Daron Acemoglu to Receive 2025 Sage-CASBS Award
Nobel Prize-winning economist Daron Acemoglu, who’s been dubbed one of the “World’s Top Thinkers” by the popular press, will receive to the 2025 Sage-CASBS Award, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford announced today.
The award, first given in 2013, recognizes a scholar in the behavioral and social sciences who has made outstanding contributions in using their scholarship to understand pressing social issues. Acemoglu will accept the award, which comes with a cash prize, when he delivers a free public lecture at CASBS on April 24, 2025.
Acemoglu’s research and writing specifically in the political economy of long-term economic growth and development, as well as in the theory and empirics of technological change. Even before receiving the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences (along with Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson), Acemoglu was widely known as a public intellectual exploring the social impacts as individuals and societies oscillate between poverty and prosperity. That theme framed the 2012 book, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, Acemoglu wrote with Robinson. The book – which won the 2013 George S. Eccles Prize for Excellence in Economic Writing, awarded annually by Columbia University — explores why, over the course of history, different societies have been wealthy or poor, pointing to the importance of economic and political institutions – formal and informal rules and norms structuring human behavior and interactions – for economic growth and development.
In addition, in the book and through related work) Acemoglu and collaborators build on and extend the New Institutional Economics tradition by articulating the colonial roots of institutions, disentangling causes and consequences. They identify specific mechanisms and conditions driving democratization (or its reverse) as well as theorize how and when democratic (or more-democratic) regimes are more likely to emerge and afford their populations economic opportunities that enable growth that persists over time. And though history shows the effects of institutional choices are long-lasting, they are not irreversible. The clear governance implication is that greater economic equality among nation-states can be achieved through institutional reforms within nation-states.
“Daron Acemoglu advances our understanding of some of the most elemental aspects of human endeavor – the pursuit of prosperity and economic equality – both in historical and contemporary contexts,” said Blaise Simqu, CEO of Sage. “In combining rigorous academic scholarship with public-facing thought leadership, often with policy and governance implications, he embodies the greatest aspirations Sage and CASBS have for this award. I am proud that Professor Acemoglu forever will be associated with it and our two organizations.”
Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson have been guests on our Social Science Bites podcast series. Listen to James Robinson on why nations fail and listen to Daron Acemoglu on artificial intelligence.
Acemoglu has served on the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1993 and has held endowed professorships there since 2004. In 2019, he was named MIT Institute Professor, the university’s highest faculty appointment. There, he co-directs the MIT Shaping the Future of Work Initiative. Before MIT, Acemoglu held a lectureship and earned his doctoral degree at the London School of Economics. He currently holds external research associate appointments with the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Tolouse Information Technology Network as well as a fellow appointment with the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and the Centre for Economic Policy Research.
A sampling of his previous honors includes the John Bates Clark Medal (2005), conferred biennially by the American Economic Association to the most outstanding U.S. economist under the age of forty; the John von Neumann Award (2007), given by the Rajk László College for Advanced Studies, Hungary; the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics (2012), awarded biennially by Northwestern University; and the Global Economy Prize (2019), awarded by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, Germany. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2006), the Turkish Academy of Sciences (2013), the National Academy of Sciences (2014), and the American Philosophical Society (2021); an elected fellow of the Econometric Society (2005), the Society of Labor Economists (2007), the European Economic Association (2012), and The British Academy (2021); and was selected for a fellowship by the Carnegie Corporation of New York (2017).
“In the process of applying his expertise across time spans, Daron Acemoglu also performs social science inquiry across multiple disciplinary boundaries and in a collaborative way, a hallmark of the ethos underlying all that we do here,” said Sara Soule, CASBS’s director. “It is fitting that Daron’s outstanding work takes some of its inspiration from eminent institutional economists, political scientists, and historians like Douglass North, Barry Weingast, and many others who have spent a year as CASBS fellows. It is an honor to celebrate Daron in connection with this enduring spirit through the Sage-CASBS Award.”
The Sage-CASBS Award selection committee consisted of Blaise Simqu, CEO of Sage; Sarah Soule, Sara Miller McCune Director of CASBS, Stanford University; Margaret O’Mara, professor and Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Chair of American History, University of Washington, and 2014-15 CASBS fellow; and Aaron Shaw, associate professor of communication, Northwestern University, and 2017-18 CASBS fellow.
Past winners of the award include Daniel Kahneman, psychologist and Nobel laureate in economics; Pedro Noguera, Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Southern California; Kenneth Prewitt, former director of the U.S. Census Bureau and the Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs, Emeritus at Columbia University; William Julius Wilson, the Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor, Emeritus at Harvard University; Carol Dweck, the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University; Jennifer Richeson, the Philip R. Allen Professor of Psychology at Yale University; Elizabeth Anderson, the John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of Michigan; and Alondra Nelson, former acting director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Harold F. Linder Chair and Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study.
