Nobel Prize-winning MIT economist Daron Acemoglu joins Nick and Goldy to discuss his new book, What Happened to Liberal Democracy? Remaking a Politics of Shared Prosperity. They explore why so many people have lost faith in democracy, how inequality and weakened worker power have reshaped politics, and why democracy has to deliver in people’s daily lives. They also dig into AI, automation, and whether new technology will concentrate even more wealth and power — or help build a more prosperous, democratic future.
Daron Acemoglu is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and Institute Professor at MIT. He is one of the world’s leading thinkers on political economy, institutions, inequality, technology, and the relationship between democracy and shared prosperity. His books include Why Nations Fail, The Narrow Corridor, and Power and Progress. His new book is What Happened to Liberal Democracy? Remaking a Politics of Shared Prosperity.
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What Happened to Liberal Democracy? Remaking a Politics of Shared Prosperity
New York Times – Nearly 200 Economists and Tech Leaders Warn of A.I. Threats
NBER – Automation and Repression
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Nick Hanauer:
The rising inequality and growing political instability that we see today are the direct result of decades of bad economic theory.
Goldy:
The last five decades of trickle-down economics haven’t worked, but what’s the alternative?
Nick Hanauer:
Middle out economics is the answer.
Goldy:
Because the middle class is the source of growth, not its consequence.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right.
Announcer:
This is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, a podcast about how to build the economy from the middle out. Welcome to the show.
Goldy:
Nick, so I need to start today’s pod by just being extremely hypocritical.
Nick Hanauer:
Okay.
Goldy:
You know how I love to make fun of the so-called Nobel Prize in economics, that it’s not a real Nobel Prize. Well, I take that back completely for today’s guest who actually is a Nobel laureate in economics. And if it is a real prize, he certainly deserves it.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, for sure. Today we get to talk to … I mean, could be the world’s most important economist. Don’t you think?
Goldy:
Well, certainly very influential. Several of the books he’s co-authored have been very influential to us, not the least of which being Why Nations Fail, but also I think, have we talked to him about all of his books? The Narrow Corridor, Power in Progress. And he has a new book coming out.
Nick Hanauer:
Came out today. It couldn’t be true, and we get to talk to Daron Acemoglu, who is, in my opinion, one of the most important economists in the world and whose books have been enormously influential, including Why Nations Fail and Progress in Power and the Narrow Corridor, so on and so forth. And an incredible public intellectual and thinker who has a new book out called What Happened to Liberal Democracy: Remaking a Politics of Shared Prosperity, which basically addresses the fact why so many people have lost faith in democracy and what we have to do to get that faith restored.
Goldy:
Right. And we’ve talked about that a lot over the years on the pod. The reason why so many people have lost faith in liberal democracy is because it’s not working for them because market capitalism is not working for them, because we have had 50 years of rising and radical inequality in which economic growth has been totally disconnected from growth in wages, larger growth in incomes, growth in employment, et cetera.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah.
Goldy:
So that disconnect between economic growth and the shared prosperity of the bottom 90% of Americans, yeah, you can see why people are losing faith in our institutions.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely and now, with AI threatening to reshape work power and the economy all over again, I think this argument is even more important. It’s even more urgent to begin to address these things in a way that secures democracy and shared prosperity. So with that, let’s talk to Daron.
Daron Acemoglu:
Well, thank you. First of all, I’m so happy to be with you. My name is Daron Acemoglu. I’m an institute professor at MIT. I’m an economist, and I’m excited about many things, but mostly right now about my forthcoming book, What Happened to Liberal Democracy?
Goldy:
I don’t know. I guess, Nick, the first question is, what the hell happened to liberal democracy?
Nick Hanauer:
Exactly. And I guess it’s safe to say that your diagnosis is highly aligned with our diagnosis, but why don’t you lay out your thesis?
Daron Acemoglu:
So I believe that, and the book documents this, we are so fortunate today in the grand scheme of history to be living in a society that’s still largely shaped by the freedoms, access to public services, political participation, and remnants of shared prosperity that liberal ideas inspired and liberal democracy worked towards, realizing to such an extent that even the most enlightened people who lived more than 300 years ago could not have imagined the kind of society that we live in.
