It’s so weird how these people think ‘worse bargaining position for labor vis-a-vis capital’ is synonymous with ‘efficiency’. America wastes on the order of 5% of GDP every single year because the labor movement was insufficiently powerful enough to implement a normal healthcare system during the critical juncture of the 1940s and 1950s. https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2026/05/26/current-us-healthcare-situation/
Noah is famously an uncharitable freak who thinks everyone else is stupid, but I don’t understand how anyone else thinks giving a tiny percent of people inordinate power will not lead to severe inefficiencies. (E.g., the illegal and prima facially inefficient DOGE actions performed on the whim of a speed-riddled oligarch.)
«so weird how these people think ‘worse bargaining position for labor vis-a-vis capital’ is synonymous with ‘efficiency’»
If productivity is measured in currency, that is dollars of outputs per dollars of inputs, that is not at all weird. That is how mainstream Economists like it. The alternative is to measure it as physical output per physical input (for example how many work-hours and raw inputs are needed to build a car from raw inputs) but that does not allow considering economic rent as a input "factor of production".
It’s dishonest for these people to frame the debate in terms of being for or against technological progress. Technological progress is a given, arguably. The debate is whether progress should be guided and tempered by broad humanistic principles, versus whether it should be controlled by a tiny minority (or maybe just totally unfettered). And obviously tempered vs unfettered is a spectrum, not a binary.
«The debate is whether progress should be guided and tempered by broad humanistic principles, versus whether it should be controlled by a tiny minority»
Ask ordinary people whether if they created some valuable innovation then it should be expropriated for the sake of being "guided and tempered by broad humanistic principles" or it should be their sole property and under their sole control to make as much money as they possibly can for themselves and screw-everybody-else.
You can't add "expropriated" to what I said and still pretend you're addressing my argument. That's called a straw man.
Given some "valuable innovation," first there is the question of valuable to whom, and by what measures. A "valuable innovation" is a subjective concept and in no way automatically granted carte blanch to "screw everybody else." Hence the debate.
Flock surveillance cameras are a "valuable innovation" according to the people who created it and presumably to the government and corporate customers who are buying the tech. Other people see Flock cameras as invasive, authoritarian, and vulnerable to nefarious misuse. If your argument is "screw everybody" who doesn't sheepishly move out of the way, then I could not disagree more.
«Given some "valuable innovation," first there is the question of valuable to whom, and by what measures.»
All I am arguing is that many ordinary people (not just oligarchs) will regard as expropriation being deprived of a way to make money (even if that making of money involves dire consequences for someone else) and they do have the same right to donate to whoever they want and vote for whoever they want that you have.
A democracy is not ruled by fair and just philosopher-kings, it is theoretically ruled by ordinary people many of whom are crudely self-interested, as their voting for decades of reaganism-thatcherism has amply demonstrated.
You named what I am arguing should guide technology, which is democracy, essentially. Nowhere did I suggest anything like kings, fair and just or otherwise. Your argument seems to be that democracy also enfranchises mercenary capitalists and sociopaths, and that “valuable innovations” can originate from them. Yes, that is true.
>> “in a democracy voters are as a rule driven by self-interest rather than by ‘broad humanistic principles’”
That is an assertion you are making, and a place where we disagree. Some people are motivated by naked self interest, others less so, and still others by altruistic impulses or at least some notion of the golden rule. This is obvious if you just observe the world and think about things for five minutes. I would actually argue that most people understand that we live in a society, and that the nakedly self-interested are the exception.
Nowhere did I suggest the existence of “some authority” that should rule over the people or define the principles for guiding and tempering the applications of tech. I’m talking about democratic processes. You keep assuming things into my comments that aren’t there.
Even I cede the idea that voters are self-interested, those interests come into conflict with each other in broad contexts, and then there is negotiation and compromise. This is exactly where I am saying that humanistic principles manifest.
