Nobel Prize Conversations

“Asking is hard. Once you realise there’s an interesting question to develop answers to, it is even harder.”

Growing up in Istanbul, Turkey, shaped Daron Acemoglu’s life and career in many ways. It sparked his interest in politics and social sciences and led to a research career investigating the differences in prosperity between nations.

Today Acemoglu is exploring the future of AI and how we can use it in the best possible way. In a conversation with Adam Smith he discusses his thoughts on the topic as well as sharing his advice for young researchers, including how to decide which research question to go for.

This conversation was published on 5 June, 2025. Podcast host Adam Smith is joined by Karin Svensson.

Below you find a transcript of the podcast interview. The transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors.

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Daron Acemoglu: One thing I tell my students is don’t listen to comments too much because if you listen to every comment that you receive from every economist and every seminar, then you are just going to be at the very average of everybody’s opinion, which is not an original place to be.

Adam Smith: I particularly like hearing Daron Acemoglu say that because of the story that his longtime collaborator James Robinson tells about the way they met. Robinson was giving a seminar at London School of Economics, and apparently Daron Acemoglu was sitting there in the front row asking endless questions and making innumerable comments. It was annoying Robinson. But afterwards they went out to dinner and became firm friends. Anyway, it’s absolutely fascinating to listen to Daron Acemoglu talk about his life, work and motivations. So please do join me for this conversation.

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Karin Svensson: This is Nobel Prize Conversations, and our guest is Daron Acemoglu, recipient of the 2024 prize in economic sciences. He was awarded for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity. He shared the prize with Simon Johnson and James Robinson. Your host is Adam Smith, Chief Scientific Officer at Nobel Prize Outreach. This podcast was produced in cooperation with Fundación Ramon Areces. Daron Acemoglu is an institute professor at MIT and faculty co-director of MIT’s ‘Shaping the Future of Work Initiative’. He talks to Adam about who he thinks we should fear, the most powerful AI or powerful tech companies. Also, who’s missing from the table as we decide the future of AI in our lives. But first, how the current state of the world is giving our laureate the chance to test his theories in real time.

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Smith: You were awarded the prize for your work, highlighting the importance of inclusive institutions. You are currently working on the future of democracy and our relationship with technology and what a time to be awarded the prize working on those things.

Acemoglu: Absolutely. Did they time it?

Adam Smith: I wonder if they did. Your banquet speech in particular that you gave at the Nobel Banquet, it was really a call to arms for people to wake up and get interested and if they weren’t paying attention to what was going on around us.

Acemoglu: Absolutely. Yes. I hope it was. Humanity has never seen corporations as powerful as the tech companies. Now those companies are choosing the direction of another extremely powerful technology. Whatever your view on other things may be. I think most people have an instinctive agreement with Lord Acton when he says absolute power corrupts. So we are in such a situation.

Smith: What’s it like right at the moment? We are recording this in late February. These are difficult times in the US for people like you.

Acemoglu: I would say that the US has not experienced, at least in my opinion, such difficult times for centuries. So these are indeed very formative moments. This is the kind of thing that we had in mind when James Robinson and I coined the term critical junctures in our book ‘Why Nations Fail’. Events during such episodes really place countries or even the world on different trajectories, and the world may look very different in 50 years time depending on what transpires today. I think a lot of the questions are institutional in nature.

Smith: Of course, you famously worked with natural experiments, the natural experiment of colonialism, and here you have a enormous natural experiment happening right in front of you.

Acemoglu: It might take a couple of years or a decade for social scientists to get the measure of this and write papers on this.

Smith: Yes. But in some ways, what a fabulous opportunity for study, what an opportunity to see things unsolved.

Acemoglu: Yes, that’s the thing. When you’re in the middle of it, you don’t see it as an opportunity for studying it, but you see it as a threat to your way of life and to what the world will hold.

Smith: It must be quite difficult to keep emotion out of it.

Acemoglu: Yes, I think it is. I think if I were younger it would’ve been perhaps even harder. But even now I find it difficult to be objective sometimes because these are things that will touch me. It’ll touch the lives of my children and lives of everybody around us.

Smith: In your banquet speech, you mentioned in particular the threats to democracy and the threats of big tech and the threat plus the opportunity of AI. If we take those apart, in terms of democracy and I know you’re working on this with James Robinson, I think you have a book coming up.

Acemoglu: Coming up would be amazingly generous. It’s like more like a twinkle in the eye. Yes.

