The world’s most influential economist is under heavy fire

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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. Acemoglu is only 58 years old, but for some time he has been the discipline’s colossus. He has written seven books, including a new one about democracy and the economic impact of artificial intelligence, not counting a couple of popular textbooks. His hundreds of papers, more than 10 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.

Give an economist a few drinks, however, and some of them will venture their true opinions about this giant. “Much of his theoretical work is useful, but he uses his models to inform populist policies that have been tried before and failed,” blasts one well-known economist. Some commentators do not require Dutch courage. “I’ve been yelling about Acemoglu for literally a decade,” Noah Smith, an economics blogger, has said, in response to a flurry of online criticism of Acemoglu’s work.

No one accuses the prolific economist of truly poor research, let alone academic malpractice. “He is obviously a genius,” says another, who also points out that he is generous to PhD students and junior colleagues. The question is whether Acemoglu’s reputation at the very apex of the economics profession – and the intellectual influence that goes with it – is justified by his scholarship.

Start with his empirical methods. 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........

© The Sydney Morning Herald