«Nowhere did I suggest the existence of “some authority” that should rule over the people or define the principles for guiding and tempering the applications of tech.»
Well you used literally the expression "guided ... by ... principles", putting those principles as the authority to obey, regardless apparently of whether voters liked them or not. An authority so final and strong that according to you it should override the right of those creating valuable innovations to their control of those valuable innovations in their own interest.
Would you agree that progress should be guided by "narrow anti-humanistic self-interest" if that was the outcome of democracy? Because in many cases voters have decisively chosen "narrow anti-humanistic self-interest".
The core point, about multiple paths of development for new technologies (especially general purpose ones) is correct and important, but I'd like to add an additional factor. Very slowly, the recognition of nonconvexities arising from interaction effects is seeping into economics. It is now more or less the dominant idea in spatial economics, such as urban and international, but it will not stop there. The barrier is the usefulness of models with a single equilibrium for explanation, prediction and advocacy, but the pure logic of interactive nonconvexity is overwhelming.
Path dependence without intervention becomes historical inertia. That's what multiple attractors means in practice. AI tools will be developed to serve existing interests. If we had a different constellation of interests in charge, the tools would be developed for them instead, and those interests would be reinforced or adapted.
Acemoglu is adjacent to this argument, so of course the we-don't-need-no-stinking-collective-action crowd has it out for him.
«Very slowly, the recognition of nonconvexities arising from interaction effects is seeping into economics.»
Since that violates "internal consistency" with the 3 fables/parables of J. B. Clark that is... COMMUNISM! :-)
«The barrier is the usefulness of models with a single equilibrium for explanation, prediction and advocacy»
Those "models with a single equilibrium" are purely for advocacy. So-called reality has optimization landscapes with many local maximums, but Economics does not address "external consistency" but only "internal consistency".
«but the pure logic of interactive nonconvexity is overwhelming.»
It is overwhelmingly likely way to destroy a career in Economics.
Cowen confidently predicted macro-level innovation would NOT occur because of political economy: there was a great stagnation which required god-level political change -- raising the status of scientists in society, emulating the policies of China and India -- to reverse. Noah Smith thought he was genius for making this argument. In fact, as recently as in 2021 Noah Smith said that the oil shocks produced the great stagnation (which was still operational in his mind), and we should focus more on public education access: https://www.thepodcastbrowser.com/education-the-great-stagnation-and-innovation-with-noah-smith/
10 years later Cowen said the singularity "happened" -- despite that very same political economy, and very high oil prices by contemporary standards -- and any attempts to regulate it would be supervillain behavior. He believes education should be done privately as much as possible. Noah Smith now thinks *this* is a genius-level argument.
If either of these self-negating men would care to explain -- in detail, with citations and explicit models supported by systematically-collected data -- how or why their great stagnation thesis was the opposite of the truth, then I'd be interested in reading it. Until then they should be ignored whenever they are not being mocked.
This is a very, very small request of two men who claim to maintain high evidentiary standards and talk a big game about intellectual audits, bets-as-adjudicators, etc.
They missed the biggest call of their lives. Why should we care what they think now? Clearly they don't possess insight, only values to sell to the highest bidder. Reminds me of when Alex Tabarrok published a big study showing that regulation does not slow economic growth... then went right on arguing that it did.
"This is a very, very small request of two men who claim to maintain high evidentiary standards and talk a big game about intellectual audits, bets-as-adjudicators, etc". Well, you know, Noah posts a lot of charts on his blog.😂
I really enjoyed this essay. I suspect that we would disagree on a number of things — but that it would be a productive, enlightening disagreement. The “AI wars” are actually driving me to work more on my non-AI papers, because it’s getting so mean and unfair. (Though, also, 3D printing is really fucking cool…)
Thank you, again. Shame on The Economist for its shoddy, ad hominem attack piece on Acemoglu. Keep after the Great Man apologists. And who cares what Tyler thinks? Who funds his Mercatus Center? State capacity has been hollowed out and critical tech IP (not just AI) rests in the hands of plutocrats. Is this who should control the tech trajectory and economic welfare of the country? Of course not.
