Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity

Recommended by Archon Fung, director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation and the Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government

If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard “AI will do this” or “social media will do that …” Acemoglu’s and Johnson’s book is a strong argument against that sort of technological determinism. The effect of technologies on society depends upon the political choices that we all make. The Industrial Revolution was, they argue, terrible for working families until it wasn’t. What changed the arc of consequence were Progressive Era reforms, the rise of a powerful labor union movement, the New Deal, and eventually productive agreements between Big Labor and Big Capital about how to organize industrial technologies and distribute the benefits they make possible. By analogy, AI and social media will probably be bad for much of society until we muster the political will to bend the arcs to make their consequences better. So let’s get to it.