So in the grand sweep of history, liberalism has been a success. Liberal democracy as the institutional realization of liberal ideals has been a success. But that success has recently, meaning over the last four decades or so, plunged itself into crisis for two main reasons. One, because the times changed, especially the structure of production changed and liberal institutions did not change with it. And second, because liberalism and liberal ideals and activism became victims of their own success in that, they overreached in a way that especially was not right for the time given the developments that were happening. The first-
Goldy:
Can we just pause for a moment for a quick definition? Because we use the word liberal differently than the rest of the world. And so, when you say liberalism, when you say liberal democracy, if you could just briefly define it.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. I think that’s right.
Daron Acemoglu:
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And we could spend several hours defining liberalism.
Goldy:
That’s right. You don’t need to.
Daron Acemoglu:
And my definition is actually somewhere between the American and European definitions in that, I start from the European definitions that liberalism is a big tent philosophy that is about individual freedoms and aspirations about progress and that progress being shared, to the extent that I’m talking about these achievements, I think I am particularly focusing on the left liberalism, meaning sort of those liberals that put a lot of emphasis on shared prosperity and dealing with discrimination and other inequities in society so that everybody can have an opportunity to enjoy meaningful freedoms.
Goldy:
Okay.
Daron Acemoglu:
Other than the two mechanisms, I think the most important part of the success of liberal democracy was to enshrine an environment in which shared prosperity became a reality. And that was about democratic governance, which created a level playing field, education and things like that. Trade unions that created protection for workers, but mostly it was also about the market economy during the industrial age where many companies invested in new technologies and in expansion. But in doing so, they also needed workers.
And in the conditions created by democratic governance and trade unions, that meant that they had to pay these workers higher wages. They couldn’t coerce them, they couldn’t cheat them. They had to go and convince them to work for them and stay with them. So that created a natural pathway for shared prosperity whereby market expansion and economic growth was accompanied by wage growth and employment growth. And those are the most surefire ways of sharing and spreading widely prosperity.
But the world has changed. Digital technologies ushered in what you might call the post-industrial age where educated workers’ skills became much more valuable. There was a lot of digital automation severing the link between market expansion and labor demand. Many companies could now expand, but without wanting to hire more labor. And some of them could in fact expand and lay off workers. And that created a very different challenge for creating shared prosperity to which liberal democracy and liberal politicians and liberal activists did not fully adjust to.
At the same time, also these same changes empowered educated segments of society. People like us, college graduates who live in large cities often with more than a college degree. These groups became much more socially influential. Also at the same time, culturally more homogeneous because they are living together and they’re becoming a large group with similar aspirations, similar education, similar occupations. And they did not sufficiently internalize the economic and social plight of the less educated, what we can call the working class.
In fact, they culturally overreached in terms of how they wanted to transform society. And in the process, they also ignored a very important lesson that was de facto a central part of early liberal democracy, which is community, local governance and local choice. And those things fade by the wayside. And all of these contributed, especially with a backlash that was triggered by right-wing entrepreneurs, radio hosts, and cultural counterfigures that exploited this overreach and some of the economic hardship in order to create a powerful backlash against liberal democracy.
Nick Hanauer:
But don’t you think that it’s the democracy’s inability to deliver material welfare for the majority?
Daron Acemoglu:
You have to be careful, at least in my opinion, in stating this as democracy’s difficulty. It’s not an unconditional difficulty. It’s a function of how the world has changed and what democracy and democratic dynamics have prioritized-
Nick Hanauer:
Correct.
Daron Acemoglu:
After all, the period of unprecedented shared prosperity where wages grew faster than productivity, lower education workers actually gained faster than higher education workers. Wages grew faster than profits where the three and a half decades that followed World War II, and that was firmly under liberal democracy’s institutions and under liberalism’s tutelage.
Nick Hanauer:
Right.
Daron Acemoglu:
So we can recreate that, but not just by going back in history, by adapting to changing times.
Nick Hanauer:
At the risk of antagonizing perhaps the world’s most important economist.
Daron Acemoglu:
Please do.
Nick Hanauer:
That being you.
Daron Acemoglu:
I thought it was somebody else you were going to-
Nick Hanauer:
No, no. No, we’re talking about you.
Goldy:
Not living economist.
Daron Acemoglu:
Yeah, living economist.