Technological development clearly is shaped and non-determined, as you point out. If you look at the AI movement in practice right now, it is clear that it is situated and politically contested.
I find the framing of such questions always rather unique and telling. "Technological progress has made everyone richer" is difficult to justify to African countries who went from independent wealth to catastrophic poverty in servitude to technological progress. A "We" became richer, humanity did not.
Similarly, Andreessen defines delayed development of AI as murder. Following that definition, how many people have they 'murdered' by not investing in healthier food? Better local communities? Removing violent drugs from the pharmaceutical companies? Or by literally investing in military technology? I think, given their definitions, more people have died by their hands than would not have been saved by the development of AI.
You excerpted this from The Economist article: "The book plays down a more compelling claim: that technological progress in itself has made the average person many times richer than in pre-industrial times."
I'm going suppress my need for catharsis by using multiple derogatory adjectives and simply say this is a very stupid statement. The timeline from pre-industrial times to today has encompassed a multiplicity of technological benefits and yes, people today are many times (materially) richer. That does not yield a valid inference which says pursue "some undifferentiated path to 'technological progress'" going forward. Clearly new technologies need to be assessed as they arise and, apart from the preference of the übermenschen and their followers, the assessment process and subsequent recommendations and steering must be made by those representing a broad, relevant collection of societal interests; at least if we're interested in living in a free and democratic society (of course if those who are opposed to this gain the long term upper hand, then this whole discussion becomes moot).
By the way, sorry for the cheap shot but didn't that kerfuffle in 1962 in the vicinity of Cuba involve relatively new technology that, I believe, nobody had any qualms about regulating?
Back to the quote at the top: past is not always prologue.
"What do you do with a man like that? The only thing that makes sense is to utilize his talents as best you can, and do your best to prevent him from subverting the national interest along the way."
Is there any concrete legislative or policy proposal to prevent Musk from 'subverting the national interest' that Smith hasn't already come out in fierce opposition to? This is about as vague and empty as Dario Amodei claiming that AI needs to be "accountable to the public" in some totally unspecified way that is nevertheless somehow distinct from any actually-existing proposals to regulate AI.
"Unfortunately, however, technological innovation doesn’t fit readily into the standard framework."
Economic theory is not very good at dealing with (the end results) of technologically provoked upheavals and also not with detailed arbitrage processes while moving from one short lived equilibrium to another short lived equilibrium.
Contrary to the Economist's recent, monumentally cretinous argument that Musk, Karp et al are self-made men, let's call them what they really are ... "welfare queens." Simply stated, it would go a long way to stop Andreesen, et al., dead in their tracks.
From the fragments of the article I have seen I get a distinct feeling it was written with a lot of input from (or entirely by) Generative AI, as if The Economist tried an experiment to let Generative AI itself react to what Acemoglu has said.
That would explain the poor depth as well, as Generative AI itself is fundamentally ‘broad & shallow”.
Noteworthy is the fact that Mu卐kRat didn't invent the Tesla, nor was he a founder. Also noteworthy is that Tesla was spiraling down the drain until Obama made subsidies and loans available. If it weren't for Obama, we'd have never heard of Elon Mu卐kRat. He'd be a nobody. Tesla would have gone down the drain, and Mu卐kRat right along with it.
"...perhaps we would indeed discover that Elon Musk and his brethren made an unique and indispensable causal contribution to the progress we have made". More likely we would discover that given sufficient capital, we could easily substitute any old vulture capitalist.
"Neither economic theory or econometrics tells us then, whether it is best to have technological development directed by a self-selecting elite of bold striving [strikeout] entrepreneurs [/strikeout] vulture capitalists..."
"Do their interests reflect the general good? Perhaps you can make a case for that - but you need to make that case". Assuming such a case even exists, it's not likely an honest one.