Smith: I like the idea of twinkle in the eye. I’ve spoken to both James Robinson and Simon Johnson, and I think twinkle in the eye might well describe what happens between you when you sort of catch on to an idea that you’re going to follow up. Is that right? I like the idea of the kind of way you jointly find something that excites you both or all three of you.

Acemoglu: Correct. Yes.

Smith: Can you talk a little bit about how you feel democracy is under threatened? Also, how you feel it might need to be redefined?

Acemoglu: I think it’s one of the least well understood questions of social science. In many ways democracies have been more successful than authoritarian regimes over the last 70-80 years. But if you look at support for democracy, people’s satisfaction with democracy, it’s at an all time low. In other ways, there are more alarming signs. Especially the young are very polarised and do not want to compromise at all on pretty much anything, which is the kiss of death for democracy. Where we’re going to go from here is very unclear, and I think it’s a sort of an overdetermined problem. It is true; I think democracy has underperformed relative to the aspirations it set. it is true social media and other mass communication tools have complicated cross-cutting conversations. It is true that there have been disruptive changes due to technology and globalization over the last 40 years that could have downstream effects on democracy and trust in institutions. There are all sorts of factors at play here. We also suspect, I think many people do suspect, that many of these factors whatever their role are going to intensify over the next decade or so, more automation, more isolation and online existence, more echo chambers, more propaganda, more polarisation. Where will that leave us?

Smith: In a way, democracy fails in a truly polarised situation because you get this sort of situation we have now in the states where the slight majority feel that they’re getting what they want, perhaps, and the rest of the people feel they’re absolutely not getting what they want.

Acemoglu: Absolutely, 100%. But it’s not the fact that there’s a slight majority in favour of one party or another. That’s always been the case. The question is, once one party comes to power, how willing are they to compromise and how those who are out of power and those who are in power liaise and form agreements and make compromises. I think that’s the part that has become increasingly difficult as a result of polarisation and as a result of tribalisation, meaning that you see the other party as immortal enemy rather than just having some legitimate differences in ideology or policy. I think our very online existence has changed the way that we interact with our broader social networks and the way that we get information. All sorts of things have really complicated the nitty gritty of democratic politics.

Smith: I guess this will be the substance of the book you’re working on, but do you have any kind of suggestion of a formula for how we begin to reverse this?

Acemoglu: Not a silver bullet, but my belief (and that’s not the heart of the book but some part of the book) is that you have to identify the pathways, why some democratic coalitions work, strengthen them and also show that democracy delivers in terms of its higher level promises, like shared prosperity, good public services, voice to people. I think there are clear failures in the ability of democracy to have been able to do that over the last several decades. Pretty much everywhere in the world, but especially in the United States and parts of Western Europe. In some sense, for a long time it looked like Nordic countries were avoiding this. But now the Nordic countries are also subject to the same trends.

Smith: I suppose in the mention of shared prosperity takes us perhaps into the realms of technology because there is a general belief held by many that somehow technology is the silver bullet.

Acemoglu: Oh you wouldn’t believe it! If you come to the US you’ll see that much more intensely. The US is a deeply techno optimistic country.

Smith: What does the historical record say? You’ve studied this in detail, especially in your book ‘Power and Progress’. What is it that we know about technology and shared prosperity?

Acemoglu: I think the history says the world is complicated context, nature of technologies, how they are used, how they are developed. They all matter. But one thing is very clear that there isn’t a universal law that good technologies will give us good outcomes. There are many instances in which better communication technologies have led to worse information. There are many cases in which technologies that have increased productivity have deepened poverty, reduced wages and increased inequality. So really the details of how technology is developed, who is empowered, what regulatory and other countervailing forces there are in society matter greatly.

Smith: Do you think that there’s a general understanding of how technology can lead to general prosperity?

Acemoglu: Yes, there is. I think economists have that mostly right; that if you’re gonna get general prosperity from technological changes, it must work largely via the labour market. Meaning improving labor market fortunes, wages and employment opportunities for people. The mechanism for that in economics is quite clear and sometimes works quite well, which is that when technology improves our capabilities, firms demand more labour that then pushes up wages and then workers doing various different tasks get higher wages.

Smith: The fear now is that we are not going in that direction. Technology is taking us in a different direction where there are fewer jobs.