Nick Hanauer:
What role do you think that economics played in the collapse of support for ordinary Americans and the aggregation of both economic advantage and power at the top?
Daron Acemoglu:
I think many disciplines in their own ways contributed to it. So as the college educated became socially more powerful, that was not a uniform process that everybody with a college degree agrees. There are deep divisions and different disciplines and different emphasis played different roles. Economists, I think, were at the forefront of saying free markets and free rein by very large tech companies would somehow lift us up. And that was the most important contribution from economics.
Nick Hanauer:
Yes.
Daron Acemoglu:
A lot of engineers thought that they could treat human society and social organizations as an engineering system. That was not a great contribution and ignored a lot of the social aspects of prosperity and as social aspects of cohesion and progress.
Nick Hanauer:
Right.
Daron Acemoglu:
A lot of lawyers legalistically interpreted politics that didn’t help. And humanities and the more left-leaning social sciences were at the forefront of trying to impose liberalism’s values on communities at the expense of all the backlash and removing or weakening self-government at the local level.
Nick Hanauer:
The cultural issues.
Daron Acemoglu:
The cultural issues.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Daron Acemoglu:
So I think we’re all to blame.
Goldy:
Okay. So now, we’re in this situation. Obviously, as a bleeding heart American liberal, we’re in great agreement on a lot of the economic issues.
Daron Acemoglu:
Yeah.
Goldy:
I understand your thesis. I find it uncomfortable to consider accepting that local communities, cities, states can enact policy based on some of the cultural issues that I find hateful and counterproductive. I understand that this is put like the Democratic Party in a situation where … and this is actually Sohrab Ahmari’s thesis that the working class is culturally conservative and they should be aligned with the right, that we have the wrong political alignments in the United States. And that serves his end as a social conservative.
How do you address people like me who are saying, “No, we really can’t back away from defending the LGBTQ community or from fighting over racism or from keeping religious fundamentalism out of our public schools, even though those are issues that make it hard for us to implement the economic policies that would ultimately address this divide.”
Daron Acemoglu:
Well, thanks for putting it this way, Goldy, because I think you’ve put it very clearly and it’s a very important issue. So I would give it a three fear answer. First, everything I say that liberalism should aspire to is a kind of pluralism subject to basic freedoms. So we should never allow communities at the local level to enact practices or laws that go against the most basic principles of liberalism. So freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association have to remain.
So ethnic communities in Europe, ethnic Muslim communities that impose Sharia law or religious communities here that impose certain beliefs and don’t let their children to be educated, those are not allowed. Second, I think liberalism by any measure, when you look at its philosophical foundations, has always celebrated pluralism. I think it would not be liberalism. It would be something else. Some sort of what I would associate with Rousseau, Rousseau type of progressivism. If it said, “We want progress and these are the ideals and we’re going to impose them on everybody.” So pluralism is a very important part of it.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, particularly in a country like the United States of America.
Daron Acemoglu:
Particularly in the United States, particularly in Europe, but particularly also in Latin America.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Yeah.
Daron Acemoglu:
But what I’m going one step further, and as the third tier of it, is that it’s not enough just to have pluralism at the individual level, but you also need pluralism at the community level for two reasons. One reason is because individuals are defined by often get their shared moral values, their communication, their solidarity from communities. So you cannot impose uniformity over them. And second, a lot of the experimentation that is critical for idea generation and progress are not done at the individual level, they’re done at the community level.
So you want some diversity at the community level. And that means that you have to let communities, again, subject to those basic freedoms, make certain decisions themselves. That doesn’t mean that they should be allowed to tell people how they can pray or what they can do, but they should be able to emphasize different values and organize their communities in different ways. So in some sense, it’s not going as far as, yes, we can allow Ku Klux Klann, whatever, to do whatever they want to do. Absolutely not, because they would very, very strongly contradict with basic freedoms.
But how much they emphasize religion and how they organize local public goods and local policies, there will have to be a lot of heterogeneity there. And when you do that … By the way, just one final thing. When you do that, if you can do that, I think Ahmari is wrong. Working class shouldn’t be necessarily aligned with the right. I think working class liberalism, what I call, is something that can bring the working class inside the tent of left liberalism.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. And I feel very strongly that one of the things that’s pushed working class people culturally to the right has been the economic commiseration they have faced over 50 years, right?
Daron Acemoglu:
100%.
