{"id":196811,"date":"2026-06-30T11:29:11","date_gmt":"2026-06-30T19:29:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=196811"},"modified":"2026-06-30T13:26:14","modified_gmt":"2026-06-30T21:26:14","slug":"daron-acemoglu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=196811","title":{"rendered":"Nobel Prize Winning Economist Daron Acemoglu"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the afternoon of October 14, 2024, Daron Acemoglu<\/a> (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<\/a> had awarded him, along with Simon Johnson<\/a> (b. 1963) and James A. Robinson<\/a> (b. 1960), the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences<\/a>, eleven million kronor split three ways, for showing how the institutions a country builds decide whether its people stay poor or grow rich.<\/p>\n

He could not reach his wife. Asuman Ozda\u011flar<\/a>, an MIT<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. His mother, Irma Acemoglu (d. 1991), wrote poetry and ran an Armenian primary school in Kad\u0131k\u00f6y, the school her son first attended. From there he moved to Galatasaray<\/a>, the old French-language lyc\u00e9e 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.<\/p>\n

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 S\u00fcleyman 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

He left at nineteen for England and the University of York<\/a>, 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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Those who worked beside him describe a single habit above the others. Johnson, who later ran the research side of the International Monetary Fund<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

That turn is the spine of the work. It began, though, somewhere narrower, in the labor market.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The idea reached a wide public in 2012 with Why Nations Fail<\/a>, 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<\/a> (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.<\/p>\n

Here the story stops being a triumph and becomes a fight, which is the part that earns its place in the public record.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> (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.<\/p>\n

The cracks were charted in detail by David Albouy, whose comment ran in the American Economic Review<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Albouy was not the only critic, and the others aimed at the theory as much as the data. Edward Glaeser<\/a> 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<\/a> (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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

In 2019 he and Robinson published The Narrow Corridor<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> (b. 1962), who runs the blog Marginal Revolution<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Notes<\/p>\n

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<\/i> account.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.nobelprize.org\/prizes\/economic-sciences\/2024\/acemoglu\/interview\/<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/armenianweekly.com\/2024\/10\/15\/daron-acemoglu-awarded-the-nobel-prize-in-economics\/<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.institutionalinvestor.com\/article\/2bswrc9snorom07uqcmps<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.nobelprize.org\/prizes\/economic-sciences\/2024\/acemoglu\/1722488-interview-transcript\/<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Daron_Acemoglu<\/a><\/p>\n

The story about the history teacher “S\u00fcleyman” is explicitly flagged in the text as a single-source and unconfirmed account. It comes from a Turkish opposition publication.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/politurco.com\/how-classmates-drove-daron-acemoglu-away-from-turkey.html<\/a><\/p>\n

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<\/i> profile cited above.<\/p>\n

The 2001 settler-mortality argument, Why Nations Fail<\/i>, Nogales, Korea, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 come from the document you provided, together with the Daily Sabah<\/i> report for Acemoglu’s comments about China and his observation that “democracy is not a panacea.”<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.dailysabah.com\/business\/economy\/acemoglu-johnson-and-robinson-win-2024-nobel-prize-in-economics<\/a><\/p>\n

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<\/i> comment.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.aeaweb.org\/articles?id=10.1257%2Faer.102.6.3059<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.researchgate.net\/publication\/46441478<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Colonial_Origins_of_Comparative_Development<\/a><\/p>\n

Andrew Gelman’s October 17, 2024 post.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu\/2024\/10\/17\/controversy-over-recently-honored-claims-in-the-paper-the-colonial-origins-of-comparative-development\/<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.nber.org\/papers\/w32487<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/economics.mit.edu\/sites\/default\/files\/2024-04\/The%20Simple%20Macroeconomics%20of%20AI.pdf<\/a><\/p>\n

Tyler Cowen’s response describing the estimates as “outright wrong” appears here.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/marginalrevolution.com\/marginalrevolution\/2024\/04\/the-simple-macroeconomics-of-ai.html<\/a><\/p>\n

