2025 Sage-CASBS Award Lecture featuring Daron Acemoglu

Institutions, Technology and Prosperity
This talk will review the main motivations and arguments of Daron Acemoglu’s work on comparative development, colonialism, and institutional change. He then will provide a simple framework to organize the key ideas and connect them with his research on innovation and technology. The framework is centered around a utility-technology possibilities frontier, which delineates the possible distributions of resources in a society both for given technology and working via different technological choices. It highlights how various types of institutions, market structures, norms, and ideologies influence moves along the frontier and shifts of the frontier, and it provides a simple formalization of the social forces that lead to institutional persistence and those that can trigger institutional change. The framework also enables us to conceptualize how, during periods of disruption, existing – and sometimes quite small – differences can have amplified effects on prosperity and institutional trajectories. In this way, it suggests some parallels between different disruptive periods, including the onset of European colonialism, the spread (or lack thereof) of industrial technologies in the 19th century, and decisions related to the use, adoption, and development of AI today.
The event will conclude with the Sage-CASBS Award presentation to Daron Acemoglu.
Outdoor reception 5:00pm | Event begins 5:30pm
There will be free valet parking available at this event.