Nick Hanauer:
It’s much easier to be tolerant when things are going well. When you’re hanging on by your fingernails, you have very little patience for others and difference and the rest of it, right?
Daron Acemoglu:
But the way I would think of it is that economic hardship, especially the kinds of jarring inequalities that we have in the United States, it’s a ticking bomb.
Nick Hanauer:
Yes.
Daron Acemoglu:
But when it actually explodes is also very related to cultural backlash and how that cultural backlash is exploited. So inequality increased a lot in the 1980s, and you saw a lot of grumblings, but you didn’t see that big sort of backlash against liberal democracy in the 1980s or in the 1990s. But it starts much more a little bit in the 2000s and much more in 2010s when both the overreach is there and the cultural matters, but it’s also being very skillfully exploited by first AM radio show hosts and then all sorts of other political entrepreneurs and then social media.
Nick Hanauer:
But to be clear, inequality may have gone up in the ’80s, but it’s much, much, much worse today.
Daron Acemoglu:
Absolutely. It’s been keeping going up. Yes. Yes.
Nick Hanauer:
As a practical matter, in the 80s, things were much easier on the median family than they are today.
Goldy:
How much did the two great shocks, the 2008 financial collapse and then the COVID shutdown, how much did they contribute to the polarization that has undermined liberal democracy? I mean, had those not happened, had we not had giant catastrophic shocks like that, might we be in a different situation or were we just going to get there inevitably on the path we were on?
Daron Acemoglu:
I don’t know. That’s a great question, Goldy. I would say that … and I do not emphasize this enough in the book, and that’s my bad, but certainly the financial crisis and how it was dealt with damaged the legitimacy of liberal democratic expert decision-making and for good reason.
Nick Hanauer:
For sure.
Daron Acemoglu:
COVID is a more complicated story. Actually, the policy response during COVID economically-
Nick Hanauer:
It’s pretty good.
Daron Acemoglu:
Made sure that poverty did not increase. In fact, there was a reduction in poverty because of the transfer programs. But the cultural aspect of COVID was A, mismanaged, and B, very badly exploited by very skillful provocateurs.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah.
Daron Acemoglu:
And that’s why you saw, for example, anti-fax ideas become so much more powerful. I mean, they were there before COVID, but they became so much more powerful, or things like wearing masks became-
Nick Hanauer:
Politicized.
Daron Acemoglu:
… such a key cultural political topic. That was skillful exploitation. On the other hand, own goals by the liberal establishments, school closures. They were the most destructive, socially costly policies that were also tone-deaf and of course became fodder for in the culture wars.
Nick Hanauer:
So I think we’re in violent agreement with the basic thesis that until democracy starts delivering the goods, it’s not unreasonable to mistrust democracy, especially if you live-
Daron Acemoglu:
100%, and I think that’s the most important message.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. If you’ve lived through-
Daron Acemoglu:
Democracy has to deliver if it wants people support. And democracy can only survive with people’s support.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right. And our thesis is our democratic crisis is the consequence of an economic crisis.
Daron Acemoglu:
Yeah, we’re broadly in agreement then. Absolutely. Yeah. That is the foundational block.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Yeah.
Daron Acemoglu:
But then what goes on on top of it, determine the direction of the crisis and the severity and many others.
Nick Hanauer:
And the texture of it.
Daron Acemoglu:
And the texture of it.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Adjacent to this work on this book and as a consequence of your last book, Progress and Power, which was about the role that technology plays in human societies. And I mean, I think the main point of the book was, I hope I get this right, technological progress does not automatically turn into shared prosperity.
Daron Acemoglu:
100%. You got it right again. Thank you, Nick.
Nick Hanauer:
And if you look it back in history, in almost every case, technological progress did not turn into shared prosperity.
Daron Acemoglu:
Let’s say in several cases.
Nick Hanauer:
And if it did, it took a while and it took-
Daron Acemoglu:
Exactly. That’s it. That’s exactly it.
Nick Hanauer:
… extra technological forces. It took social forces, democratic forces, political forces.
Daron Acemoglu:
And also direction of technology that was more conducive to work-
Nick Hanauer:
More conducive, yeah. Sort of sandwich in between these things, you just did this other paper entitled Automation and Repression, which seems to have … which you were kind enough to quote me, and I’m not sure I should be flattered or not.