The closing Nobel banquet scene on December 10, 2024, together with Acemoglu’s remarks on behalf of the three laureates, comes from MIT.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/shapingwork.mit.edu\/news\/daron-acemoglu-delivers-remarks-at-2024-nobel-banquet\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Daron Acemoglu and the Hero System of Explanation<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

September 1980. A boy of thirteen walks to school in Istanbul past men with rifles. The tanks came in the night. The radio plays military music. At the gate of the lycee a soldier looks him over and waves him through, and the boy, who is Armenian in a country that spent the century teaching its minorities to vanish into the mass, learns a thing about power that he will spend forty years turning into equations. By one account a teacher that year ordered him to stand and say his name, heard Daron, told him that was no Turkish name, and renamed him Suleyman on the spot, then told him to sit. The boy said nothing. The class said nothing. He has said since that the silence drove him out of the country.<\/p>\n

Hold the scene, because Ernest Becker<\/a> (1924-1974) would build everything from it. Becker argued that man is the animal who knows he will die and cannot bear the knowledge. Out of that unbearable fact he builds hero systems, cultural schemes that promise him a way to count for something that outlasts the body. Every society is a codified plan for heroism, a set of rules for earning the feeling that one’s life has a worth death cannot cancel. The terror runs in two channels. There is the terror of annihilation, the boot and the soldier and the name taken away. And there is the terror that even survival means nothing, that a man may live and die and leave no mark on the order of things, an accident in an indifferent world.<\/p>\n

Acemoglu carries both terrors in their pure forms, and his life’s work is a single answer to them. The first terror has a face, the arbitrary force that can erase a boy, a people, a name. The second terror arrived later, with the data. He has said the thing many times, that the ten richest countries hold incomes forty, fifty, sixty times those of the poorest, and that there is nothing natural about such a gap in a connected world. Read that as an economist reads it and it is a research question. Read it as Becker reads it and it is the second terror speaking. A world where some men live long and others die poor for no reason is a meaningless world, an absurd one, and the absurdity is the death-fear wearing a different coat.<\/p>\n

His hero system is the science of why nations fail, and it defeats both terrors at one stroke. Against the first, he names the killer. The thing that erases the boy and starves the nation has a name, extractive power, the narrow elite that hoards authority and smothers the new. To name the killer is to stop being its prey. Against the second, he makes the suffering legible. The gap is not random. It has a cause. It can be removed. And the man who finds the cause writes himself onto the one ledger that outlasts the flesh, the eternal record of knowledge, the citations that accumulate after the body is gone, the prize that fixes a name in the canon. Becker would say the corpus is the immortality project. The hundreds of papers are the bid for permanence. The Nobel is the canonization. The instrumental variable is the relic that proves the miracle happened.<\/p>\n

Notice the shape of his core story, because it is a subtraction story and the subtraction is where the heroism lives. Poverty, in his account, is not a positive thing that needs explaining. Prosperity is the natural condition of free men, and poverty is what remains after something has been taken away, after the boot has pressed down. Misery minus the extractive hand equals growth. The diagnosis carries the cure inside it. This is the heroic posture in its oldest form, the man who stands over the body of a dead nation, names the poison, and by naming it promises the antidote. He is the pathologist of nations, and the autopsy is an act of hope.<\/p>\n

A hero system feels like reality to the man inside it. His sacred words feel like plain description. They are not. They are the liturgy of one system among many, and the same word turns to a different metal in a rival’s mouth.<\/p>\n

Take institutions, the holiest word in his vocabulary. For Acemoglu it means the rules that distribute power, the courts and franchises and property protections that keep any one hand from closing around the whole. Carry the word to a man in a glass tower in the Gulf, a deputy who manages a sovereign fund the size of a continent’s savings, and watch it change. He fingers a string of amber beads and speaks of institutions with respect, and he means the ruling family, the long stewardship, the order that has kept his people fed and safe while the republics around them burned. Inclusive, to him, is a word foreigners use before the rioting starts. The same syllables, a different god. Carry institutions further, to a young man who has burned his thesis and now writes manifestos, and the word goes rancid in his mouth. Institutions are the dead hand, the committee, the thing that exists to say no. For him the sacred act is to tear them down. Three men, one word, three hero systems, and each hears the other as a blasphemer.<\/p>\n