I believe the problem stems from "Techno-Optimists" living in a fantasy world where their fantasy world comes to fruition thanks to the brilliance of the Vulture Capital elites. That's why they can't present logical arguments in favor of their preferred outcomes - because ther
That "technological progress" has lifted the living standards of workers is a favourite claim of right-wing propaganda (like that of a book by Gordon) because then they credit "technological progress" to randian heroes of invention and innovation, the so-called "wealth creators".
However 90+% of the increased living standards of workers is rent extracted from the increased use of coal and then oil which have a tremendous "consumer surplus". Invention and innovation have played a role in increasing diffusion and efficiency of use of coal and then oil, but that has been rather secondary compared to simply adopting coal and then oil based machinery.
Wrigley, "Energy and the english industrial revolution (2013): "Noting that one steam horse power was estimated as providing the power equivalent of 21 manual labourers, he suggested that in France ca 1840 steam engines were performing the work of 1.2 million labourers but that by the mid-1880s the rapid expansion in the use of steam engines meant that this figure had risen to 98 million labourers, ‘two-and-a-half slaves for each inhabitant of France’ [19, III, p. 74]."
Andres Malm "Fossil capital" (2016) https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/135-fossil-capital: "One method used by Wrigley and his followers to illustrate the logic is to convert coal into acres of land required to generate the same amount of energy. In 1750, all coal produced in England would have equalled 4.3 million acres of woodland, or 13 percent of the national territory. In 1800, substituting wood for all coal would have demanded 11.2 million acres, or 35 percent of the British land surface; by 1850, the figures had risen to 48.1 million acres and 150 percent, respectively. As early as in 1750, then, a hypothetical total conversion from coal to wood in the British economy would have ‘represented a significant proportion of the land surface for which there were many other competing uses’; in 1800, it would have been ‘quite impractical’; in 1850 – the threshold of 100 percent crossed – ‘self-evidently an impossibility’. [...] Paolo Malanima, likewise standing on the shoulders of Wrigley, estimates that in the absence of fossil fuels, Europe would have needed a land area more than 2.7 times its entire continental surface in 1900, rising to more than 20 times in 2000."
It’s so weird how these people think ‘worse bargaining position for labor vis-a-vis capital’ is synonymous with ‘efficiency’. America wastes on the order of 5% of GDP every single year because the labor movement was insufficiently powerful enough to implement a normal healthcare system during the critical juncture of the 1940s and 1950s. https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2026/05/26/current-us-healthcare-situation/
Noah is famously an uncharitable freak who thinks everyone else is stupid, but I don’t understand how anyone else thinks giving a tiny percent of people inordinate power will not lead to severe inefficiencies. (E.g., the illegal and prima facially inefficient DOGE actions performed on the whim of a speed-riddled oligarch.)
Really seems like just another facet of the (white male) libertarian fantasy world all these strange guys would like to force the world to be.
«so weird how these people think ‘worse bargaining position for labor vis-a-vis capital’ is synonymous with ‘efficiency’»
If productivity is measured in currency, that is dollars of outputs per dollars of inputs, that is not at all weird. That is how mainstream Economists like it. The alternative is to measure it as physical output per physical input (for example how many work-hours and raw inputs are needed to build a car from raw inputs) but that does not allow considering economic rent as a input "factor of production".
It’s dishonest for these people to frame the debate in terms of being for or against technological progress. Technological progress is a given, arguably. The debate is whether progress should be guided and tempered by broad humanistic principles, versus whether it should be controlled by a tiny minority (or maybe just totally unfettered). And obviously tempered vs unfettered is a spectrum, not a binary.
«The debate is whether progress should be guided and tempered by broad humanistic principles, versus whether it should be controlled by a tiny minority»
Ask ordinary people whether if they created some valuable innovation then it should be expropriated for the sake of being "guided and tempered by broad humanistic principles" or it should be their sole property and under their sole control to make as much money as they possibly can for themselves and screw-everybody-else.
