My guest today, Diron Asamogl is a professor of economics at MIT and co-author of a number of influential books written for a popular audience, including why nations fail and power and progress.

He is also, without a doubt, one of the greatest economists I have ever met.

Historical processes really shape economic relations and we cannot understand the

economy today without understanding where we're coming from in terms of history.

Welcome to people I mostly admire with Steve Lovett.

Drone tackles huge questions at the intersection of politics and economics. Why are some countries rich and others poor?

How does democracy take hold and what factors allow it to survive?

Who benefits and who

losers allow it to survive.

I've left every conversation I've ever had with the run

amazed by his insight into how the world works.

I hope that's true again today.

I want to talk about your

public-facing work, they probably have no idea about what a giant you are within academics.

So let's start with citations of your work. That's one of the most commonly used

metrics of a scholar's impact. I looked this up yesterday because I knew we'd be talking. You have 226,000 citations according to Google Scholar.

And when I saw that number, I practically fell out of my chair.

Wow!

For purposes of comparison, I looked up my own citation numbers and I've had a pretty good academic

career.

We had the exact same age and you have more than five times as many citations as I do.

In fact, I think you are the most cited economist in the world over the last two decades.

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