In this exclusive end-of-year conversation with our Co-Managing Editor Ece Özbey, Nobel Prize–winning political economist Daron Acemoğlu reflects on what 2025 revealed, and failed to resolve, about the state of democracy. From Trump’s global impact to the limits of personalized politics, from institutional decay to AI-driven distortions of political judgment, he explores why liberal democracy is struggling across regions and where renewal might still begin. He offers a concise yet wide-ranging assessment of democracy’s present, defined by the widening gap between ambitious promises and lived outcomes—and the uncertainty ahead.
Daron Acemoğlu is an Institute Professor in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Faculty Co-Director of the Stone Center on Inequality and the Shaping of the Future of Work. He is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the British Academy, the Turkish Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, the European Economic Association, and the Society of Labor Economists. His academic work spans political economy, economic development, growth, technological change, inequality, labor economics, and the economics of networks. Acemoğlu has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the John Bates Clark Medal (2005), the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics (2013), and the BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Economics (2016). In 2024, he received the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, jointly with Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson, “for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.”
The interview was conducted by Ece Özbey. Alina Young edited the audio file.
