On August 17, The Economist ran a piece titled “The world’s most influential economist is oddly unconvincing.” Its subject was Daron Acemoglu, the Turkish-American MIT economist who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in economics with Simon Johnson and James Robinson for their work on how institutions shape prosperity. The magazine did not dispute that Acemoglu is exceptionally productive, generous to younger scholars, and among the most cited economists alive; several economists interviewed for the piece said as much themselves. But the article went on to raise real doubts about the empirical foundations of his most celebrated work, pointing in particular to the settler-mortality data underlying the 2001 paper on the colonial origins of comparative development. A 2012 critique by University of Illinois economist David Albouy noted that figures for some countries were simply borrowed from other countries. A later Nobel Committee report also described them as sketchy. The piece raised a more theoretical worry too: that “institutions matter” risks becoming circular once institutions are defined broadly enough and identified retrospectively to fit whatever outcome one is trying to explain.
That skepticism is overdue, and it should reach further than the settler-mortality regressions. The deeper trouble with the Acemoglu account of development is that it treats colonization as a founding moment, the point at which a society’s institutional trajectory was fixed for centuries, rather than as one episode layered onto histories that already had their own political episodes. Colonies had a history before colonization. Societies are not simply the residue of what was done to them by a colonial power; they carry inherited structures, norms, and constraints on rulers that shape how any subsequent institutional imposition actually lands. A theory that begins its clock in 1500 or in 1800 is bound to miss most of the story that came before.
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