Take creative destruction, the engine Acemoglu inherited from an earlier economist and treats as the breath of progress, the willingness to let the old firms die so the new can rise. Stand in the doorway of a workshop in the Andes where a man has cut the same cedar his father cut, and say the phrase to him. He does not have the English, but he knows the bulldozer, and he knows the dam upriver that the engineers called development and that drowned the field where his grandmother is buried. To him your creative destruction is a polite word for the thing that erases. The land is not a factor of production. It holds the dead. Now say the phrase to a Theravada monk who rises at four to sweep a courtyard he does not own. He smiles, because impermanence is the first truth he learned, and the rise and fall of firms is only the rise and fall of all things, dust returning to dust, and the error is not in the destroying but in the clinging, the belief that any arrangement of matter could be made to last. He would tell Acemoglu, gently, that the whole project rests on a wish that cannot be granted, the wish to make the world stay.<\/p>\n

Two rivals deserve more than a passing turn, because they fight Acemoglu on his own ground and refuse to lose.<\/p>\n

The first sits in Hefei, in a tower of black glass, the founder of a company that builds batteries for half the cars on earth. He wears a small enamel pin on his lapel and a watch he could not have dreamed of as a child eating thin congee in a village. He has read Why Nations Fail. He found it elegant and wrong. Across his desk an interviewer asks the question Acemoglu has spent a career answering, whether a country can grow rich without the broad franchise, and the founder laughs, not unkindly.<\/p>\n

“You think we did this with elections,” he says. “We did this with thirty years of one direction. My workers gave their twenties to it. I gave mine. We lifted more people out of poverty than any democracy in history, faster than any democracy in history. Your professor says it will not last, that we will choke ourselves.” He turns his palm up. “Maybe. Ask me in fifty years. But he has been saying it for twenty and I am still here, and the bridge outside my window went up in eighteen months. How long for a bridge in his country?”<\/p>\n

His hero system is national rejuvenation, the recovery of a civilization from a century of humiliation, and in it the sacred value is delivery, the visible proof that the people are rising. Democracy, to him, is the thing that talks while the bridge does not get built. He is not the villain of Acemoglu’s story. He is the protagonist of his own, and the two stories cannot both be the final word, which is why Acemoglu cannot stop arguing with him and answers, on the phone with Stockholm, that authoritarian regimes will have a harder time at sustained innovation. He says it carefully. He says it because the founder’s existence is the standing wound in his system, the case that will not resolve.<\/p>\n

The second rival sits in a low building south of San Francisco, in a fleece vest, and runs money into companies that build the machines. He has the number memorized, the one Acemoglu published, that artificial intelligence might lift productivity by two-thirds of one percent across a decade. He treats the number as heresy, and his contempt is the contempt of one believer for another, because he too has an immortality project and it is larger than Acemoglu’s. To him the machine is not a tool to be aimed by institutions. It is the next form of mind, the thing that breaks the human limit, the door out of death itself. Against that, a professor’s coefficient is a man measuring the tide with a teaspoon.<\/p>\n

“He’s modeling tasks,” the investor says, and he is almost laughing. “Tasks. You don’t model a phase change with a task list. He’s the guy in 1995 telling you the internet adds half a point to retail. He is going to be the most precisely wrong economist of the century, and he’ll have the standard errors to prove it.”<\/p>\n

Here the sacred word is the number, and the two men worship it in opposite directions. For Acemoglu the number is the discipline that defeats the second terror. To refuse the loose talk and put a figure on the thing, with its confidence interval, is the heroic act, the way a man drags the chaos into the light and makes it answer to evidence. For the accelerationist the number is the cage, the small mind’s refusal of the infinite, the failure of nerve dressed as rigor. One man earns his immortality by measuring. The other earns his by transcending measurement. They cannot hear each other because each has built his defense against death out of the other’s blasphemy.<\/p>\n

