What To Do About the Dependence of the Form Progress Takes on Power?: Quick Takes on Acemoglu & Johnson's "Power & Progress"
Janeway, Smith, Farrell, & DeLong all take their shots…
Bill Janeway gives his take on Acemoglu and Johnson’s new book Power & Progress:
Bill Janeway: The Political Economy of Technology: ‘The economic outcomes we experience have never been wholly the consequence of markets efficiently allocating resources to their optimal uses. On the contrary, how the costs and benefits of technological progress are distributed is a matter of social choice—even if it does not always seem so…. [There is] a fundamental tension between the industrialized Western world’s two systems for distributing and exercising power: political democracy and the market economy. Each, in its own way, documents how the dynamics of capitalism have concentrated economic and financial power, which then is used to influence and even dominate the political process….
Melvin Kranzberg’s “First Law of Technology”… states that “technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral”…. Successive technologies… both… “displace” labor from existing tasks and… “reinstate” labor in new tasks…. New technologies… augment… surplus…. But the sharing of that surplus is determined by the balance of power in markets and in the political process, which always has the potential to mitigate or even reverse market outcomes…. From the point of view of the handloom weaver, the technology of the textile mill was unequivocally bad…. Exploitation… was reinforced by the “Bloody Code,” which made machine breaking and more than 100 other acts felonies punishable by death or transportation to Australia…. Progressive reform… was won through aggressive public pressure… peaceful assemblies and petitions… insurgent riots…. Power and Progress assigns a special, shaping role to the “vision” of the entrepreneurs who have led successive waves of technological innovation, and who constitute a “vision oligarchy.”… Acemoglu and Johnson worry that the vision of today’s Big Tech entrepreneurs will dominate how today’s new technologies are applied….
Identifying the actual distributional effects of a technology’s deployment is extremely challenging, and that formulating interventions to move deployment toward machine-useful applications is even more so…. Carrots, rather than sticks… antitrust… an active government role in supporting innovative technologies… as the first, collaborative customer… academia’s “central role in the cultivation and exercise of… social power”… changing the narrative and, with it, cultural norms; building countervailing power; and generating relevant policy solutions… <https://www.billjaneway.com/the-political-economy-of-technology>
And Noah Smith gives his take:
Noah Smith: Book review: “Power and Progress”: ‘“Technology can be used for bad purposes” should be a simple truism, [but] Acemoglu and Johnson pick some very odd examples… [of] “new inventions that brought nothing like shared prosperity”…. “Fritz Haber developed artificial fertilizers that boosted agricultural yields. Subsequently, Haber and other scientists used the same ideas to design chemical weapons that killed and maimed hundreds of thousands on World War I battlefields…” The idea that… Haber-Bosch process… “brought nothing like shared prosperity” is an absolutely wild…. About half of the entire population of Earth—3.5 billion people—is only sustained thanks to this technology….
Acemoglu and Johnson argue that “digital technologies became the graveyard of shared prosperity” over the last few decades…. But as… Larry Mishel and Josh Bivens noted, when Acemoglu and Restrepo measured the effect of workers’ “exposure to IT capital”… they found either no effect or a positive effect on employment and wages…. Acemoglu and Johnson… include persuasion and compulsion in a single category of “power”…. I do not understand why we should put accidental success in a nonviolent marketplace of ideas in the same conceptual category as chattel slavery and feudalism….
You could write a very interesting book about how technologies that complement humans are better for both productivity and broad-based prosperity than technologies that try to substitute for humans wholesale. I would definitely read that book! But Acemoglu and Johnson did not choose to write that book; instead, they warn against a focus on productivity, claiming that it’s a seductive but dangerous narrative used by the greedy, fast-talking techbros….
How do we know in advance, before a technology is invented, whether it will increase or decrease the labor share?… Fundamentally, it… boils down to some sort of mandarins… trying to assess the economic effects of a technology that doesn’t even exist yet…. This is probably an impossible task… inferior to… policies to increase labor share ex post… co-determination… sectoral bargaining… wage subsidies funded by taxes on capital income… policies [that] will act like a Pigouvian tax on the kind of cost-cutting that Acemoglu and Johnson decry. With a wage subsidy, for example, the higher the market rate you can afford to pay your workers, the more of a rebate you can get from the government. So if there are technologies that augment your workers and let you hire new workers, a wage subsidy gives you an incentive to create them…
And Henry Farrell:
Henry Farrell: Dr. Pangloss’s Panopticon: ‘Noah represents a style of economics that has an overly Panglossian view of power, economics and progress…. Acemoglu and Johnson’s notion of non-coercive power… [sees that] power is a kind of social influence… some combination of “social influence” and “agenda control”…. Acemoglu and Johnson… are worried about some very specific ideas… unhappy with Silicon Valley’s “techno optimism.” But they don’t push back against progress in general. Instead, they tell us that we can’t just opt for progress and sort out the distributional implications post hoc….
Acemoglu and Johnson’s core claims, as I read them are:
That the debate about technology is dominated by techno-optimists….
That this dominance can be traced back to the social influence and agenda setting power of a narrow elite….
That their influence, if left unchecked, will lead to a trajectory of technological development in which aforementioned very rich tech people likely get even richer, but where things become increasingly not-so-great for everyone else.
That the best way to find better and different technology trajectories, is to build on more diverse perspectives, opinions and interests…
There are two parts to the Glasgow weaver’s complaint…. Different technological trajectories… have long term distributional implications (they lock in economic patterns of who gets what)… [and] you can’t assume that these problems will sort themselves out in some fair and equitable fashion in the long run…. The second part… is a social concern—that maximizing on aggregate wealth and power may have adverse effects for society, and may hurt some groups particularly badly…. Acemoglu and Johnson worry that machine learning… will not only remake the bargain between capital and labour, but radically empower authoritarians…. A decade ago, there were ferocious blogospheric debates about left neo-liberalism… a different version of the fight over whether we could just solve for progress and economic growth and assume that the distributional issues would somehow take care of themselves. I found myself on the opposite side of some very sharp disagreements with Noah’s podcast-mate and intellectual partner, Brad DeLong. I am not at all sure that we’d find ourselves on the opposite sides now… <https://crookedtimber.org/2024/02/27/dr-panglosss-panopticon/>
So where do I come down on this? Ten theses:
First: Janeway, Smith, Farrell are all well worth reading and thinking about.