Mr Acemoglu featured in The Economist

...not super flatteringly.

BY THE TIME he received the call from Stockholm, it felt overdue. In 2024 Daron Acemoglu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shared the Nobel prize in economics with Simon Johnson and James Robinson for work on how institutions shape prosperity. Mr Acemoglu is only 58 years old, but for some time he has been the discipline’s colossus.

I completely missed that he has a new book out, What Happened to Liberal Democracy?: Remaking a Politics of Shared Prosperity, with the world's ugliest cover. Interesting.

His hundreds of papers, more than ten of them published so far this year, are often stuffed with complex mathematics. He competes with Andrei Shleifer of Harvard University for top spot on a citation ranking of economists produced by IDEAS/RePEc, a research database. His opinions carry great weight with other wonks and the media.

Ten in a year is only what elite scholars with teams of underlings can do... slap your name on the paper, hurl in the academic kudos -- citation, H-stat etc.

"Give an economist a few drinks, however, and some of them will venture their true opinions about this giant."

Who did they talk to?! Fucking wonderful:

• theory useful, used to push shitty populist policies
• the work/result is underwhelming and "safe"

His Nobel rests heavily on a paper released in 2001 with Messrs Johnson and Robinson, which researchers have cited more than 23,000 times. It seeks to explain why some countries are rich and others poor. In places where European settlers died in droves, perhaps because of disease, colonisers built “extractive” institutions, with power and resources concentrated in the hands of an elite few, to take as many resources from the area as possible. But in more agreeable climates, settlers survived. In these places the colonists built more inclusive institutions, with proper roads, schools and medical services. Those institutions persisted, with the effect that places with lower settler mortality during colonial times are richer today.

Economists now take these results seriously but not literally. The paper encouraged wonks to think more deeply about institutions, but they have also picked it apart. The Nobel committee’s report in 2024 conceded that the mortality data are “sometimes sketchy”.

That's polite. Apparently, the paper's result is completely done:

In 2012 David Albouy of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign showed that some countries were assigned mortality rates borrowed from other countries, among other adjustments. Correct for these, he found, and the paper’s estimates become unreliable.

Too much math, too little insight:

Most recently, researchers have examined a paper that Mr Acemoglu released in June, with a series of co-authors, which reported that lower birth rates are associated with faster growth in GDP per working-age adult. This is a striking finding, seeming to suggest that places that are losing population, like Japan, do not have much to worry about. Yet other economists, including Jesús Fernández-Villaverde of the University of Pennsylvania, question whether historical relationships are really useful to understanding the present, where in many countries birth rates are collapsing. It is a perfectly reasonable point—and Mr Acemoglu and his co-authors raise it briefly in their conclusion. But it can get lost and can seem unsophisticated when set against the reams of mathematics Mr Acemoglu deploys. #1528464

"After prodding and probing, a determined critic could find holes in almost any researcher’s work—and Mr Acemoglu is the biggest target in economics."

his grand thesis of institutions may not reveal very much. Nations prosper when institutions are good, and stagnate when they are bad. True. But what, exactly, is an institution? Rules, norms, enforcement, culture—everything, really. Where do institutions come from? From “critical junctures” and “institutional drift”, whatever that means.

In the 2010s, when I was hanging about university seminars, this was a cooooonstant convo. Conclusion: "institutions" is absolutely everything and anything. [insert "And then a miracle happens" meme]

Here's yet another Acemoglu book I haven't read:

“Power and Progress”, a book from 2023 co-written with Mr Johnson, treats a thousand years of innovation largely as a story of elite capture and unintended consequences. The cotton gin was the handmaiden of slavery, while the Haber-Bosch process created weapons. Ordinary people apparently gained only when they could steer capitalists to consider their interests. The book plays down a much more compelling claim: that technological progress in and of itself has made the average person many times richer than in pre-industrial times.

as for AI?

Mr Acemoglu’s arguments about AI are also pessimistic to the point of losing their credibility. In a paper released in 2024 he calculates that AI will boost American productivity by only a small amount over ten years. The paper reaches this conclusion by ignoring the potentially transformative effect of new AI products coming to market. [He] may not think AI is about to turbocharge productivity, but he does worry about its effects on democracy and jobs. His new book focuses on the potential social harms of the technology (worsening atomisation, spreading political fakery) rather than its potential benefits.

archive: https://archive.md/1l5ol