World's Most Famous Economist gets Trashed

The Economist magazine reports:

The world’s most influential economist is oddly unconvincing
Daron Acemoglu is revered. Why? ...

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. ...

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.

I get the impression that he invented a politically popular conclusion, and then searched large amounts of data for a contrived argument to support that conclusion.

No, I do not think that colonizer institutions have much to do with why some countries are richer than others. He is trying to cover up human capital, and factors that cannot be changed in a reasonable time frame.

He says he will write a rebuttal.