You can't add "expropriated" to what I said and still pretend you're addressing my argument. That's called a straw man.
Given some "valuable innovation," first there is the question of valuable to whom, and by what measures. A "valuable innovation" is a subjective concept and in no way automatically granted carte blanch to "screw everybody else." Hence the debate.
Flock surveillance cameras are a "valuable innovation" according to the people who created it and presumably to the government and corporate customers who are buying the tech. Other people see Flock cameras as invasive, authoritarian, and vulnerable to nefarious misuse. If your argument is "screw everybody" who doesn't sheepishly move out of the way, then I could not disagree more.
«Given some "valuable innovation," first there is the question of valuable to whom, and by what measures.»
All I am arguing is that many ordinary people (not just oligarchs) will regard as expropriation being deprived of a way to make money (even if that making of money involves dire consequences for someone else) and they do have the same right to donate to whoever they want and vote for whoever they want that you have.
A democracy is not ruled by fair and just philosopher-kings, it is theoretically ruled by ordinary people many of whom are crudely self-interested, as their voting for decades of reaganism-thatcherism has amply demonstrated.
You named what I am arguing should guide technology, which is democracy, essentially. Nowhere did I suggest anything like kings, fair and just or otherwise. Your argument seems to be that democracy also enfranchises mercenary capitalists and sociopaths, and that “valuable innovations” can originate from them. Yes, that is true.
>> “in a democracy voters are as a rule driven by self-interest rather than by ‘broad humanistic principles’”
That is an assertion you are making, and a place where we disagree. Some people are motivated by naked self interest, others less so, and still others by altruistic impulses or at least some notion of the golden rule. This is obvious if you just observe the world and think about things for five minutes. I would actually argue that most people understand that we live in a society, and that the nakedly self-interested are the exception.
Nowhere did I suggest the existence of “some authority” that should rule over the people or define the principles for guiding and tempering the applications of tech. I’m talking about democratic processes. You keep assuming things into my comments that aren’t there.
Even I cede the idea that voters are self-interested, those interests come into conflict with each other in broad contexts, and then there is negotiation and compromise. This is exactly where I am saying that humanistic principles manifest.
«Nowhere did I suggest the existence of “some authority” that should rule over the people or define the principles for guiding and tempering the applications of tech.»
Well you used literally the expression "guided ... by ... principles", putting those principles as the authority to obey, regardless apparently of whether voters liked them or not. An authority so final and strong that according to you it should override the right of those creating valuable innovations to their control of those valuable innovations in their own interest.
Would you agree that progress should be guided by "narrow anti-humanistic self-interest" if that was the outcome of democracy? Because in many cases voters have decisively chosen "narrow anti-humanistic self-interest".
Two straw men in the same argument, good job!
The core point, about multiple paths of development for new technologies (especially general purpose ones) is correct and important, but I'd like to add an additional factor. Very slowly, the recognition of nonconvexities arising from interaction effects is seeping into economics. It is now more or less the dominant idea in spatial economics, such as urban and international, but it will not stop there. The barrier is the usefulness of models with a single equilibrium for explanation, prediction and advocacy, but the pure logic of interactive nonconvexity is overwhelming.
Path dependence without intervention becomes historical inertia. That's what multiple attractors means in practice. AI tools will be developed to serve existing interests. If we had a different constellation of interests in charge, the tools would be developed for them instead, and those interests would be reinforced or adapted.
Acemoglu is adjacent to this argument, so of course the we-don't-need-no-stinking-collective-action crowd has it out for him.
«Very slowly, the recognition of nonconvexities arising from interaction effects is seeping into economics.»
Since that violates "internal consistency" with the 3 fables/parables of J. B. Clark that is... COMMUNISM! :-)
«The barrier is the usefulness of models with a single equilibrium for explanation, prediction and advocacy»
Those "models with a single equilibrium" are purely for advocacy. So-called reality has optimization landscapes with many local maximums, but Economics does not address "external consistency" but only "internal consistency".