Acemoglu: Yes. The fear now is that, but it’s not just this time is different. It’s always been so. The pathways that I have just summarised are not universal. There are many reasons why they may not work. This is the heart of the theory of the power and progress book that I co-wrote, which Simon Johnson. First of all, it may well be the case that labour markets are not competitive and higher labour demand doesn’t translate into higher wages. For example, think of cotton production in late 18th century United States, US South, where the cotton gin and other improvements led to huge productivity in cotton production. But because most of the workers who did that cotton production were slaves, there were no forces to ensure that they shared in the vast fortunes that people made. In fact, their living conditions and their real wages probably worsened during the intensification of that plantation economy. There are many other examples like this. In addition, and I think this is an even more fundamental point. The presumption that greater capabilities via technology will necessarily lead to more labour demand from firms, meaning that firms would want to hire more workers, is simply not true. It depends on what type of technologies we’re speaking of. If technologies are focused on automation, meaning increasing productivity by eliminating labour and substituting cheaper machinery or algorithms for them, then productivity will grow. Our capabilities will grow, our output will grow, but demand for labour will decline because we have fewer users for labour. That’s what happened in the early phases of the industrial revolution that started in England in the middle of the 18th century. That’s what happened over the last few decades in the US for example, with digitalisation and AI promises to go down the same path.

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Acemoglu: We have to automate work, but at the same time make plumbers better plumbers, electricians better electricians, educators better educators, and create new occupations that we can’t even dream of at the moment. That’s not something like mana from heaven that immediately descends because we declare, we have powerful AI that comes out of a vision, a desire to develop tools to make labour more productive. That’s what’s missing. It is in that context that we need more inclusion. I argue, for example, if labour was at the table, then labour wouldn’t be enthusiastic about automation and more automation. They would say, ‘Well, can we not use these tools for making more workers more productive and more important for the production process?’ That’s the pathway to get to a more more balanced portfolio of technologies.

Smith: It is basically a collective imagination or tapping into the collective imagination about the sort of society we want.

Acemoglu: Absolutely. That’s the first step. That’s why I think conversations like that are important because most people don’t even realise that there is a socially beneficial and technically feasible different direction of AI that would give such better outcomes. That’s the collective imagination. But imagining isn’t enough. Different people have different imaginations, different people have different incentives. In the current environment, it’s not your imagination or mine that matter, but it’s what the tech bosses desire. That’s the sense in which, if we can bring more people to a table that might even the scales when it comes to whose interests are going to be favoured with these decisions.

Smith: So much of this debate seems to be centered in the huge rich countries. If you’re listening to this conversation from somewhere that isn’t a rich country, that doesn’t have a big stake in the development of these technologies, what can you do?

Acemoglu: First of all, most of the discussion (including in my book and in my writing) focuses on that precisely because we are in the pitiful state where there isn’t a voice from the developing countries. That is both because of omission and commission. There are no international organisations that speak for the developing world. That’s the commission. We haven’t really helped them have that voice and omission on their part that very few of the emerging economies actually prioritise this. If India, Mexico, Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia prioritised this and wanted to have a voice and they were speaking in unison, their voices would have a better chance of being heard. But they’re not, they’re focused on much more mundane, shorter term political issues.

Smith: Necessities, yes.

Acemoglu: Necessities. Sometimes they’re all authoritarian paths and everything. But the other thing is that actually there is a lot of commonality between what is good for the American worker and what would be good for India. Why? Because if the direction is between automation on the one hand and more pro worker things that amplify the skills and expertise of workers of different backgrounds helps them perform more sophisticated or newer tasks, especially enables opportunities for lower education workers. That’s the one that would reduce inequality and increase real wages in the United States and help contribute to shared prosperity. That’s the one that would also help India, Indonesia, Mexico etc because these countries are abundant in middle and low skill labour and any development path that doesn’t rely on that abundant factor is not going to work.

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Svensson: Adam, you’ve mentioned the book ‘Power and Progress’ that Daron Acemoglu wrote together with James Robinson a couple of times during this conversation, which was the main takeaway for you from reading that book?

Smith: Essentially the same point that he was making in his banquet speech during Nobel week, which is that it’s blatantly ridiculous to assume that a few top executives at the world’s leading tech companies should be responsible for deciding how we’re gonna coexist with technology in the future.

Svensson: Someone had to say it.

