Several critics see US President Donald Trump as the biggest threat to American democracy. But Nobel Prize-winning economist Daron Acemoglu believes the real danger runs much deeper, and it has less to do with one man and more to do with long-term economic decay.
Speaking to Fortune, he issued a warning: “If we go down this path of destroying jobs and creating more inequality, US democracy is not going to survive.” In 2024, Acemoglu won the Nobel Prize in economics along with Robinson and Simon Johnson for their work on how political and economic systems shape a nation’s success.
Job losses already underway
The Nobel laureate argues that the “AI job apocalypse” is not a distant fear. He says it is already happening. According to him, American companies recorded 1.2 million layoffs in 2025, a 58% jump from the previous year. More than 50,000 of those job cuts are linked to AI.
He is especially critical of the race to build artificial general intelligence, or AGI, machines that can match or surpass human thinking abilities. In his view, that focus is misguided. “I think there are ways in which this is a misguided agenda,” he told Fortune. “It would have huge social consequences that are quite adverse.”
Acemoglu believes there is another way out, one where AI supports workers instead of replacing them. He calls it a “pro-worker” AI agenda. “The best way to use something that’s different from you is not to use it to replace yourself, but to use it in a complementary way,” he told Fortune.
AI, inequality and a growing wealth gap
Acemoglu believes AI-driven job losses could dramatically widen the already massive gap between the rich and everyone else. He points out that wealth inequality in the United States is at a historic high, and traditional policies have not managed to fix it.
“We may need wealth taxes because anything else we do today is still going to lead to this huge wealth gap that exists in this country,” he said.
The professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology has spent decades studying why some countries thrive while others fall apart. In his 2012 book Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, he argued that strong political institutions are the foundation of prosperity.
He referred to California’s proposed “billionaire tax,” which would impose a one-time 5% tax on individuals with a net worth of $1 billion or more. Even so, he believes that simply taxing the wealthy is not enough. “It’s not enough to tax the rich,” he said. “You really need ways in which workers of all sorts of skills can take part in the growth process.”
For Acemoglu, the real issue is not just technology itself, but who benefits from it. If AI only enriches a small group at the top while pushing workers aside, the social and political consequences could be severe.