Daron Acemoglu
Institute Professor of Economics, MIT
About
Daron Acemoglu (b. 1967) is an Institute Professor at MIT and, with Simon Johnson and James Robinson, a 2024 Nobel laureate in economics for work on how institutions shape prosperity. Turkish-American, educated at York and the LSE, he won the John Bates Clark Medal in 2005. His argument about technology is that its benefits are not automatic: whether a machine augments workers or merely replaces them is a choice made by the people directing it, and history is full of stretches where the gains went to a narrow few. He is also the most cited sceptic of large near-term AI productivity gains, estimating in 2024 that total factor productivity would rise by under 1% over a decade — a figure far below what the industry assumes, and one he arrived at by counting which tasks AI can actually do rather than by extrapolating from capability.
Key Contributions
- Shared the 2024 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for comparative studies of how institutions form and affect prosperity
- Co-wrote Power and Progress (2023) with Simon Johnson, arguing that who captures the gains from technology is a political choice rather than a technical inevitability
- Co-wrote Why Nations Fail (2012) and The Narrow Corridor (2019) with James Robinson, on institutions, liberty and the balance between state and society
- Published The Simple Macroeconomics of AI (2024), estimating AI's ten-year total factor productivity gain at under 1% by counting exposed tasks rather than extrapolating capability
- Won the John Bates Clark Medal in 2005 for contributions to labour economics, political economy and the economics of technology
