Economists Like Me Have a Non-Standard Conception of How We Should Use the P-Word. You Want Me to Think Different? Make Me...
Noah Smith & I have made Henry Farrell unhappy. But we do believe that non-economist social scientists are greatly confusing themselves via excessive, promiscuous, and insufficiently thoughtful use of the “power over” concept, & thus of the P-word…
An economist like me would say that other social scientists see nine modes of human interaction as exercises of “power over”:
Compulsion-stick: “Do the thing I want you to do, or else!” “Or else what?” “I will punish you by doing this thing you dislike”.
Inducement-carrot: Do the thing I want you to do, or else!” “Or else what?” “I will not reward you by that thing that you like”.
Blocking-stick: “Don’t do the thing I don’t want you to do, or else!” “Or else what?” “I will punish you by doing this thing you dislike”.
Blocking-carrot: “Don’t do the thing I don’t want you to do, or else!” “Or else what?” “I will not reward you by doing that thing that you like”.
Fraud: “Let me hornswoggle you by convincing you that you do not really want to do the thing that you thought you wanted to do, and that your Best Self would still think you should do!”
Information-persuasion: “Let me give you information that persuades you that doing the thing will be bad, and thus that you do not really want to do the thing”.
Agenda-setting: “Let me silence you all, or, alternatively, filibuster—all to keep you from talking about your problems and coming to an agreement on action to do the thing”.
Systems-equilibrium: “I don’t see anyone offering you a better alternative. Do you see one?”
Identity-constitution: “Be like far-famed Achilles… active, hot-tempered, inexorable, and fierce… deny[ing] that laws were made for him… think[ing] his sword rules all…”
By contrast, economists like me think conceptual clarity is mightily gained by calling (1), (3), (5), and (7) exercises of “power over”, and say that you should not use the P-word for (2), (4), (6), (8), and (9)
Economists like me will freely acknowledge that (1) and (2), (3) and (4), and (5) and (6) blend into each other, and really cannot be distinguished in a large variety of on-the-ground cases. But we still maintain that the conceptual distinction is important and worth maintaining for Thames-estuary reasons: you cannot say where the Thames River ends and the North Sea begins, but Tilbury Fort is on the Thames River, and Margate is on the North Sea.
And economists like me will try to maintain an (also fuzzy) distinction between (a) an exercise of power over someone on the one hand, and (b) on the other hand a situation in which social interaction is shaped and controlled by a previous exercise of power over someone.
Why do economists like me hold to these positions? Because in modern society “power over”—the P-word—is seen as ipso facto illegitimate—making things happen that people do not consent to, or should not consent to, or that their Best Selves would not consent to, and so coërcing people born equal and free who possess rights to autonomy and meaningful choice that are inalienable—by virtue of its imposing bad society-of-domination patterns on them.
It has been this way ever since before 1776:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…
Only consent—and only true consent, not coërced consent.
Yet we economists do not believe that identity-constitution, systems-equilibrium, information-persuasion, blocking-carrot, and inducement-carrot societal processes are ipso facto bad, and adopting a framing language that makes them ipso facto bad—that framing leads to confusion and error.
Indeed we see it as an exercise of “power over” (5)—an illegitimate intellectual move to make the worse appear the better cause…
And in stridently arguing this point in our Hexapodia Podcast:
Noah Smith and I have annoyed the extremely sharp and thoughtful Henry Farrell:
What does Henry say? And is he right?