Daron Acemoglu:
Yeah, well, because you articulated the name pitchforks.
Nick Hanauer:
Yes. Exactly.
Daron Acemoglu:
It’s so central to the ideas there.
Nick Hanauer:
Exactly.
Daron Acemoglu:
Of course, you have to be quoted twice, Nick. Twice.
Nick Hanauer:
I know. I’m very flattered. I want you to know. But that seemed to be a formalization of a lot of these arguments.
Daron Acemoglu:
It is. It is.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. And can you just talk a little bit about that paper-
Daron Acemoglu:
Well, let me actually take one step back.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Okay.
Daron Acemoglu:
And make another point which will then lead to that, which is also in the book, which is that if AI, which of course is going to have several transformative effects on our society and economy, goes in the direction of automating more and more work and concentrating more and more wealth in the hands of a very narrow group of people. Not only will shared prosperity will become a distant dream, but I don’t think liberal democracy or democracy can survive. And automation and repression paper picks up from there.
And it says, if you are having more and more automation, what will happen to the social life and to the political life? And one thing is that if automation, as theory suggests, and data support, keeps on increasing capital labor inequality, meaning the capital share increases, the labor share declines, that’s going to create more and more political reaction from laborers that might turn into a revolt.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah.
Daron Acemoglu:
Summarizing it briefly, essentially that would make the richest people who are often politically influential really afraid of the pitchfork coming out-
Nick Hanauer:
Yes.
Daron Acemoglu:
As many people have expressed in one way or another. And then, they will have two reactions. One is they can redistribute. They can provide more public goods, more transfer programs, better healthcare, UBI or things like that, or they can repress. And what that paper does … this is about the future. It refers to some historical data, but it’s a scenario planning, but it points out the forces that ultimately repression has an advantage because the more you keep on automating, the more you need to redistribute. And the cost of redistributing more and more will become higher and higher on the people who are becoming wealthier and they won’t like that.
Whereas if you repress, you pay the fixed cost or the necessary cost for a big army and a security force, and that becomes more economical at some point.
Nick Hanauer:
Yes.
Daron Acemoglu:
So that’s the very dystopian scenario planning.
Nick Hanauer:
It’s a very depressing paper.
Goldy:
Well, also, there’s something peculiar about the technology. It’s not like the spinning Jenny was a tool of repression. It increased productivity. But AI, that’s a tool that can be used for repression, specifically used that way if that’s how you want to use it.
Daron Acemoglu:
Absolutely. 100%. 100%. And in fact, well before AI had any productivity effect in say manufacturing, it was already being used for repression by China.
Nick Hanauer:
Yes. Right. Correct.
Daron Acemoglu:
And Russia, and perhaps the NSA.
Nick Hanauer:
Yes. Yes. Almost certainly. Yes, most certainly.
Goldy:
How do we get out of this mess?
Daron Acemoglu:
So I think it’s a multipronged approach we need to adopt. First, liberal democracy needs to be renewed, and that means the aspirations of liberal democracy renewed and a demonstration effect to show, perhaps starting from the community level, that these aspirations can be translated into practice and would deliver what people want, better public services, true self-government and voice. And most importantly, as we agree, Nick, shared prosperity. And what I suggest is as an implementation of that in our current age, it would be what I call working class liberalism.
Liberal ideas merge with working class priorities, making jobs and shared prosperity central, but also emphasizing the importance of community and that community level pluralism that we talked about. But then second, if AI keeps on going on its current path, all of that would become impossible for the reasons that we’ve already touched upon. So then I suggest why there is a different direction for AI, which I call pro-worker AI, where we use AI tools to work workers more productive, better inform, better at problem solving, better at performing new tasks, better at contributing to the production process.
And I try to outline, and of course in a brief way, but my other research goes into more detail, why that’s a feasible direction and why it would have a variety of much better social consequences.
Nick Hanauer:
So can you highlight a few of the practical ways in which we might point AI or technologies like it in directions that are more aimed at human welfare rather than capital returns, and ideally analogize to another instance in history where we did the same thing?
Daron Acemoglu:
Well, let me do that in two stages because I think the most important one, but also the more straightforward one is to argue and change the narrative that this direction that I’m suggesting as pro-worker is actually feasible. And for that, what I do in the book and in my research is first of all, show that throughout the last eight decades, there have been a lot of new tasks and new activities enabled by technology where workers have been central and they’ve been great for job creation and wage growth.