There is a third reading of the number that neither man holds, and it belongs to a Pentecostal preacher in Lagos who fills an arena on Sunday and lands at the private terminal on Monday. To him the question of why nations fail has an answer Acemoglu’s instrument can never reach. Nations fail under curses. They prosper under favor. The gap that Acemoglu calls institutional is, to the preacher, the visible shadow of an invisible war, and the cure is not a better franchise but a breaking of strongholds. He is not a fool. He has watched the institutional men come with their projects for fifty years and watched the poverty stay, and he has built, out of faith, a hero system that delivers what theirs delivers, the feeling that the suffering is not random and that a man can act against it. His god and Acemoglu’s god ask for different sacrifices. Both promise the same relief, the assurance that the death of the poor is not meaningless.<\/p>\n

Does Acemoglu know his science is a hero system. In part. He is not a naive man. He describes a working life of rejection, hundreds of papers sent out and slaughtered, mistakes he still makes most days, and that is the talk of a man who knows his ledger is fallible. He writes that democracy is not a panacea, that introducing it can breed conflict, that the corridor of freedom is narrow and easily lost. He sees the trade-offs at the level of policy with a clear eye. The blindness sits lower, at the level of the frame, and it is the necessary blindness of his kind of hero. The man whose whole defense against terror is the conversion of suffering into a removable cause cannot afford to meet suffering that has no cause and no cure. He cannot rest in the meaningless even for a moment, because the meaningless is the enemy his entire system exists to defeat. Show him a misery with no institutional root and he must find the root or the world tilts back toward absurdity. This is what Becker called the lie at the heart of character, and it is not a flaw to be fixed. It is the price of being able to function at all.<\/p>\n

Three coordinates, then, to fix the man.<\/p>\n

The hero. He is the diagnostician, the pathologist of nations, the one who stands over the dead country and names the poison and writes the name on the record that outlives him. His heroism is the heroism of explanation. He defeats the soldier at the gate by giving the soldier a name and a cause, and he defeats the indifference of the universe by proving that the gap between the living and the dying is no accident. The boy who lost his name to a teacher grew into the man who gives every nation its true name.<\/p>\n

The unnamed rival. He argues with the founder and the accelerationist because they fight him on the board he respects, the board of cause and consequence and growth. He cannot argue with the monk, and so he does not, because the monk denies the board. The monk says the forty-fold gap is samsara, that the cure is not a better instrument but the end of the craving that makes a man measure his life against another’s, that significance was never out there in the eternal record to be won. To take that seriously for one hour would dissolve the project. So it stays unnamed, the rival hero system that does not want what Acemoglu is selling, the one that would tell him the second terror is not a problem to be solved by explanation but a thing to be released.<\/p>\n

The cost the ledger cannot price. He is the man of the number, and the number is honest within its borders, and the borders are the cost. The land where the grandmother is buried does not enter the model as land. It enters, if at all, as a coefficient on output, and the thing that made it worth dying for falls out of the equation the moment the equation is well specified. His system buys him the defeat of meaninglessness, and it pays for that victory in a coin it cannot see, the whole register of human worth that does not convert to growth, the meanings that show up nowhere in total factor productivity because they were never quantities. The ledger that prices everything cannot price what it cannot count, and a man who has staked his soul on the ledger will go on calling that uncounted remainder noise, because the alternative, that the remainder is the point, is the one terror his hero system was built to keep from him.<\/p>\n

Notes<\/p>\n

The sacred-word device runs on his liturgy: institutions, creative destruction, the number. Each refracts through several systems so the same syllables turn to different metal. That is the engine you asked for, and I kept it from going industrial by varying the scene lengths and letting two rivals talk back at length while others pass in a single beat.
\nDialogue is invented for the composite archetypes, which is the honest way to do it, since attaching invented lines to a real named person would fail my front-page test. The founder and the investor are types, not real people. Acemoglu’s own lines are the documented short ones, “nothing natural” about the gap and “democracy is not a panacea” and the harder-time-at-innovation answer to Stockholm, all sourced in the earlier turns (Daily Sabah and the Nobel interview).
\nThe Suleyman renaming opens the essay because it is the purest image of the first terror, annihilation by arbitrary power. I marked it inside the prose as “by one account,” since it rests on a single Turkish opposition source (politurco.com) and Acemoglu has not confirmed the dialogue. For a hero-system essay the psychological truth carries weight even where the forensic record is thin<\/p>\n

