Daron Acemoglu: evaluation

Transcript context

…There’s a lot of talk in your book about what you call working-class liberalism, but say today in America, what exactly is working class? Household income, it’s almost six figures. Percentage working in manufacturing, it’s what, 8 percent to 9 percent. Private sector unions are very small. Is this even a meaningful notion today, the working class? It may or may not be. That’s why I say that social democracy, as it evolved in Scandinavia and then spread to Europe and to some extent in a modified version to the United States, isn’t the right actualization of liberal ideas today because it very strongly relies on unions and a particular kind of industrial working class. Today we don’t have an industrial working class. If by working class I meant industrial working class, obviously that would be almost a vacuous notion. But we have the vast majority of people who live by earning their living in the labor market. That’s the working class. If you’re getting your income from the labor market mostly, not from capital, not from your parents, then in my definition you’re part of the working class. The working class is distinguished by having a very diverse set of skills. Not just one skill. It’s going to have the manual part. It’s going to have the trades. It’s going to have office jobs. It’s going to have entrepreneurship of some sort, but that’s what the unifying theme is. That’s of course not a very simple unifying theme. There’s going to be a lot of heterogeneity within the working class. That’s why I emphasize in the working-class liberalism different communities that are going to have their own practices and values. Say when MIT decides who in the economics department should get tenure, that’s a working-class decision?…

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