Astral Codex Ten

Daron Acemoglu

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Daron Acemoglu

Article

Daron Acemoglu is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between March 09, 2021 and July 13, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “by Daron Acemoglu, Davide Cantoni, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson”; “Daron Acemoglu is the most-cited economist of the past ten years”; “This time it’s Daron Acemoglu”. It most often appears alongside Europe, Germany, Soviet Union.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: March 09, 2021
  • Last seen: July 13, 2022

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

The Consequences Of Radical Reform
March 09, 2021 · Original source
Into this eternal battle comes The Consequences Of Radical Reform: The French Revolution, by Daron Acemoglu, Davide Cantoni, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson (from 2009; h/t Rob B). Under Napoleon, the revolutionary French took over large swathes of Europe. They abolished their client states' traditional systems, replacing them with the Napoleonic Code and other "modern" legal systems. Europe at the time had so many tiny duchies and principalities and so on that you can actually do a decent experiment on it - for every principality Napoleon conquered and reformed, there was another one just down the river which was basically identical but managed to escape conquest. So the authors ask: did the radically-reformed polities do better or worse than the left-to-their-traditions polities?
Inline links: The Consequences Of Radical Reform: The French Revolution
First, this is from 2009 (I’m only just hearing about it, sorry). Normally I'd be inclined to trust it; Daron Acemoglu is the most-cited economist of the past ten years, and I've never heard anyone say a bad word about him. But I feel like concerns about spatial autocorrelation in this kind of cross-country research have gotten much stronger over the past decade, and I'm not sure 2009 economists knew how to take this problem seriously. Are we sure it's not just something like "France invaded countries close to it, France is pretty close to the economic core of Europe, so countries in the economic core of Europe did better than countries elsewhere"? The authors note there was no tendency for French-invaded countries to outperform their neighbors before the French invasion, but that could just be because "economic core of Europe" only started being meaningful post-Industrial-Revolution. I don't know enough about what safeguards you're supposed to have against these kinds of things to know whether this paper had them.
Contra Acemoglu On...Oh God, We're Doing This Again, Aren't We?
July 27, 2021 · Original source
The Washington Post has published yet another "luminary in unrelated field discovers AI risk, pronounces it stupid" article. This time it's Daron Acemoglu. I respect Daron Acemoglu and appreciate the many things I’ve learned from his work in economics. In particular, I respect him so much that I wish he would stop embarrassing himself by writing this kind of article (I feel the same way about Steven Pinker and Ted Chiang).
Inline links: has published yet another, Ted Chiang
I have no idea why Daron Acemoglu and every single other person who writes articles on AI for the popular media thinks this is such a knockdown argument. But here we are. He writes:
How do you write an entire article dismissing fear of superintelligent AI, which doesn’t contain a single argument against fear of superintelligent AI? Daron Acemoglu is a smart person and I doubt he did this by accident. I think he just didn’t care about the topic at all. He wanted space to make his argument that narrow AI is pernicious and that somebody needs to do something. Pitching it as “instead of worrying about superintelligence, worry about this!” seemed like a cute framing device that would probably get the article a few extra eyeballs.
Book Review: The Man From The Future
July 13, 2022 · Original source
In my post, I was able to track down a few clues to the mystery. All of the Martians were Jewish, which linked the puzzle to the general puzzle of Jewish overachievement (for example, 36% of US Nobel Prize winners are Jews, compared to only 2% of the US population). Greg Cochran and others suggest a genetic explanation, with Daron Acemoglu and others suggesting a cultural/historical one; unsurprisingly, I side with Cochran. Granting that this is a Jewish phenomenon, it’s not too hard to explain why it happened at the turn of the century in particular - too long before then, and anti-Semitism prevented European Jews from getting a good education; too long after then, and they all died in the Holocaust.
Inline links: a genetic explanation, a cultural/historical one