The Great Delusion<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

If John J. Mearsheimer’s anthropology is right<\/a>, the institutional economics of Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu collapse into a fundamental misreading of what drives human societies.
\nAcross 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.
\nInclusive institutions\u2014which protect property rights, enforce contract law, and maintain open political competition\u2014succeed because they allow individual, atomistic actors to innovate and pursue economic rewards through rational self-interest.
\nMearsheimer\u2019s framework strips away this institutional primacy, revealing that Acemoglu treats a secondary byproduct of culture as a primary engine.
\nFirst, Acemoglu argues that nations fall into poverty when elite groups design extractive institutions to enrich themselves at the expense of the public.
\nIf 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.
\nMearsheimer 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.
\nSecond, 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.
\nMearsheimer’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.
\nFinally, 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.
\nUnder 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\u2014whether an economic elite, an ideological movement, or a nation-state\u2014will always use technological innovation to strengthen its internal cohesion and external leverage.
\nIf Mearsheimer is right, Acemoglu\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

‘A Big Misunderstanding’<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

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.
\nA Pinsofian analysis strips away this framework. Extractive institutions\u2014where a narrow elite uses the coercive apparatus of the state to enrich itself at the expense of the public\u2014do 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.
\nThis 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.
\nIf 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.
\nBy 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.
\nAcemoglu 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.<\/p>\n

Daron Acemoglu Through Bourdieu’s Field Theory<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 lyc\u00e9e, 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Andrew Gelman’s charge<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

On Oct. 17, 2024, Andrew Gelman wrote<\/a>: <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I’ve never looked into this particular example, and a search of the blog turned up only this comment<\/a>, so I’ll just pass along some references that my colleague sent to me:<\/p>\n

Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson (2001), The colonial origins of comparative development: An empirical investigation<\/a><\/p>\n

David Y. Albouy (2012), The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation: Comment<\/a><\/p>\n

Morgan Kelly (2019), The Standard Errors of Persistence<\/a><\/p>\n

This recent post<\/a> from Alex Tabarrok gives some sense of the importance and ideological dimensions of the work under discussion.<\/p>\n

Some people love this work, some people don’t<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On Oct. 1, 2010, Andrew Gelman wrote<\/a>: <\/p>\n

\n

Robert Neumann writes:<\/p>\n

in the JEP 24(3), page18, Daron Acemoglu states:<\/p>\n

\n

Why Development Economics Needs Theory<\/p>\n

\nThere 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.<\/p>\n

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?\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

My reply: This reminds me a lot of Heckman’s argument<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Notes<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Daron Acemoglu served as Editor of Econometrica<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Daron_Acemoglu<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.econometricsociety.org\/society\/news\/New-Econometrica-Editor-and-Co-Editors-announced-2015-02-26.html<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/economics.mit.edu\/people\/faculty\/daron-acemoglu<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.institutionalinvestor.com\/article\/2bswrc9snorom07uqcmps<\/a><\/p>\n

The cold coffee, seating arrangement, and Tuesday setting are simply atmospheric details that I supplied as ordinary features of an economics seminar. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/i> comment.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.aeaweb.org\/articles?id=10.1257%2Faer.102.6.3059<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu\/2024\/10\/17\/controversy-over-recently-honored-claims-in-the-paper-the-colonial-origins-of-comparative-development\/<\/a><\/p>\n