Smith: Yes. He’s not alone in saying it. But the book uses lots of examples to emphasise that there isn’t a correlation necessarily between new technologies and a rise in living standards, that very often things go in the opposite direction for a while. After time things begin to improve. It tends to be (the book argues) that people need to get involved much more broadly in working out how a technology can benefit society more generally.

Svensson: Can you give an example of that?

Smith: Yes, for instance, close to home for me is the industrial revolution in Britain and in a section of the book called Less Pay for More Work they analyse how the initial long lasting effect of the industrial revolution in the UK was to make working conditions worse for everybody. It was only after human creativity was allowed to come into it, and people began to have more input into how to coexist with these new technologies and how the special things that humans bring could flourish together with these technologies that things began to improve. That’s the story again and again. It’s not about automation, it’s about finding ways to use automation to make other things flourish.

Svensson: It seems like there’s a lot of work ahead of us.

Smith: Yes. But I think they think it’s a hopeful message that there are lots of models to follow for how to do this. But it takes everybody to get involved in the conversation and to move away from this model of just assuming that tech profits are somehow gonna lead to progress.

Svensson: That’s sort of been an axiom of economics, hasn’t it? That the free markets will solve everything.

Smith: Maybe, I don’t want to put words into Daron Acemoglu’s mouth, but you might say the free market combined with human creativity is the best path forward.

Svensson: What was he awarded the economics prize for?

Smith: He, Simon Johnson and James Robinson I suppose broadly looked at history and applied maths. They took this natural experiment in economics of the period of colonialisation and studied how countries had fared in the wake of being colonised. Broadly they showed that countries that had had slightly more attention paid to them by the colonial power in building institutions and making the apparatus of state did better in the end than countries where the colonial power had simply exploited the resources of the country and not built infrastructure there. Their conclusion was that building inclusive institutions can contribute to the prosperity of a country.

Svensson: Daron Acemoglu himself has got an interesting background, sort of ties into all this.

Smith: Yes, indeed. He was born in Turkey, he studied in the UK and then he ended up in the United States. That’s so common among laureates that they have these paths of migration and have benefited from different inputs along the way. That’s constantly emphasised when you talk to laureates, that either by moving or just by talking, it’s so important to expose yourself to other points of view.

Svensson: Particularly growing up in Turkey during a specific time also had an influence, didn’t it?

Smith: Actually, yes. Let’s listen to him talk about how growing up in Istanbul sparked an interest in politics and economics.

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Acemoglu: Turkey was going through a variety of political problems in the aftermath of a military coup and a controlled transition to democracy, a lot of political repression and people being imprisoned for their political views. It was also undergoing a lot of economic problems, high unemployment, high inflation, low growth. Just idly, I was wondering whether the two were related. That’s what I wanted to study and that’s what I wanted to go into economics. Little did I realise that that’s not what economics was about for the most part, but I remained anchored to those questions even as I became interested in other parts of economics. Then I returned to them during the second half of my PhD work. That’s become my passion as well.

Smith: As a teenager seeing this around you, were you an activist or was it more of an intellectual question at that stage?

Acemoglu: I was interested in politics and became involved a little bit in politics, but then I found that involvement not very rewarding for a variety of reasons. It became more of a thought process rather than an activity process.

Smith: Then you decided to go and study in York in the UK rather than studying in Turkey?

Acemoglu: Yes. What a crazy idea, right?

Smith: Weather wise, it’s quite a decision.

Acemoglu: Yes. It’s much warmer than where I am right now. The gradient is not pointing in the right direction in terms of weather. Where are you from?

Smith: I’m from London.

Acemoglu: A little better.

Smith: Not much of a big difference.

Acemoglu: York is beautiful. I have only good things to say about York.

Smith: Still the question is, if you’re deciding to leave Istanbul and Turkey. What led you there?

Acemoglu: I decided to leave Istanbul and Turkey because I wanted to study these issues and I didn’t think the university’s in Turkey were offering the best academic environment. Secondly, I wasn’t happy about the political atmosphere and lack of freedom of speech. That was the impetus for me leaving. So both the academic and the personal. And then, where was I going to go? Essentially there were two attractors. One being France because I had gone to a French school but the little I knew didn’t fill me with great confidence that the education I would get in France, except perhaps in the Grand Ecole where it was harder to get into coming from Turkey would be excellent. The second option was the US which even then it was clear that was just like the center of gravity for a lot of academic thing but it was very far from Turkey. It was just one step too many. So the UK ended up as like the compromise solution.

Smith: That makes sense. Did it fulfill your hopes?

