Leader of the Pack

Dozens of scientific papers and four thick books.

Daron Acemoglu, 57, has been the intellectual heart and cultural soul of MIT’s Economics Department since 2011, when Peter Diamond retired. Insiders have known as much for a decade. Now Acemoglu has a Nobel Prize to make it clear to others.

Acemoglu was recognized in October by Sweden’ Royal Academy of Sciences, along with Simon Johnson , of MIT’s Sloan School Management, and James A. Robinson, of the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, “for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity”

Unlike the economics departments of Harvard, Princeton, Chicago, and Stanford, MIT’s department always has preferred to single out a strong personality to serve as representative of its distinctive culture. Acemoglu is the fourth such figure in eighty-five years, succeeding Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, and Peter Diamond. Like the others, Acemoglu is one of a dozen Institute Professor, the highest honor a MIT can bestow on its own.

Unlike the others, however, Acemoglu’s reputation rests mainly on three lengthy literary books, three of them written with Robinson. (Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, 2005; Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty, 2011; and The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the fate of Liberty, 2019. The fourth, Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, appeared last year. The dazzling Why Nations Fail is generally considered a modern classic, on a par with A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy (Princeton, 2018), by Joel Mokyr.

Members of MIT’s economics faculty have earned eights Nobels in sixteen years (Daron Acemoglu, Angrist Banerjee, Peter Diamond, Esther Duflo, Bengt Holmstrom, and Michael Kremer, now at the University of Chicago), with two others probably deemed prizeworthy, Drew Fudenberg and Robert Townsend. Any number of other luminaries in other domains have taught there in recent years, including Rudi Dornbusch, Stanley Fischer, Olivier Blanchard (who spotted and hired the unlikely Acemoglu), and James Poterba. Three winners of the economist-under-forty Clark medal – Isaiah Andrews, David Donaldson, and Amy Finkelstein – are waiting in the wings.

In their scientific background, the Nobel Committee zeroed in on the trio’s achievement:

There is also no commonly accepted view of how economic institutions should be conceptualized and measured. Systematically measuring their historical evolution is even harder, given the limitations in the data….In two seminal papers, Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2001, 2002) greatly enhanced the study of the impact of economic institutions on economic prosperity. In particular, they employed a design-based – or quasi-experimental – approach using the experience of European colonialism as a “natural experiment”

What were those natural experiments? There were many, in all corners of the world. If you want to know more about how economic and political patterns of the past determined the wealth and poverty of nations around the world today, get a copy of highly readable Why Nations Fail. To get a sense of the clever empiric behind the book, read the Scientific Background essay from the Nobel site. Or settle for the press release. If you prefer to listen (and are an early riser), watch the laureates’ lectures (scroll down) on Sunday, December 8, at 08:00 EST.

All that is economics. This much has been sociology.