The artificial intelligence estimates and Tyler Cowen’s response are sourced as in the biography, through the NBER working paper and Marginal Revolution<\/i>.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.nber.org\/papers\/w32487<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/marginalrevolution.com\/marginalrevolution\/2024\/04\/the-simple-macroeconomics-of-ai.html<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Daron Acemoglu and the Convenience of Institutions<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Daron Acemoglu made part of his name by exposing convenient beliefs. He tells you that the comfortable explanations for why poor countries stay poor, that they sit in the wrong latitudes, that their cultures lack the work ethic or the trust or the spark, are evasions that serve the people who repeat them. The geography story lets the rich world off the hook. The culture story blames the victim. Behind both, he argues, stands a refusal to look at power, because looking at power is the thing that costs. He is, in this mode, a debunker, a man who reads a belief by asking whom it spares and whom it indicts.<\/p>\n

Stephen Turner<\/a> (b. 1951) built a body of work<\/a> around the move Acemoglu performs and around the question Acemoglu does not turn on himself. Turner studies expertise and the social life of knowledge, the patronage that funds it, the jurisdictions that experts defend, and the beliefs that persist less because the evidence compels them than because they pay. A convenient belief, in this reading, is one that does work for the people who hold it. It secures a position, sustains a demand, flatters an audience, or keeps a check arriving. Turner’s discipline carries a warning that separates it from cheap suspicion, and the warning is the whole point. Convenient is not the same as false. A belief can be useful to its holder and also true, and the frame does not settle which. It asks a narrower thing. It asks what the belief does, and how much of its grip it owes to that work rather than to its warrant.<\/p>\n

Turn the question on the institutions thesis, the claim that the rules distributing power are the cause of why nations grow rich or stay poor. The claim has constituencies, and each finds it convenient for its own reasons.<\/p>\n

Start with the profession that produced it. The grand question of civilizational wealth had long belonged to no one in particular, claimed in pieces by historians, geographers, anthropologists, and a scatter of economists who treated it as too large for a model. Acemoglu’s answer pulls the question inside economics and makes it answerable by the tools economists own, the formal model and the identified regression. The settler-mortality instrument is the device that does the pulling, because it turns a sweeping historical claim into a thing that looks like the discipline’s own product, defensible by the discipline’s own standards. Turner would note the convenience without sneering at it. A belief that expands the expert’s domain is the belief the expert has reason to find persuasive. The institutions thesis is convenient for economics because it keeps the prize question at home, and it rewards the methods the profession already trains its young to use.<\/p>\n

Move to the reader. Why Nations Fail sold in airport bookshops, and the books that sell in airport bookshops tell the buyer something he is glad to hear. The buyer is, on the whole, educated, Western, and democratic. The inclusive-extractive division hands him a flattering map. His own society is rich because it built good rules, distributed power, opened the doors to the newcomer who unseats the incumbent. The poor world is poor because its elites closed those doors. The story locates the failure in the failed and the credit in the successful, and it does this without dwelling long on the plantation, the gunboat, the extracted ore, or the plain luck of sitting on coal. A man at the departure gate can read it and feel that the world is, at bottom, just. Turner’s frame does not call that story false. It notes that a story this comforting to the people with the disposable income to buy hardcovers has reasons to spread that run alongside its evidence.<\/p>\n

Move to the apparatus that lives off the thesis. If institutions cause prosperity, then building institutions is a product, and there are buyers. The development banks, the donor agencies, the reform consultants, the governance indices, all of them gain a mission and a fee from the belief that the right rules, properly installed and monitored, deliver growth. Turner has written for years on the patronage that shapes what gets believed, the way funding binds a body of knowledge to the system that funds it. The institutions thesis is convenient for the institution-building trade in the most direct sense. It is the thesis that justifies the budget.<\/p>\n

Move, last, to the man. The belief is the ground his standing rests on, and the cost of giving it up is the corpus. Watch what happens when the ground is tested. David Albouy went at the settler-mortality instrument and found that more than half the countries in the original sample carried mortality rates borrowed from elsewhere, and that the rates mixed laborers, bishops, and soldiers dying on campaign in the direction that helped the result. Clean the data, he argued, and the finding loses its firmness. The convenient response to such a challenge is to concede nothing, to defend each contested country, to treat the instrument as sound and the critic as mistaken, and that is the response the authors gave. Andrew Gelman, watching from the edge of the field, has made the observation that fits Turner’s frame exactly. The economics literature, he says, does not correct itself. Turner would supply the reason. Correction is costly to the people whose position rests on the uncorrected result, and a belief that is expensive to abandon tends not to be abandoned, whatever the data say. The persistence is the thing to explain, and convenience explains a part of it that the evidence does not.<\/p>\n