Then explain why AI opens new windows to do those kinds of things. So I explain, for example, how we can use AI tools to help electricians become better electricians and perform more tasks, nurses to do many more things, educators to work much more productively in different ways. So rather than sideline, displace these workers and automate work, give them tools to do better, gain more expertise, do new things, be better at problem solving, that’s a change in narrative and change in focus. And the best way to do that would be change the conversation and convince people, especially in the tech sector, that it’s a feasible and exciting direction and they should go down that way.
But of course, none of that happens in a vacuum. You need societal pressure and you need some policies to support that. I do not believe that the government can be the entrepreneur and bureaucrats can dictate the direction of technology.
Nick Hanauer:
Yes.
Daron Acemoglu:
So the government’s role is to create the framework within which that can happen. But I think historical analogies, as you suggest, Nick, are central. And one great analogy, and which actually is quite telling, comes from the energy sector. As recently as the early 2000s, renewable energy was more than 10 times as expensive as fossil fuel energy. Today, it’s cost competitive with fossil fuels and cheaper in a few activities and more expensive in other activities because of storage and high energy density difficulties, et cetera.
But it’s made tremendous progress. How did it do that? Because there was a change in the direction of research. People became much more excited and put much more investment and much more energy into renewable solar panels, wind, and other things.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah.
Daron Acemoglu:
Why did that happen? First of all, there was a realization that this was an important priority. Second, there were certain policies that supported that, starting with … in Germany and in Europe, and then in the United States regulations as California, then translating into certain activities in China. Then there was a lot of support for renewable and other clean technologies in terms of the R&D space. And all of these imperfectly, none of them working perfectly, some of them being exploited, some of the biggest recipients of green technology subsidies were big energy companies, but so be it.
It’s still on the whole work and it redirected research, which had tremendous consequences as I’ve just explained. So those are the same parameters that we need. We need a changing conversation. We also need to get rid of distortions that support automation. Some of them are in the tax code, some of them are in other places.
Nick Hanauer:
So the distortions in the tax code are like depreciation, fast depreciation schedules.
Daron Acemoglu:
Right, right. Those are the components of it. What a summary measure would be that we tax labor heavily, we subsidize capital. So which means that if I have two pre-tax cost equivalent ways of doing something, I have a significant benefit from doing the more capital intensive automated one because the tax code subsidizes.
Nick Hanauer:
Yes.
Daron Acemoglu:
And also some subsidies for blue sky, new AI, ventures that would be more human complimentary. So all of those I think need to be bundled in some way that’s not going to be identical to the energy sector’s developments over the last 20 years, but from which we can learn a lot.
Nick Hanauer:
The biggest thing that happened in the energy sector is rights law, right?
Daron Acemoglu:
Yeah.
Nick Hanauer:
The scale economies-
Daron Acemoglu:
But scale economies were previously working in favor of fossil fuels.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, and now they’re working in favor of-
Daron Acemoglu:
Exactly. And how did that happen? Because of an intervention by the government and the democratic process and aspirations.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right. That’s right. So if you could wave a magic wand, what would be the first three things you would do?
Daron Acemoglu:
First of all, I don’t think any policy would have remotely the effect that change in the mindset of Silicon Valley would have. If tomorrow we woke up miraculously and 60%, or let’s say even 50% of the tremendously talented people who are working on AI in the United States said, “No, we’re no longer so interested in artificial general intelligence and artificial super intelligence. We want to develop human complimentary tools, pro-worker AI,” it would happen. So policies are supporting for that process. I would say one is the tax code, which is very easy to change in theory.
Nick Hanauer:
In theory. In practice. Yeah.
Daron Acemoglu:
Very difficult in the current political environment.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Yeah.
Daron Acemoglu:
The second one, you might find a little bit of a wild one, but I think legislating a proper set of laws for control and property rights over data. Everybody understands and agrees that data is going to be much more important than land in the new AI digital economy. But nobody can go and take your plot of land is this in the United States. Technology companies routinely take and expropriate everybody’s data. That is not just inequitable, but it’s also very bad because it kills any incentives to create high quality data. And high quality data is very important for these human complimentary things where expertise needs to be combined with AI.
