The Economist published an article this week that went after Daron Acemoglu, putting one of economics’ most cited names under a fresh and public attack just after he was described as having won a Nobel prize. The response was immediate. Economists did not treat it like a routine critique. They treated it like a shot at the field’s hierarchy.
Noah Smith was among the quickest to answer, saying, “I’ve been yelling about Acemoglu for literally a decade.” Smith was not a target audience the magazine had sought out for a new interview. Instead, it used a tweet from June, then left him to stand as part of the argument it was making. That mattered because Smith was not speaking from one stray complaint. He had argued in 2012 against an Acemoglu paper that said America was more entrepreneurial than Sweden because America’s weaker safety net forced people to work harder, and in 2022 he called a famous paper on robots destroying jobs an outlier.
Smith’s support was selective, and that made the dispute sharper rather than softer. He said he liked Acemoglu’s book Why Nations Fail, but not Power and Progress. He was also highly critical of a recent paper Acemoglu wrote about AI and productivity, and he said the claim that skilled immigration has crippled the American education system was extremely implausible. In other words, even one of Acemoglu’s loudest critics did not buy the whole case against him. He was willing to reject parts of the work, while still pushing back on a broad takedown.
The Economist did not stop at one line of attack. It listed a bunch of criticisms of Acemoglu’s work and argued that it would be difficult to name a top economist whose body of work does not contain questionable theoretical assumptions, motivated reasoning, or shaky empirical results. It also said economics is far too hierarchical and closed a profession. That is a hard thing for the field to hear, but it helps explain why the magazine’s article drew a fast defense. Once the target is someone sitting at the top of the list of most cited economists, and once that person has just earned a Nobel prize, the criticism lands as more than a review of papers. It becomes a test of who gets to define rigor.
That is where the friction sits. The magazine tried to make a larger case about economics itself, but top figures in the profession rushed to condemn the article after it came out and defend Acemoglu instead. One unnamed voice in the debate framed the criticism in practical terms, saying much of his theoretical work is useful, but that he uses his models to inform populist policies that have been tried before and failed. That is not a full rebuttal of the magazine’s attack. It is a narrower complaint about how ideas get translated into policy, and it leaves the core question untouched: whether the article’s criticism matched the scale of Acemoglu’s influence.
For now, that question matters more than any single paper in the dispute. Acemoglu remains a newly Nobel-recognized economist with an enormous footprint in the profession, and the reaction to The Economist’s piece shows how quickly criticism of him turns into a fight over economics’ own standards. The magazine has already made its case. What remains unanswered is whether it had the evidence to support each of the criticisms it chose to pile on.
