Daron Acemoglu: belief

Transcript context

…But we want to cover up the role of the elite to some extent, right? The Straussian view. Okay, well, if you cover it up really well. No. I think the nuance here is that I am also very committed to expertise, obviously, given where I am. One challenge, which I mentioned in passing, and perhaps I should have done more in the book on this, is how do you utilize and respect expertise without creating the wrong kind of technocracy that is insular and too self-confident and, frankly, looking down upon the rest? Unfortunately, that’s what we’ve created in the United States and Europe, and that’s what working-class liberalism has to avoid. Now, here’s a sentence in your book that I very much disagreed with. I almost thought you left out a word. Let me read it to you, and I’ll tell you why I disagree. You wrote, “Automation is central to my account because it severs the link between mass production and shared prosperity.” Now, I view automation as creating the link between mass production and shared prosperity. There’s a lot of evidence that automation doesn’t lower the labor share. I know well your papers with Restrepo. That’s about the composition of labor income, right? Not about the total labor share. There’s a new paper out by Barany, Patel, and Siegel looking at France up through 2019. Automation doesn’t harm the labor share at all, so why be so negative on automation? I just think it’s great.…

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