What he says:
There is a dizzyingly vast gulf between what Noah believes Acemoglu and Johnson are saying about power and what they actually say. And this drives the conversation with Brad in some very strange directions…. Brad does not correct Noah, where correction is urgently required. He echoes and amplifies…. Noah explains… the power of these entrepreneurs is nothing more than their ability to talk in an “unrestricted marketplace of ideas” with “freedom of the press and speech.” Such an understanding of power is “useless and even counterproductive” since it assumes that “people just hearing arguments and deciding that those arguments are right means power has been exercised.”… That all sounds very bad…. Let’s move away from Noah to look at what Acemoglu and Johnson actually say!…
And that, according to Henry, is:
“Acemoglu and Johnson claim that the success of ideas depends on the “social status” of their originators and transmitters…”
“‘Prevailing beliefs and the attitudes of powerful individuals and organizations determine which ideas will appear compelling, rather than wacky or so ahead of their time as to be safely ignored…’”
“Social networks also create power imbalances…. This allows for important forms of agenda control…. ‘The king or the president… [has] ample influence on the agenda…’”
“‘Economic institutions influence who has the resources and the economic networks to mobilize support and, when necessary, pay politicians and journalists…’”
“Acemoglu and Johnson’s Theory… [s] this ain’t no level playing field market of ideas! Political, financial and social asymmetries have substantial consequences for who has influence and who has not…
“Acemoglu and Johnson want… to level the playing field, so that tech bros, and those allied with them, do not enjoy an unfair advantage…. Acemoglu and Johnson simply want other voices to be heard. They advocate for the building of countervailing power, and they suggest that democracy is the best way to get there…”
And that leads Henry to conclude:
[Their] interpretation is ludicrous…. It allows Brad and Noah to completely avoid addressing Acemoglu and Johnson’s fundamental challenge. Should the development of technologies be subject to some form of democratic control, or should it be left to market forces? If Brad and Noah think that market forces are preferable, they should make that case!…
And:
Acemoglu and Johnson… fear that the bros’ unseeing ignorance leads to over-reach… [and] their choices may nonetheless become self-reinforcing because of the mutually reinforcing intersection of influence, technological development and political power…. “Students of history and political economy have highlighted… pathways that make the rich politically more influential and how this additional political power enables them to become richer. The same is true of the new vision oligarchy that has come to dominate the future of modern technology…”. Moving away from democracy towards a fuller embrace of market awesome may radically undermine the capacity to exercise democratic choice later…. It’s startling that it is so difficult for economists of a certain bent to even see the argument that power may be exercised through influence and ideas, let alone to understand it, let alone embrace it…
If you want to steelman the arguments that (I think) Noah and I were groping towards in our podcast—and no reason why you should: it is (still) a largely free-discussion SubStack world, and there is no reason not to try to advance the self-comprehension of humanity as an anthology intelligence by making us serve our turn as a pinata or in the barrel—I would put them like this:
We are not debating whether modern tech should or should not be subject to democratic control. Modern tech is subject to democratic control. That is indisputable, unless you want to open a particular noxious can of worms by claiming that the United States and the European Union are not democracies. The question we are debating is: What kind of democratic control? What subsidies, in terms of direct government financial support and exorbitant property-rights privileges, should our democracies impose on modern tech? And what restrictions should our democracies impose on modern tech? And is the current pattern of subsidies and restrictions working?
Now currently this debate is a mix of (5) through (8), a combination of grifting, discussion, persuasion, agenda creation and modification, identity-constitution, and resultant system outcomes that were not the first-best desire of anyone. And to say that the “techbro” side of this debate is simply an exercise in P-word domination is not terribly helpful.
Hence Noah’s and my conclusion to our podcast:
Noah: I do not understand why we should put accidental success in a nonviolent marketplace of ideas in the same [P-word] conceptual category as chattel slavery and feudalism. (That was a good line.) [Using the P-word] seems to yield neither understanding nor solutions.
Brad: That was a good line…. The Silicon Valley Ideology… has [within in] great and very large amounts of human liberation through technology, autonomy and knowledge, as well as “let’s get some people to buy some crypto assets for one more rug pull”….
Noah: Deception is Deception. Power is Power.Bullshit is Bullshit…. A plausible silver-tongued person committing fraud is a very different animal
Brad: Especially as it’s very difficult to [consciously] commit 100% fraud…. At some level you really have to believe it yourself if you’re going to be successful…. Rush Limbaugh started out with zero. Rush Limbaugh did not start out with a big megaphone.
Noah: Rush Limbaugh started out with an audience and the sense of agreement and ability to pay to it. And to say that the people were fooled by Rush Limbaugh is… Not right.
