Why did the rich Mughals, Aztecs and Incas evolve into poor civilizations today?
Mr. Acemoglu is the recipient of the American Economic Association’s John Bates Clark medal, given every two years to the nation’s best economist under the age of 40. Mr. Acemoglu, 37 years old, is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The medal has been a good predictor of future Nobel prize winners — of the 29 economists who have won the award since 1947, 11 went on to win Nobel awards later in life, including Paul Samuelson, Milton Friedman and Joseph Stiglitz. With a detailed eye on long stretches of economic history, Mr. Acemoglu has written several papers arguing that a nation’s political and social institutions play the key role in guiding its economic destiny. In one paper he detailed how civilizations that were rich compared with the rest of the world in 1500 — such as the Mughals, Aztecs and Incas — evolved into poor countries today, a point that contradicts the idea that geography is destiny. Instead, he says, differing political institutions set up by
