← All source episodes Conversations with Tyler / episode intelligence
Daron Acemoglu on Liberalism, Automation, and the Educated Elite
12 Aug 2026 36 published claims 2 attributable people
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
belief 20evaluation 6prediction 5preference 3recommendation 1commitment 1
Evidence policy
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The useful parts, with receipts.
36 published records
“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.”
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“Let me start with what’s wrong with a general-will type answer—I’m simplifying it—but I would say in a general-will type of approach is that we have a book in our hand which says when values clash and when there’s something, here is a higher value and we’re going to follow that.”
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“There’s marginal problems, but it’s hard to think of a policy that more economists on a bipartisan basis would endorse.”
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“Now, of course, I’ll read guidebooks, ask my AIs, but what else should I know to make my visit a better one that I won’t pick up from traditional sources?”
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“If we use new machinery and new information systems to train people better to do things that they couldn’t do, nurses now can do much more, journalists can do much more, electricians can do much more, that is where pro-worker AI comes in.”
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“By the way, I think the possibility that there will be shortages of labor in certain, especially manual tasks, is indeed, as you say, a possibility for optimism, but depends on how you deal with it also.”
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“In the next, when I wrote in 2024, so that would be next 10 years, so 2024 to 2034, I would expect exactly the same thing, that there will be one or two years of very rapid growth.”
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“I think I would like to be a free speech absolutist while also regulating social media.”
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“I think of it as an attempt to redefine and revitalize liberalism for our current times.”
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“You very succinctly summarized what—I try to convey this in the book, but perhaps not clearly enough—but what I think brought liberalism’s crisis.”
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“I think that is what really bothers me, that somehow we have, as the most powerful, arguably the richest, country in the world, have resigned ourselves to give up on the education of about a third to a half of the youth.”
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“I suspect that it’s not as top-down as sometimes the standard histories tell, so that’s the second thing.”
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“I think that would be an amazing thing. Our society would be so much better. I wish it were.”
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“I think noninterference by itself isn’t enough because, at least as read or as interpreted by some philosophers and economists, it is just about being left alone from higher authority or typically state-level authority, although it could be some other authorities as well.”
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“Look, I think what we have seen in Russia and in the United States, both before COVID and during COVID, is that public health is a major contributor to mortality and morbidity.”
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“If social media, and this is one of the proposals I make related to social media, always stayed in the nonalgorithmic feed that on Facebook, Twitter—TikTok couldn’t exist in that case—you only see posts by your chosen outlets and your friends and neighbors in chronological order, I think we would adjust to that very quickly.”
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“My expectation is that it’s still going to be somewhat slow. Yes, I think I would revise that up a little bit, but not radically.”
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“There’s going to more competition, et cetera. That, I think, is definitely a nonzero and probably 30 percent or so probability in my mind, just making it up.”
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“I think so long as public health issues aren’t tackled, the way that that impacts the average American or bottom 30 percent Americans is still going to be an issue.”
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“In the same way that I think many people would agree science makes gradual and sometimes uncertain progress toward some better understanding, I think morally, philosophically, we also have to have gradual uncertain evolution toward what we agree on.”
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“I think, both for me and other people, it’s only the very best papers that contribute significantly to collective knowledge.”
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“I think the nuance here is that I am also very committed to expertise, obviously, given where I am.”
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“I think AI companies have a lot of money and are waking up to the fact that their decisions are so consequential that they need to think about the broader effects.”
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“Say book markets and the printing press, they weaponized Marx and Lenin for many decades. That’s an algorithm in the very broad sense that led to terrible consequences, much worse than whatever you might think current social media have done, and yet we believe in free speech for the printing press.”
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“There’s a lot of choice in that endeavor. That’s why I think AI is so exciting and so dangerous.”
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“In fact, the Armenian language that I learned when I was born in Turkey—but my first language was Armenian—is actually somewhat different than the Armenian that people speak in Armenia because it’s merged with Turkish.”
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“Now, at the macro level, it’s more complicated because there are composition effects between like Walmart effects and things like that, so we can talk about those, but I think the evidence, at least the ones that I know, is very clear that automation will reduce the labor share.”
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“You wrote, “Automation is central to my account because it severs the link between mass production and shared prosperity.”
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“I never want to take your right away, but I want to regulate what other people take your statement and how they use it. That’s why I think I am an absolutist when it comes to free speech because I never want to restrict Tyler’s right to say anything.”
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“It did not use that establishment power just in the right way, creating its own weaknesses that made it much more vulnerable to outside attacks. That’s why I think we are now going back because we are at an interregnum period in which ideas are battling again.”
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“I think what I believe is, first of all, not as an external standard—I don’t know whether external standard or internal standard is the right word—but that we have to defend some degree of individual freedom because everything starts from that, both in terms of our meaningful lives, but also any kind of improvement in the human condition requires individual initiative, and that individual initiative is impossible without some amount of freedom, a meaningful freedom, not just saying, “Okay, you have the freedom to pray, but you cannot express that idea with others or you cannot turn it into action.”
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“I think skilled immigration is great, as it is right now, despite its problems, as you point out.”
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“The Rousseau’s general will, for example, overrides any kind of consensus that a community, for example, could have because the general will is defined to have precedence over any kinds of agreements or shared moral values or shared priorities.”
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“When you talk about the US economy has high wages—for example, wage growth was very high in the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, ’70s—that’s not, in my mind, just because of automation.”
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“There is a lot of interesting activity going on there, but the geopolitics is really, very risky. So far, it has somehow managed never to anger Russia, which I don’t know how they manage that.”
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“I think true decentralization would be much better served with more domain-specific models of AI and other approaches that really use high-quality data for specific things, which I think is the more promising thing.”
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