And all of that needs the infrastructure where people can create data, they are secure, they can sell that data or lease it and all sorts of other arrangements, both individual ownership and collective ownership over data. And then third one, I think we need an AI agency similar to NIH where there are a lot of expertise. So state-of-the-art understanding of AI and security are developed and conveyed to the rest of the government and society. Best practices are articulated for companies and some regulatory knowledge is produced as well as support for under researched areas that are socially beneficial just in the same way that NIH does.
Nick Hanauer:
Interesting.
Goldy:
And this is why Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and others have decided that we don’t need liberal democracy anymore because that would just interfere with their right to use their intellectual property however they want to use it.
Nick Hanauer:
Yes.
Daron Acemoglu:
Well, their intellectual property or whatever. I mean, their power. Once we become that rich, it’s not just your intellectual property we’re talking about, it’s power.
Nick Hanauer:
It’s power.
Daron Acemoglu:
It’s dominance. And that’s one thing. Again, liberal ideas are not against inequality. No serious liberal thinker has ever said we want a society in which everybody is equal.
Nick Hanauer:
Right.
Daron Acemoglu:
But liberalism never accepts very deep hierarchies or what new Republican thinkers call dominance relations where I have so much power over you that you cannot even exercise any meaningful choice over your life. And that’s what Peter Thiel and Elon Musk want.
Goldy:
And almost have, already-
Daron Acemoglu:
Almost have.
Goldy:
The idea of changing the mindset in Silicon Valley, I mean, it just takes-
Daron Acemoglu:
Good luck to you. Right, exactly.
Goldy:
It just takes one sociopath. And let me tell you, there’s a hell of a lot more than one. Nick Veltrop. I mean-
Daron Acemoglu:
Okay then, I’m going to leave you guys to a point … sociopath, you want to change the values there.
Goldy:
I mean…,
Daron Acemoglu:
But let me just say one thing though, the extent of Elon Musk’s wealth is now non-comparable to anything. But if you look at the 2000s, Sweden had a lot of billionaires too. None of them, none of them, not a single one of them had any discernible, very negative effect on Swedish political economy. Why not? Because institutions were such that you could not turn your money-
Goldy:
Into power.
Daron Acemoglu:
… into a political weapon.
Goldy:
Yeah.
Daron Acemoglu:
In the United States, we’ve bungled the laws. We’ve bungled the north, we’ve bungled the practices in such a way to make that possible. So we as well as them are responsible.
Nick Hanauer:
Yes. No, it’s true. Citizens United and the rest of it.
Daron Acemoglu:
Yeah.
Nick Hanauer:
Calling money speech. Yeah.
Goldy:
And the latest ruling saying essentially allowing coordination between parties and candidate campaigns now means that Elon Musk can basically spend unlimited amount of money, give it to the party, it’s unlimited, and then that can be coordinated with a campaign. If he wants to put 100 million dollars into a governor’s race, he can put 100 million dollars into a governor’s race.
Daron Acemoglu:
Absolutely, but it’s not just that. I mean, it’s not just that. So let’s be clear. It’s a broader impunity against corruption.
Goldy:
Yes.
Daron Acemoglu:
And also the fact that we’ve turned our politics into a rat race between different levels of spending, which makes money so important in political campaigns.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. The whole thing is a catastrophe. And Daron, we’ve taken up a lot of your time. We have one final question which you’ve answered before, but I want you to answer it again. Why do you do this work? What motivates you?
Daron Acemoglu:
Look, I stay up many nights because I’m worried about our future, because if democracy collapses, the consequences will be tremendously bad. I worry other nights equally because of what AI might do to our society if it goes on its current path. And I think it’s all of our responsibility to try to articulate different, better futures so that we have a hope of surviving this period.
Goldy:
I get the feeling actually that you’re as gloomy as I am. Despite writing a book with … it’s such a positive idea that we can remake a politics of shared prosperity.
Daron Acemoglu:
Well, I mean, what I’m saying, we can.
Goldy:
We can. Yeah.
Daron Acemoglu:
I’m not saying that it’s easy. And I’m saying we have to try. We have no other place.
Nick Hanauer:
Here’s the thing. If there’s anything history teaches, we will once again at some point in the future have a politics of shared prosperity.