Brad: It [was] that Rush Limbaugh gave form and shape to things that were inside of them….
Noah: To quote the great DJ Khaled, congratulations, you played yourself…. We [have] got to wrap up. I have to leave right now….
Brad: My key insight is that Acemoglu and Johnson should have written their 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. And… that the incentives of large oligarchical tech companies with multi-trillion dollar valuations are plausibly not aligned with our interests, in the sense of trying to figure out how to spur the development of technologies that complement humans. And… they should have stopped there.
Noah: I agree. And stopping there could have still allowed for an 800-page book because the idea that technologies that complement humans are the technologies that win. What are the good technologies of history and the world? That would have been a book easily worth 800 pages that it was within their ambit to write.
Brad: And also, what are the bad technologies? I think that I would like more examples of bad technologies besides the cotton gin and the Roman Empire.
Noah: Right. I do not want to have to go back to the Roman Empire for examples of bad… They did talk about the internet….
Brad: And the cotton gin….
Noah: But… the idea that the internet was this bad technology that we could have known was going to just replace humans instead of complementing them….
Brad: You could have done a very good meditation on to what degree was the printing press worth two centuries of near-genocidal religious war in Europe, which it played a role in spurring. On the other hand, you got the printing press, albeit without musical type in China, and it produced a flowering of Buddhism and Taoism in lots of ways, but did not produce anything like… my ancestors shooting out the windows of Canterbury Cathedral… for target practice….
Noah: My key insight… is that… [in] the intellectual circles we run in… people who are basically progressive… suspicious of the rich guys who are in charge of tech companies… pro-union… [and] have deep concern for workers… generally pro-government…. [For] all those people the blurb version of the Acemoglu and Johnson book seems to generally comport with and align with that political and intellectual persuasion…. I’ve been receiving Twitter DMs and emails saying: “I’m glad someone went after this book; I didn’t want to because Acemoglu is so famous. And from actual economists who say this stuff.” And I’m like, well, it’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it. And that’s why we have your friendly neighborhood economics blogger. So that’s my key insight: I spent way too much time on this book review….
Brad: Why don’t we add that everyone should go off and read Why Nations Fail instead?
Noah: Yes, let’s do that. And all of Simon Johnson’s other books, which are really excellent.
Brad: And underread. And our last key insight is?
Noah: As always, Hexapodia.
Brad: This has been Noah Smith’s and Brad DeLong’s Hexapodia podcast, in which Noah Smith certainly works out his psychological issues with respect to Power and Progress by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson.
Noah: Thank you very much for listening.
Noah & Brad: Goodbye.
References:
Acemoglu, Daron, & Johnson, Simon. 2023. Power & Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity. New York: PublicAffairs. <https://shapingwork.mit.edu/books/power-and-progress>.
Acemoglu, Daron, & Robinson, James A. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, & Poverty. New York: Crown Publishers. <https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/220473/why-nations-fail-by-daron-acemoglu-and-james-a-robinson/>.
DeLong, J. Bradford, & Noah Smith. 2024. “Acemoglu & Johnson Should Have Written About Technologies as Labor-Complementing or Labor-Substituting”. Hexapodia Podcast. LVIII, March 19. <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/podcast-hexapodia-lviii-acemoglu>
Continental Congress. 1776. “Declaration of Independence”. Philadelphia. July 2. <https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript>.
Digeser, Peter. 1992. “The Fourth Face of Power”. Journal of Politics. 54:4 (Nov.), pp. 977-1007. <doi.org/10.2307/2…>.
Farrell, Henry. 2024. “Power: A Primer for Perplexed Economists”. Programmable Mutter. March 21. <https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/power-a-primer-for-perplexed-economists>.
Lukes, Steven. 1974. Power, a Radical View. London: Macmillan. <https://archive.org/details/powerradicalview0000luke>.
Smith, Noah. 2024. “Book review: Power and Progress”. Noahpinion. February 21. <https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/book-review-power-and-progress>.