Daron Acemoglu: the opportunity economist

The winner of the World’s Top Thinker, as voted for by you, urges us to actively steer the direction of progress

By Tom Clark

After decades of sweeping research covering technology, “democracy, dictatorship and labour laws,” Daron Acemoglu—the polymathic Turkish-American economist whom Prospect readers have voted the world’s top thinker for 2024—is ready to boil things down. “The overall conclusion I’ve reached,” he tells me, “is that there’s nothing automatic about shared prosperity.”

That sounds more measured than electrifying, and will leave the uninitiated scratching their heads at the film-star reception this affable 56-year-old man attracts among young researchers: his recent Resolution Foundation event saw the thinktank’s first-ever queue for selfies. And that’s not to mention the intense admiration of his peers. The eminent Harvard trade economist Dani Rodrik tells me simply: “I think the world of Daron Acemoglu.”

But there are three ways in which the Acemoglu agenda is more disruptive than it appears. First, and most obviously, it defies “techno-optimism”. Not just the extreme “Utopian” form that is the “currency of Silicon Valley,” but also the more general conviction he says “dominates” across “society in the United States”. Namely, the idea that the forward march of human ingenuity will—even if there are odd bumps on the road— soon enough enrich us all. 

Refusal to buy into this is what makes Acemoglu an urgent thinker in 2024, when many are acutely worried about what the rapid rise of AI will mean for work and life in our unequal society. He warns that for all the undoubted potential for good, “technology often is impoverishing for certain groups”, a serious point that—with one of many chuckles—he illustrates with “the oft-quoted semi-joke that the future factory will have two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog, and the dog is there to make sure that the man doesn’t touch the equipment!”

A completely automated factory would be “very good for productivity,” but there’s no reason why its owners are going to hire extra staff, pay higher wages or otherwise “share those increases in productivity with labour.” 

More conventional economists insist all will come good in the long run, because the extra supply of output should eventually create demand for more labour of another type—maybe the rest of us could thrive by retraining as, say, therapists, fitness instructors or masseurs for the factory owners. But Acemoglu looks back and finds long stretches of history where the new opportunities never arrived: the first 80 years of Britain’s Industrial Revolution, during which working-class living conditions stagnated and on some counts worsened, being one example. We can’t sit around and wait. Because in the long run, as Keynes put it, we’re all dead. 

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/economics/64535/daron-acemoglu-the-opportunity-economist