Interview with the 2024 economic sciences laureate Daron Acemoglu, recorded on 6 December 2024 during Nobel Week in Stockholm, Sweden.

Where does your passion for economic sciences come from?

I got into economics as a teenager. Growing up in Turkey, I became interested in social issues, especially I was troubled by the fact that the country had just experienced a military coup. There was a lot of repression, soldiers were everywhere including at the gates of our school. That got me interested in issues of politics, but also economics because the country was also suffering from various economic problems, high unemployment, high inflation, economic stagnation, and I wondered whether these two things were related. That was the beginning of my journey into economics. 

How was your childhood in Istanbul?

I grew up in Istanbul, I was born there. My parents and I were Armenian and I went to an Armenian school at first, but then from there on I transitioned to a regular elementary school. I got into one of the exam schools, which is where I studied until I went abroad to study economics at the University of York. These were turbulent times. My father used to be a professor in the law faculty of Istanbul University, and part of the reason why he left the university was because there was a lot of unrest, uncertainty, violence in the university. You could feel all of that, and as a minority, of course you felt some of those tensions even more. But after I went to a regular school, I felt relatively well integrated. I had friends from the Armenian community and I also had many friends from the Jewish community and the Greek community, but the majority of my friends and acquaintances were from my school and a much more broad spectrum of Turkish society. 

What is your advice for young researchers?

I got into research because I was curious about these questions. I loved economics, and I continued to be intrigued by the intersection of economics with other questions of social science. What has propelled me throughout my career is that I enjoyed, I continue to enjoy what I do. I think success in everything depends on luck, but it also depends on putting a lot of hours. You can do that just because you want to be successful, but it’s not easy, it doesn’t work so well. I think it’s much, much more productive and straightforward if you find something that you are passionate about, so my first advice to young people is find something that you’re really passionate about. Don’t just think what can get me very successful or what can make me most money but do something that you love. The second one is put the hours. Unless you put a lot of effort, hours, sometimes sleepless nights, because you’re passionate about something, that is very important for success. Then the third one is be lucky.

Tell us about your motto “Swing for the fences.”

If you are doing something you’re passionate about, then you also want to be successful and influential and impactful. One way of doing that is to be ambitious, to swing for the fences, meaning you don’t just try to score a few points, but you try to get the big home run in the baseball parlance. That’s not easy because science in every field is incremental. We start from the established wisdom, we build on other people’s work, and I think that’s very important. It’s a particular challenge to follow the scientific best practice, but at the same time, to try to be ambitious so that you don’t just continue what other people have done, but you try to do something new. 

Have you encountered any failures or mistakes in your career?

Oh, failures and mistakes – my career is full of them. Even now, I think I make a few of them every day. I think academia is what attracted me after I got interested in these issues. What I didn’t know at the time was how cutthroat academia was, it’s a tough business. One of the things that I only understood after I started writing papers and submitting them to journals is you sometimes spend a couple of years on a paper and it goes to somebody anonymous and they slaughter it. So, you need to be thick skinned, and you realise you’ve made mistakes. Sometimes people are unfair, but if they reject your paper – and that has happened hundreds of times to me – sometimes, often, they have a point that’s a failure and you make mistakes all the time. There are topics that I thought I should work on, and then I said, Ah, no, I don’t want to do it, and then I realised, oh no, I should have spent much more time on this. Or I sometimes get into projects and I realise my premise is faulty, and that happens.

I think everybody make mistakes. The important thing is to recognise your mistakes and learn from them. In empirical work, for example, it’s very difficult not to make mistakes. Sometimes you use the wrong variable or you do a statistical procedure that is not the right one. In theory, sometimes you think you’ve proved something and it’s not a proof, there’s a mistake, there’s a logical error. All of those have happened to me, and I bet you all of those happen to almost everybody. What distinguishes I think good science is that you check and check and you find out your mistakes, you correct them and you learn from that. That is, I think, one great part of open science. Open science forces you to be very vigilant because other people are going to check your work. You should have the passion that you want to do the great correct thing, but it’s also important that you are under that constant threat of other people that are going to come and check my work, and that’s a wonderful sort of dynamic. We all learn from our mistakes and hopefully one day I will start making fewer of them.

Do you ever get imposter syndrome? How should one handle that?

