PERSON
Daron Acemoglu
The Nobel-winning economist who documented a thousand years of evidence that technology does not determine prosperity—institutions do—and who argues that AI is currently being deployed in the wrong direction: toward automation and concentrated gain, when it could instead augment workers and distribute benefit.
Daron Acemoglu spent his career doing what builders rarely do: looking at what happens after the building is done. His landmark work with James Robinson and Simon Johnson demonstrated, through centuries of natural experiments and meticulous causal identification, that the same technology introduced into different institutional environments produces radically different distributions of benefit and harm. The heavy plough in feudal England concentrated surplus in the manor house; the same innovation in the more autonomous cities of the Low Countries seeded the Dutch Golden Age. The Industrial Revolution produced fifty years of immiseration before the Factory Acts, universal education, and the franchise redirected its gains. The pattern is not complicated:
inclusive institutions distribute; extractive institutions concentrate—and the institutions determine the outcome, not the technology. Acemoglu's 2024 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences recognized this framework, and his 2023 book
Power and Progress with Simon Johnson applied it with uncomfortable precision to AI. His empirical