Goldy:
We just may all be dead for a couple millennia it happens.
Nick Hanauer:
Before we get there.
Goldy:
I mean, this is a tiny blip in history.
Daron Acemoglu:
It will be the foundation period in Asimov’s novels.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right. That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. Goldy, that was a fantastic conversation. And I find myself nodding in agreement with almost everything Acemoglu says. But with one caveat, at some point, it would be fun to press a little harder on the role that economics played in this debacle.
Goldy:
I think he acknowledges it, and I think it’s consistent with the feedback loop that is described in Why Nations Fail, that political inclusion feeds economic inclusion and economic inclusion feeds political inclusion. And when you break one of those-
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah.
Goldy:
Well, that’s when nations fail.
Nick Hanauer:
Right.
Goldy:
Because you undermine both democracy and the economics that creates broad support for democratic institutions.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right.
Goldy:
And that’s what we’ve seen. The fact that he’s coming back to this issue is not … and in somewhat a more less theoretical, more practical way in his new book, I think is an indication of how existential he views this threat to be.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, absolutely. Which it clearly is.
Goldy:
But not without solutions. I mean, we can do things to fix it and they are hard, but we’ve done hard things in the past as a nation.
Nick Hanauer:
We have. Usually only when we’re in a complete panic.
Goldy:
When faced with existential crises, but we did it with the New Deal. That was hard. Much of the rest of the world was going totalitarian. It was going fascist or communist. And we found a path to save both democracy and market capitalism by remaking our institutions. We fought an existential war in the Second World War, and we were able to come together as a nation, even though going into that war, there was majority opposition to getting involved in another World War. And we did it in a way just the extraordinary economic power of this country just suddenly marshaled towards war production in …
If you ever go back and you look at the numbers, like the number of airplanes produced in 1940 versus the number in 1943, it’s astounding. It’s just astounding what we were able to do when we put our minds together as a people, as a nation and actually did it. And it reminds me of that great quote from John Maynard Keynes where he says, “Anything we can do, we can afford.”
Daron Acemoglu:
Yeah.
Goldy:
When people say we can’t afford to address this crisis because the gap is just so big, we can’t afford to provide Medicare for all, or whatever you want to call it, provide every American access to affordable healthcare or housing or education or childcare or elder care. These are the things, the basic costs of a middle-class life that have been going through the roof much faster than inflation over the past 50 years as incomes have been flat. Well, we can afford to do those things. If they can be done, we can afford them.
We can’t afford to address climate change. It’s too expensive to build, to transform our energy systems to … Well, yeah, it can be done. We know technically how to do it. We could marshal our forces to do it if we wanted to. So you know me, Nick, I’m a pretty gloomy person. I think Daron sounded pretty gloomy himself, but I like to call myself … I describe myself as a cockeyed pessimist. Speaking of clean energy, I see no shame in tilting at windmills.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. No, for sure.
Goldy:
Generally, it’s futile and hopeless, but occasionally you knock one over. And a good example is a pet issue of ours, the $15 minimum wage.
Nick Hanauer:
For sure.
Goldy:
Not only did we pass that in Seattle, but that helped change how everybody thinks about the minimum wage and higher minimum wages have been passed in cities and states around the nation, including red states. So when he talks about changing the mindset of Silicon Valley, we helped change the mindset of America about that so-called inverse relationship between wages and employment-
Nick Hanauer:
So it can be done.
Goldy:
It can be done. It’s possible.
Nick Hanauer:
It’s just hard.
Goldy:
It’s hard and maybe unlikely, but it’s possible. And that’s why we continue to do this podcast. Did I talk us into being confident, Nick? Are you optimistic now? I don’t know. Anyway, if you want to read more from Darren, we will provide a link to his book in the show notes. What Happened to Liberal Democracy: Remaking a Politics of Shared Prosperity. It is actually out in bookstores right now, released today. You can get it at that big online monopolist or at your favorite local independent bookstore.
Freddy:
Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show, make sure to follow, rate, and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on other platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads @pitchforkeconomics. Nick’s on Twitter and Facebook as well @NickHanauer. For more content from us, you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter, The Pitch, over on Substack. And for links to everything we just mentioned, plus transcripts and more, visit our website, pitchforkeconomics.com. As always, from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.