I think that success has a way of getting to people’s head. One great thing is to make sure that you don’t take yourself too seriously. You could go to the other extreme, you can doubt yourself so much that you think you’re an imposter or something. But I believe there’s a healthy balance that you don’t consume yourself in self-doubt, but you also don’t become arrogant. It’s a constant struggle, especially after the wonderful news of the Nobel Prize. I think it’s more important that people should try not to get too arrogant. I’ll try to work at that.

What has contributed to the successful collaboration with your co-laureates?

One of the great things in modern science, both in social science and natural sciences and engineering, is that it’s become more of a team activity. That’s wonderful, because otherwise – and I’ve written papers by myself – it’s very solitary. You work years without anybody really seeing what you’re doing. With a team, you’re sharing the successes, you’re sharing the intermediate steps, you’re sharing the failures, but that also means that it’s really important that you have the right team. Not just in terms of what each person brings to the scientific endeavour, but also in terms of friendship, in terms of trust. That’s why, if you look at my career, you’ll see I have written with the same people over and over again because those are the people I get along with, I am at the right frequency.

That applies doubly to Simon Johnson and James Robinson, who were awarded the Nobel Prize together with me for the joint work that the three of us did, as well as the work that I did with James Robinson, and they are some of my closest friends. We get along, we enjoy discussing things together, thinking about existing questions, new questions, and I trust them and I think that’s been a very important part of it. We also complement each other, we bring different things to the team sometime and we’ve learned to work with each other. I think that is part of the joy of this journey. 

Is diversity important in the field of economic sciences?

I believe that in every field of scientific inquiry or knowledge building – broader than scientific inquiry in engineering, in companies, economics of course included – we are in the business of generating collective knowledge, wisdom, and understanding. Collective is the important word. It’s not a solid reactivity, and that’s what distinguishes almost everything humans do. It also distinguishes some of the best things that humans do, such as science. We learn from each other, we build on the shoulders of giants and on each other’s shoulders and that becomes most meaningful. If different people have different perspectives and bring different things, variation is good. If we were all doing our own thing, it wouldn’t matter. You and I could be doing the same thing, but we’re running in our own lanes. But if we’re going to collaborate, it’s good that I do something different. I ask a different question than you ask, so that sort of variation or diversity I think is essential for the incremental building of collective knowledge. That diversity requires diversity of perspectives.

In social sciences that means not everybody should have the same ideological leanings, should not have the same preoccupations, it requires diversity of experiences. It’s very important that some people are in the ivory tower, but not everybody’s in the ivory tower. It requires different genders, ethnicities, religions, all groups in terms of their histories and experiences bring different things to the table, different questions, different approaches, and I think we can try to make best use of it in this collective knowledge way. 

When do you get your best ideas?

Idea creation is perhaps the most important part of the scientific and academic inquiry. One thing I tell my students is the worst thing you can do is sit down at your desk and say, Today I have to generate an idea. It just doesn’t work that way. In my case, I believe almost every idea I got – some good ones, some very bad ones – came as a byproduct of something else I was doing, while driving, while reading the newspaper, while reading a book. Sometimes reading a paper, you know, you read a paper and you realise they’re doing something interesting, but I would’ve done it differently and that starts the beginning of an idea. Or you listen to the news and you hear something from a politician or a journalist that either you had heard before or not, but it suddenly leads to a train of thought that you hadn’t had yourself before. Or you can see parallels that weren’t obvious to you before that other people had made some arguments, but you see similarity between them that had not occurred to you. Almost all of those, in my case, have occurred as byproducts. Sometimes that byproduct is in the process of science. So, I’m working on a project and I get an idea about something else. Rarely, it has even happened that I work on a project and I get an idea on that project, but that’s very rare. 

How do you think humans should use AI?

If you look at history, and I often do because that’s an important part of my motivation and inspiration, many important transformative periods have coincided with new technologies. I don’t have a technological determinist reading of history. I don’t think technology by itself shapes history, quite the opposite. But new technologies create myriad challenges and opportunities. In fact I said quite the opposite because I think it is historical forces, political forces, social forces that often make us use our scientific knowledge in one way or another, or develop a particular type of technology in one of the possible manners that we could have developed. But put these two things together. It creates something very important for our understanding, scientific inquiry and our engagement as citizens, which is that periods in which there are new technologies are both going to be transformative and they are going to increase the importance of social, technical and economic choices that we make. How we do when we develop these technologies, who are going to be the winners and losers, what is socially responsible? How can we ensure that these technologies are not used for bad, but they are steered in the direction of the social good?

