Daron Acemoglu

Daron Acemoglu (born September 3, 1967, Istanbul, Turkey) is a Turkish-American economist and winner, with Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson, of the 2024 Nobel Prize for Economics (the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel) “for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.” Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson were recognized by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which selects the winners of the Nobel Prize for Economics, for having demonstrated that societies with political and economic institutions that effectively prevent popular participation in government and exploit their general population for the benefit of a ruling elite are historically and currently less prosperous than societies with more-inclusive institutions. Through their extensive research, the laureates established a causal relationship between relatively nondemocratic and exploitative institutions and the existence of widespread poverty and poor economic growth. Correspondingly, more-democratic societies that also afford greater economic opportunities for their general population have been and continue to be richer. The work of Acemoglu and his collaborators thus establishes, in the view of the Royal Swedish Academy, that efforts to reduce extreme differences in prosperity and quality of life between rich and poor countries across the globe should take political and economic institutions into account.

Education and academic career

Daron Acemoglu was born into a family of Armenian heritage. His mother was the principal of an Armenian school and his father a business lawyer. After graduating from a prestigious high school in Turkey, he moved to Great Britain, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematical economics at the University of York in 1989. He later attended the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where he received a master’s degree in 1990 and a doctoral degree in 1992. After serving as a lecturer at LSE, Acemoglu joined the economics faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he became a full professor in 2000 and was named Institute Professor in 2019.

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Contributions to studies of political economy and economic development

Acemoglu is the author or coauthor of numerous influential studies regarding the relations between social institutions and economic development. Among them are Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (2012), authored with his fellow laureate James Robinson, which argues that countries with “inclusive” political institutions and respect for the rule of law tend to be prosperous, while those with “extractive” institutions that enforce extreme political and economic inequality in the service of a small elite are typically impoverished or economically underdeveloped.

Other books and journal articles coauthored or written individually by Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson explore corresponding causal relationships by examining the sometimes dramatic changes in Indigenous societies resulting from European colonization from the 15th through the early 20th century. Although they initially presented colonizers with greater resistance, larger societies, once conquered, afforded more exploitable labor than did smaller ones. Accordingly, fewer European migrants were needed to work in the extraction of natural resources, and the migrants who did settle in larger colonies usually created or took control of extractive institutions. In contrast, smaller societies required more colonizers to operate an exploitative economy, resulting in greater numbers of European migrants. Eventually, European settlers demanded their own political rights and an appropriate share of the profits generated through their own labor.

The differences between the institutions established or controlled by colonizers affected the relative prosperity and economic growth of the societies involved. Societies that were urbanized or more densely populated before colonizers arrived tended to be more prosperous than sparsely populated areas. However, as Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson have documented, larger colonies with extractive institutions eventually suffered economic decline, while smaller colonies with more-inclusive (though not genuinely democratic) institutions experienced economic growth. In addition, the economic changes following colonization under either type of regime tended to be long-term, if not permanent—in essence, because ruling elites in extractive societies were not inclined to share their political and economic privileges with the general population, while communities of European settlers were not about to surrender their own rights and benefits. A telling example cited by the laureates is the contemporary cross-border city of Nogales, whose northern half is located in the U.S. state of Arizona and whose southern half is in Mexico. In the 16th century Spain imposed an extractive colonial regime on the densely populated Aztec empire, and more-inclusive colonies were later created in what became the United States and Canada. The apparent result is that northern Nogales has been, and continues to be, much more prosperous than southern Nogales.

Although the extractive and inclusive institutions and their economic consequences tend to be long-lasting, they are not unchangeable, as history has also demonstrated. In the estimation of the Royal Swedish Academy, the work of Acemolgu and his collaborators shows that greater economic equality between countries can be achieved through changes to societal institutions.

Acemolgu has authored or coauthored several important books and journal articles in addition to the work cited above. His books include Introduction to Modern Economic Growth (2009), The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty (2019), and Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle over Technology and Prosperity (2023).