Acemoglu: Yes, I was very lucky that I ended up at York. I always tell people I learned all the economics I’ve been using for the last 30 some years at York. Don’t tell my LSE Friends and teachers. No, it was great. I became really passionate about economics and it was a great environment.

Smith: When speaking to James Robinson about your meeting at LSE, he said what you’ve shared in common was a realisation that at the end of your PhDs at LSE, you still didn’t really know anything. I love that. One instruction you’re given at the beginning of your PhD is you’re supposed to become the world expert in this topic by the end of three years or whatever. But how lovely to recognise that not only you’re not the world expert, there’s a lot more to find out.

Acemoglu: I would still say that would’ve been true as a general statement, but it was also a specific statement that when it came to understanding the causes of big growth differences or big differences in prosperity or economic development, we didn’t know much because we didn’t focus on the right questions.

Smith: What’s your secret for finding the right question?

Acemoglu: Luck more than anything else. I think you have to be a little irreverent. If your gut instinct tells you to ask certain things that are not asked, don’t shy away from them. But other than that, your gut instinct is mostly luck.

Smith: As you mentioned, your journey has taken you from Turkey to the UK to the US and other places in between. But what it hasn’t done is taken you back to Turkey. I just wondered, given that Turkey sort of ignited your interest, whether that is something that plays on you, that you are a product of Turkey.

Acemoglu: Meaning going back to Turkey in terms of living there or going back to Turkey to study Turkey?

Smith: To study Turkey and to participate in the academic circles of Turkey.

Acemoglu: I am not completely detached from the academic circles in Turkey. I have written one or two pieces about Turkey and I follow Turkey. But in some level, being close to somewhere is both an advantage and a disadvantage. When you’re closer, you understand the details, but it’s also perhaps sometimes harder to abstract from those details. I often find myself applying theories and conceptual frameworks that I have developed, sometimes inspired by my experience in Turkey, but developed much more generally at the world level or more for the US or Western Europe, or for other emerging economies. Then I apply it back to Turkey rather than sort of do an in-depth study of Turkey. But one day, if I have enough time, which probably will never happen, I might do the latter too.

Smith: But I suppose one thing that interests me is the outside perspective. Of course you’re not an outsider in the US in any way anymore.

Acemoglu: Oh, I’m in some ways.

Smith: It is so important again and again, this migration of mind, this exchange of populations that goes on, especially within academic circles and particularly important now again at this particular moment in time, it is good to emphasise that and talk about it.

Acemoglu: What’s important is the traveling of ideas and new ideas and new perspectives. If that happened, would people stay put in their place like it was during the Renaissance? That will be fine too. But often it’s easier when people travel too.

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Smith: What defines whether something’s worth sticking with for you?

Acemoglu: No formula. Sometimes you stick with things that don’t pay off. You have to be prepared for that as well. That’s where the stubbornness comes in. One thing I tell my students is don’t listen to comments too much because if you listen to every comment that you receive from every economist and every seminar, then you’re just going to be at the very average of everybody’s opinion, which is not an original place to be.

Smith: It needs a lot of confidence to keep going.

Acemoglu: If you think about it that way, if you step back and say, ‘Oh, well everybody disagrees with me, but I believe in myself’, that would require a lot of confidence. But if you approach it playfully and say, ‘I want to explore this’, that could be more realistic.

Smith: One of the things that characterises you is you ask questions and you have always asked questions. That does require a boldness. It requires an interest.

Acemoglu: Yes. I think I asked too many questions as a kid too.

Smith: Did anybody tell you so?

Acemoglu: Yes, they did. Especially when they didn’t know the answers.

Smith: Yes, exactly.

Acemoglu: But adults don’t like it.

Smith: Yes, exactly. But still, it is something that people find hard to really be bold enough to keep asking.

Acemoglu: Asking is hard. Once you realise there’s an interesting question to develop answers to, it is even harder. That’s where you need a lot of work. I love writing articles and I love that I have written books, but writing books is a lot of work. That’s because you have to develop answers (at least provisional answers) to some big questions in a multi-dimensional and multi-faceted way. That’s a lot of work.

Smith: It’s a lot of work, it’s a different audience and it’s a different style completely.

Acemoglu: I like the style. The thing that’s hard with books is you don’t see the end of the tunnel. You have to start working hard, recognising you might need to work hard for another two years. It’s not like an article where you say, ‘Okay, I know I’m going to write the introduction and then everything else is ready’. That’s easier.