All of these questions I think are central for AI. You can be an AI optimist, AI realist, AI pessimist, but I think most people will agree artificial intelligence is going to be disruptive. Artificial intelligence is going to destroy jobs. Artificial intelligence is going to take some people’s privacy away. It’s going to increase some surveillance. It may provide much better information, it may increase productivity, it may give us completely new perspectives, new scientific methods. All of these are possible, but which ones we are going to prioritise? Who is going to bear the burden and who is going to enjoy the riches? There’s nothing deterministic about this. Somebody might tell you it’s all an act of nature. There is a process of science that’s going to go by itself. I don’t believe that’s the case. Science is what we do, it’s our choices. There isn’t like a ladder that we have to climb. There are thousands of ladders. 

I think the problem I have today is that I believe AI has empowered a lot of people and risks disempowering a lot of people as well, and it need not be so. AI is an amazingly powerful and versatile technology. There are many different ways in which we can develop it. There are many different ways in which we can use it. There are ways in which AI could be useful to some of the poorest people in the world, or there are ways in which AI could turn into a very potent weapon in the hands of dictators that rule over these millions of billions of people. There’s a way in which AI could perhaps help workers in Indonesia or Malaysia. There’s a way in which it can completely take away all the jobs and tasks that they perform, so those choices are really important, and I don’t think they are being debated enough. 

How important is it to use science to address the issue of poverty?

The economics discipline perhaps, perhaps started with Adam Smith. There were many economists before him, but a lot of the ways that we think about economic questions are shaped by Adam Smith’s Wealth of nations. He was talking about wealth of nations, and when he was writing the gap between the richest and the poorest countries was probably something like fourfold. Today we live in a much more advanced, hyper globalised, hyperconnected world. And the richest 10 or so countries are about 70 times as rich as the bottom 10 countries. That’s just a staggering, staggering gap, and that gap is not getting any smaller. So, if the point of international corporation and economic development and all of the scientific knowledge and policy was to narrow the gap between poor and niche countries, that’s not happening. I think it is very desirable that it happens. It’s not going to happen by itself, using the correct knowledge, correct understanding of economic incentives and opportunities is important, but it’s not an engineering problem. It’s not something that we have the best economics formula and we can apply it in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and then we make sure that the Democratic Republic of the Congo starts getting a bit richer, it doesn’t work that way, and that’s what actually motivated me to get into economics and social science. It’s the political economy that’s central, meaning what are the incentives on the ground? How can you mobilise the people? How is it that you incentivise them, and how is it that you actually overcome the barriers that exist, for example because of kleptocratic rulers, corrupt bureaucrats, firms that coerce their workers, all sorts of problems.

The world is more interesting, not necessarily happier that we live in a complex environment. Every agent, every individual, every firm has their own incentives and their own approaches. That’s that sum total level of these very different things have to align in order for economic development to happen. That makes it a really fascinating question. It’s not a planning problem, it’s really an organic process, but the fact that it’s an organic process doesn’t mean that you cannot do anything. In fact, we do a lot of things, technologies, international cooperation, international policies and institutions. What I have spent my life studying is all about disciplining, framing that organic process. 

What are the most urgent threats to democracy?

When I started writing on political economy issues, the world was not a widespread democratic environment. There were many democracies, many non-democracies, but there was a general optimism that democracy was on the rise. The political scientist Samuel Huntington had written a book called The Third Wave, talking about how a wave was sweeping the world, pushing countries more towards democracy. Today, it looks very different. The last 20 years or so have seen more and more threats against democracies and democracies themselves have not performed that well. If you look at the industrialised world support for democracy, especially among young people, is at a modern law. So, it is time to ask first whether democracy is really important for us, and second, what kind of democracy, how can we do better as democratic nations? My answer to the first one is, yes, democracy is important, desirable, and more essential than ever. My research shows, and of course it uses historical data, or data at least, not the last 10 years, but if you look at data from the 19th century to around the 2010 or so, you will see that democratic countries do better. When a country democratises it grows more, it delivers better public services, it delivers better education, health services to its citizens.

Democracy is essential for people to have voice, for people to have security often. But democracy is not popular right now or relative what it was 20 years ago. Why not? Because I think democracy has created aspirations and it hasn’t risen up to them. Democratic countries have seen huge increase inequality. They were expecting higher quality public services, education, healthcare, they haven’t delivered those. So, in some sense, democracy hasn’t risen up to the challenge that it sets to itself, giving people voice, giving people shared prosperity, giving people good, reliable services. I think we need to renew the democratic compact so that democracy becomes more popular both within democratic countries and around the world. 

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