China is where the convenience shows, because China is the counterexample the thesis can least afford. A country grew at a furious rate for decades under rules no one calls inclusive, and the thesis predicts this should not last. Pressed on it, Acemoglu answers that concentrated power will, in time, choke the innovation that long prosperity needs. He has given that answer for twenty years and the growth has gone on. Note what the answer does. It defends the master belief on a horizon that never quite arrives, so that no present fact can refute it and every future stumble can confirm it. Turner would not say the prediction is wrong. He would say its grip on the believer owes more to its necessity for the framework than to anything now observable, and that a belief held because the alternative would unmake the system is a convenient belief by definition.<\/p>\n

The artificial intelligence work looks, at first, like the exception, because the belief there is inconvenient for powerful people. Acemoglu put a number on it. He computed that AI might lift productivity by no more than two-thirds of one percent across a decade, against the forecasts from McKinsey and Goldman Sachs of yearly gains in the percents. That number cost him friends in the technology trade and earned him the contempt of the men whose valuations depend on the rapture they expect. So whose convenience does it serve. It serves his, and it serves his profession’s. It confirms his prior thesis, that technology delivers shared gains only when institutions aim it, so the new phenomenon enters the world already explained by the old framework and demands no revision of it. And it reasserts the credentialed economist’s authority over the question of what the economy will do, a question the consultancies and the venture funds had been answering without him. Turner’s sociology of expertise reads a move like this with care. When rival claim-makers crowd a discipline’s territory, the belief that restores the discipline’s authority is the belief the discipline finds convenient to hold. The honest extension of the frame cuts the other way too. The accelerationist’s optimism is far more convenient for the accelerationist, whose book depends on it, than Acemoglu’s caution is for Acemoglu. Convenience saturates the whole quarrel. The frame does not crown a winner. It denies either side the claim to be reasoning from evidence alone.<\/p>\n

How much of this does Acemoglu see. At one level, all of it, because the reading of belief by interest is his own instrument. His account of why elites block reforms that would enrich them is a convenient-beliefs account in everything but the name. The elite holds the belief that the existing order is natural and just because the belief guards the elite’s position, and Acemoglu sees through it with a cold eye. His testimony about his own work shows real humility at the level of particular results, the hundreds of rejected papers, the daily mistakes he admits to making. The suspicion stops one level up. The master belief, that the misery of nations is institutionally caused and therefore institutionally removable, is the belief he cannot turn the instrument on, and Turner’s frame predicts the exemption. That belief is the one that makes him necessary. A world where some suffering has no removable institutional cause is a world with less demand for the man who removes institutional causes. The conviction that the gap can be closed sustains the value of the closer. This is the deepest convenience in the system, and it is invisible from inside it, because to the man who holds it the conviction does not feel convenient. It feels like the plain truth about a fixable world.<\/p>\n

None of which shows the thesis to be wrong. Power may indeed be the thing the comfortable explanations evade, and Acemoglu may have his hand on the real cause while his critics fuss over the data. Turner’s frame leaves that question open and was never built to close it. What it establishes is smaller and harder to wave away. The thesis is held, by the profession that owns it, the donor that funds it, the reader that buys it, and the man whose name it carries, for reasons that include its convenience to each of them, and the share of its grip that convenience accounts for has never been measured by any instrument and never will be, because convenience is the one variable the people inside a belief are least able to see in themselves. The man who taught the world to ask whom a belief serves is owed the courtesy of the same question, and the answer, in his case, is the one his own method would expect. It serves him. Whether it is also true is a separate matter, and the two should not be mistaken for each other, which is the error the convenient belief exists to encourage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[162],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-196811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t