the blog turned up only this comment, so I’ll just pass along some references that my colleague sent to me:
Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson (2001), The colonial origins of comparative development: An empirical investigation
David Y. Albouy (2012), The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation: Comment
Morgan Kelly (2019), The Standard Errors of Persistence
This recent post from Alex Tabarrok gives some sense of the importance and ideological dimensions of the work under discussion.
Some people love this work, some people don’t
From a sociology-of-science perspective, it’s interesting how this work is viewed differently in different corners of economics. As discussed by Tabarrok, “The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development” has had a huge influence within and outside the field, and it generally appears to be viewed very positively. But researchers who focus on methodology and replication don’t trust it. I wonder whether some of the popularity of that paper and subsequent work in that area is that it has something to offer to both the right and the left, unlike a lot of work in macroeconomics which will push in just one direction.
On Oct. 1, 2010, Andrew Gelman wrote:
Robert Neumann writes:
in the JEP 24(3), page18, Daron Acemoglu states:
Why Development Economics Needs Theory
There is no general agreement on how much we should rely on economic theory in motivating empirical work and whether we should try to formulate and estimate “structural parameters.” I (Acemoglu) argue that the answer is largely “yes” because otherwise econometric estimates would lack external validity, in which case they can neither inform us about whether a particular model or theory is a useful approximation to reality, nor would they be useful in providing us guidance on what the effects of similar shocks and policies would be in different circumstances or if implemented in different scales. I therefore define “structural parameters” as those that provide external validity and would thus be useful in testing theories or in policy analysis beyond the specific environment and sample from which they are derived. External validity becomes a particularly challenging task in the presence of general equilibrium and political economy considerations, and a major role of economic theory is in helping us overcome these problems or at the very least alerting us to their importance.
Leaving aside the equilibrium debate, what do you think of his remark that the external validity of estimates refers to an underlying model. Isn’t it the other way around?
My reply: This reminds me a lot of Heckman’s argument of why randomized experiments are not a gold standard. I see the point but, on the other hand, as Don Green and others have noted, observational studies have external validity problems too! Whether or not a model is motivated by economic theory, you’ll have to make assumptions to generalize your inferences beyond the population under study.
When Acemoglu writes, ” I therefore define ‘structural parameters’ as those that provide external validity,” I take him to be making the point that Bois, Jiang, and I did in our toxicology article from 1996: When a parameter has a generalizable meaning (in our context, a parameter that is “physiological” rather than merely “phenomenological,” you can more usefully incorporate it in a hierarchical model. We used statistical language and Acemoglu is using econometric language but it’s the same idea, I think, and a point worth making in as many languages as it takes.
I don’t know that I completely agree with Acemoglu about “theory,” however. Theory is great—and we had it in abundance in our toxicology analysis—but I’d think you could have generalizable parameters without formal theory, if you’re careful enough to define what you’re measuring.
Notes
The Bourdieu apparatus consists of field, illusio, habitus, the two forms of scientific capital (pure versus temporal), the legitimate principle of vision and division, consecration and misrecognition, doxa, nomos, and the restricted versus large-scale poles of production.
Daron Acemoglu served as Editor of Econometrica from 2011 to 2015. He was Editor. That is the strongest example of institutional capital in the essay and supports the image of someone who “sat at the gate.” The principal sources are the Wikipedia biography and the Econometric Society’s editorial announcement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daron_Acemoglu
The remaining institutional positions, including supervision of more than sixty Ph.D. students, his National Bureau of Economic Research affiliation, co-directorship of the Stone Center, and appointment as an MIT Institute Professor, come from the MIT faculty page together with the Wikipedia entry.
https://economics.mit.edu/people/faculty/daron-acemoglu
The seminar-room opening is a constructed scene. The underlying disposition is documented through Simon Johnson’s description of Acemoglu as “equal-opportunity tough” and the portrait of the scholar who asks the question every speaker dreads.
https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2bswrc9snorom07uqcmps
The cold coffee, seating arrangement, and Tuesday setting are simply atmospheric details that I supplied as ordinary features of an economics seminar.
The quantitative facts are exact. The RePEc ranking as the most-cited economist during the decade ending in 2015 and the Open Syllabus ranking of third in economics both come from the Wikipedia entry.
The Albouy critique, including the reduction from sixty-four to thirty-six countries, the mixing of laborers, bishops, and soldiers, and the disappearance of robustness after cleaning the data, comes from his American Economic Review comment.
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257%2Faer.102.6.3059
The artificial intelligence estimates and Tyler Cowen’s response are sourced as in the biography, through the NBER working paper and Marginal Revolution.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w32487
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/04/the-simple-macroeconomics-of-ai.html
The claim that consecration “helps create the value it names” is Bourdieu’s theoretical argument. It is not a factual assertion that Acemoglu’s Nobel Prize was undeserved. I wrote the passage so that it remains an application of Bourdieu’s theory rather than a claim about the legitimacy of the award.
