Power and Progress

Turkish-American economist and recent Nobel prize winner, Daron Acemoglu, along with British-American economist and also recent Nobel prize winner, Simon Johnson, penned the 2023 book Power and Progress. Given the star power, one starts the book with high expectations. There are a number of books that survey the history of innovation, such as Ridley's 2020 How Innovation Works. In this case, the focus is inclusive innovation that benefits a broader number of people in society, as opposed to innovation that benefits a few (and potentially harms the majority). Like Ridley's book, it is a mass market book that tells stories of innovation. Also like Ridley's book, the book is general selects positive cases from the West and negative cases from the rest and ends up with quite normative or ideological takeaways, as opposed to findings rooted in the evidence from the book / drawn out from the examples on innovation that are surveyed (that coming from a reader who has not won a Nobel!). The key solutions proposed by the authors include: increase people power via unions, increase civil society action and organizing, create incentives for social good, break up big tech, reform taxes to align labor and capital, invest in people / workers, enhance data protection, and the need for government leadership. A few notes:

"There is reason to be hopeful because history also teaches us that a more inclusive vision that listens to a broader set of voices and recognizes the effects on every one is possible. Shared prosperity is more likely when countervailing powers hold entrepreneurs and technology leaders accountable-and push production methods and innovation in a more worker-friendly direction. Inclusive visions do not avoid some of the thorniest questions, such as whether the benefits that some reap justify the costs that others suffer. But they ensure that social decisions recognize their full consequences and without silencing those who do not gain." (p. 29)

"By the mid-nineteenth century; tens of thousands of middle-status Britons had formed the idea that they could rise substantially above their station through entrepreneurship and command of technologies. Other parts of Western Europe saw a similar process of social hierarchies loosening and ambitious men (and rarely women in those patriarchal times) wishing to gain wealth or status. But nowhere else in the world at that time do we see so many middle-class people trying to pierce through the existing social hierarchy. It was these meddling sort of men who were critical for the innovations and the introduction of new technologies throughout much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain." (p. 166)