Daron Acemoglu

An economist at MIT who works on why some countries are rich and others are not, and who answers institutions rather than geography or culture.

Why Nations Fail, written with James Robinson, divides institutions into inclusive ones that spread power and opportunity and extractive ones that funnel both upward, and argues the difference compounds over centuries. The Korean peninsula is the book's cleanest case: one people, one geography, two systems. He shared the Nobel in economics in 2024 with Robinson and Simon Johnson. The thesis has been argued with hard, particularly on how institutions arise in the first place, which the book is less able to explain than it is to describe.