In which Noah Smith & Brad DeLong wish Daron Acemoglu & Simon Johnson had written a very different book than their "Power & Progress" is...

Key Insights:

• Acemoglu & Johnson should have written a very different book—one about how some technologies complement and others substitute for labor, and it is very important to maximize the first.

• Neither Noah Smith nor Brad DeLong is at all comfortable with “power” as a category in economics other than as the ability to credibly threaten to commit violence or theft.

• Acemoglu & Robinson’s Why Nations Fail is a truly great book. Power & Progress is not.

• We should not confuse James Robinson with Simon Johnson

• Billionaires running oligopolistic tech firms are not trustworthy stewards of the future of our economy.

• The IBM 701 Defense Calculator of 1953 is rather cool.

• The lurkers agree with Noah Smith in the DMs.

• The power loom caused technological unemployment because the rest of the value chain—cotton growing, spinning, and garment-making—was rigid, hence the elasticity of demand for the transformation thread → cloth was low.

• We need more examples of bad technologies than the cotton gin and the Roman Empire.

References:

• Acemoglu, Daron, & Simon Johnson. 2023. Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity. New York; Hachette Book Group. https://archive.org/details/daron-acemoglu-simon-johnson-power-and-progress-our-thousand-year-struggle-over-

• Acemoglu, Daron, & James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Crown Publishers. https://archive.org/details/WhyNationsFailTheOriginsODaronAcemoglu

• Besi. 2023. “Join us Tues. Oct. 10 at 4pm Pacific for a talk by

@MITSloan’s Simon Johnson…” Twitter. October 9. https://twitter.com/BESI_Berkeley/status/1711541113738387874.

• DeLong, J. Bradford. 2024. “What To Do About the Dependence of the Form Progress Takes on Power?: Quick Takes on Acemoglu & Johnson's "Power & Progress”. Grasping Reality. February 29.

• DeLong, J. Bradford; & Noah Smith. 2023. “We Cannot Tell in Advance Which Technologies Are Labor-Augmenting & Which Are Labor-Replacing”. Hexapodia. XLIX, July 7.

• Gruber, Jonathan, & Simon Johnson. 2019. Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream.

The book is available on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/e-20190429.

• Johnson, Simon, & James Kwak. 2011. 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown. New York: Vintage Books. https://archive.org/details/13bankers0000unse.

• Smith, Noah. 2024. “Book Review: Power & Progress”. Noahpinion. February 21.

• Walton, Jo. 1998. “The Lurkers Support Me in Email”. May 16. http://www.jowaltonbooks.com/poetry/whimsy/the-lurkers-support-me-in-email/.

+, of course:

• Vinge, Vernor. 1992. A Fire Upon the Deep. New York: TOR. https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0.

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