Smith: Is that why you write with people?

Acemoglu: Yes. I think research is already solitary. Writing books is even more solitary.

Smith: But learning to share ideas with people is not, for some people it comes very naturally. But to have these close relationships that you do as you write a book together, batting ideas off each other, that’s a partial description. But how would you describe those relationships?

Acemoglu: Yes, that’s exactly it. But I had decades of relationship to these people before starting to write a book. We had written several papers, so that helps. I think it would be much harder to write a book with somebody you haven’t collaborated with before. I think sharing has to be natural and organic, and you can only do that if you know the other person well enough.

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Smith: Any prescription for what to do about AI? It was the subject of a much debate during Nobel Week. You had amongst the laureates, rather different views of what to worry about with AI.

Acemoglu: Yes. I think some thought there was nothing to worry about it. Some thought it was super intelligence that was oncoming, that should be the real worry. I worried about the things that not so super intelligent AI can do in the hands of whoever controls it at the moment.

Smith: Do you worry about super intelligent AI? Or is that just something too far away?

Acemoglu: I’m not in the middle of developing the large language models and the associated generative AI tools. I keep hearing from people at the center and at the periphery of those efforts that AGI is on the horizon. I cannot completely ignore it. On the other hand, instinctively I still don’t believe it. That’s because my understanding of human intelligence is sufficiently multifaceted. That one simple architecture based on the foundation models and next word prediction and souped up with chain of reasoning or other sort of tricks of machine learning, doesn’t seem like it could have the multifaceted aspect of human intelligence. But the proof in the pudding, we’ll see. But in the meantime, I think we have a lot of other things to worry about. Even if we are headed towards super intelligence, I would still worry about the things that I’m worrying about right now for the simple reason that before we get to super intelligence where AI itself can do damage to us, there’s going to be a pretty lengthy period, years at least, where AI tools are super productive and super powerful. Even if that’s super intelligent and somebody controls them and that person controlling them can do a lot of damage to us.

Smith: The question of what it means to be human living with AI works across the spectrum from…

Acemoglu: It does. But AI is a tool in the hands of some people that can be used against other people directly or indirectly, is always present. That’s why I started by saying, you have to worry about the fact that these tools are in the hands of the most powerful corporations humanity has ever seen. If you have immediate size corporation that has a very powerful technology in its hands, that company is subject to a lot of checks, regulations and barriers. Not so with the richest companies in the world.

Smith: Do you think in some ways the conversation about super intelligent general AI is obscuring the conversation about the current threats from AI?

Acemoglu: 100%. Yes, that’s what I’ve been arguing. That’s why I don’t want to get engaged so much with the super intelligent, because the moment you get engaged (I may be wrong, I may be right) but that’s not the conversation that I think we should be having right now, because before we get there, we could do untold damage.

Smith: Oh dear. That’s rather a doom scenario to end on.

Acemoglu: Yes. But it’s not a hopeless scenario because part of what I’m saying also is that there is a direction of AI that’s much more beneficial. We can use AI to provide greater privacy, better communication possibilities, better ways for people to protect their data, to uncover lies that they are being told. We can create AI that makes workers more productive rather than just automate their work. There are directions, it’s just that we’re not heading there. That’s the pessimism or that’s the gloomy aspect. If you wanted a Cinderella story where the good is going to triumph over evil ultimately. There’s no guarantee.

Smith: I suppose, as you said in your banquet speech, it’s up to all of us.

Acemoglu: Yes, exactly. That’s the message I would like to convey.

Smith: Good. Thank you very much indeed.

Acemoglu: Thank you, Adam. This is a great conversation.

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Svensson: You just heard Nobel Prize Conversations. If you’d like to learn more about Daron Acemoglu, you can go to nobelprize.org where you’ll find a wealth of information about the prizes and the people behind the discoveries. Nobel Prize Conversations is a podcast series with Adam Smith, a co-production of Filt and Nobel Prize Outreach. The producer for this episode was me, Karin Svensson. The editorial team also includes Andrew Hart and Olivia Lundqvist. Music by Epidemic Sound. If you like how economic sciences laureates often seem to work in pairs and packs, why not listen to our earlier episodes with 2022 laureates, Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig. You can find previous seasons and conversations on Acast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening.

Nobel Prize Conversations is produced in cooperation with Fundación Ramón Areces.