The Economist went after Daron Acemoglu this week, and the reaction was immediate. Top figures in economics moved quickly to defend the Nobel prize winner after the article questioned his work.
Mr Acemoglu sits near the top of economics by reputation and by citation count, which made the attack land harder than a routine critique. Noah Smith answered with a blunt line of his own: "I’ve been yelling about Acemoglu for literally a decade."
Noah Smith in June
Smith said The Economist did not actually interview or contact him for the piece, even though it quoted him from a June tweet and did not link to it. He has been criticizing Acemoglu’s work for years, including a 2012 argument against a paper that claimed America is more entrepreneurial than Sweden because America’s weaker safety net forces people to work harder.
He also said in 2022 that Acemoglu’s paper on robots and jobs was an outlier. Beyond that, Smith said he liked Why Nations Fail but thought its empirical foundations were fairly shaky, did not like Power and Progress, and was highly critical of a recent paper on AI and productivity.
Acemoglu and AI
Smith’s objections were not limited to one paper. He said Acemoglu’s argument that skilled immigration has crippled the American education system is extremely implausible, which put him squarely in the camp of critics who think the economist’s models have gone too far when turned into policy claims.
The Economist’s article listed a bunch of those criticisms and paired them with a sharper judgment: economics is far too hierarchical and closed a profession. That is why the response mattered so quickly. The defense of Acemoglu was not just about one scholar’s reputation; it became a fight over how easily the field tolerates criticism of its most cited names.
One well-known economist put the defense more directly: "Much of his theoretical work is useful, but he uses his models to inform populist policies that have been tried before and failed." The dispute now sits there plainly: a magazine attack, a public rebuttal, and a field forced to decide how much of Acemoglu’s influence is analytical and how much is institutional.