«but the pure logic of interactive nonconvexity is overwhelming.»
It is overwhelmingly likely way to destroy a career in Economics.
Cowen confidently predicted macro-level innovation would NOT occur because of political economy: there was a great stagnation which required god-level political change -- raising the status of scientists in society, emulating the policies of China and India -- to reverse. Noah Smith thought he was genius for making this argument. In fact, as recently as in 2021 Noah Smith said that the oil shocks produced the great stagnation (which was still operational in his mind), and we should focus more on public education access: https://www.thepodcastbrowser.com/education-the-great-stagnation-and-innovation-with-noah-smith/
10 years later Cowen said the singularity "happened" -- despite that very same political economy, and very high oil prices by contemporary standards -- and any attempts to regulate it would be supervillain behavior. He believes education should be done privately as much as possible. Noah Smith now thinks *this* is a genius-level argument.
If either of these self-negating men would care to explain -- in detail, with citations and explicit models supported by systematically-collected data -- how or why their great stagnation thesis was the opposite of the truth, then I'd be interested in reading it. Until then they should be ignored whenever they are not being mocked.
This is a very, very small request of two men who claim to maintain high evidentiary standards and talk a big game about intellectual audits, bets-as-adjudicators, etc.
They missed the biggest call of their lives. Why should we care what they think now? Clearly they don't possess insight, only values to sell to the highest bidder. Reminds me of when Alex Tabarrok published a big study showing that regulation does not slow economic growth... then went right on arguing that it did.
"This is a very, very small request of two men who claim to maintain high evidentiary standards and talk a big game about intellectual audits, bets-as-adjudicators, etc". Well, you know, Noah posts a lot of charts on his blog.😂
I’m enjoying the Tristero/Trystero reference in your avatar …
I really enjoyed this essay. I suspect that we would disagree on a number of things — but that it would be a productive, enlightening disagreement. The “AI wars” are actually driving me to work more on my non-AI papers, because it’s getting so mean and unfair. (Though, also, 3D printing is really fucking cool…)
Thank you, again. Shame on The Economist for its shoddy, ad hominem attack piece on Acemoglu. Keep after the Great Man apologists. And who cares what Tyler thinks? Who funds his Mercatus Center? State capacity has been hollowed out and critical tech IP (not just AI) rests in the hands of plutocrats. Is this who should control the tech trajectory and economic welfare of the country? Of course not.
Technological development clearly is shaped and non-determined, as you point out. If you look at the AI movement in practice right now, it is clear that it is situated and politically contested.
I find the framing of such questions always rather unique and telling. "Technological progress has made everyone richer" is difficult to justify to African countries who went from independent wealth to catastrophic poverty in servitude to technological progress. A "We" became richer, humanity did not.
Similarly, Andreessen defines delayed development of AI as murder. Following that definition, how many people have they 'murdered' by not investing in healthier food? Better local communities? Removing violent drugs from the pharmaceutical companies? Or by literally investing in military technology? I think, given their definitions, more people have died by their hands than would not have been saved by the development of AI.
You excerpted this from The Economist article: "The book plays down a more compelling claim: that technological progress in itself has made the average person many times richer than in pre-industrial times."
I'm going suppress my need for catharsis by using multiple derogatory adjectives and simply say this is a very stupid statement. The timeline from pre-industrial times to today has encompassed a multiplicity of technological benefits and yes, people today are many times (materially) richer. That does not yield a valid inference which says pursue "some undifferentiated path to 'technological progress'" going forward. Clearly new technologies need to be assessed as they arise and, apart from the preference of the übermenschen and their followers, the assessment process and subsequent recommendations and steering must be made by those representing a broad, relevant collection of societal interests; at least if we're interested in living in a free and democratic society (of course if those who are opposed to this gain the long term upper hand, then this whole discussion becomes moot).
By the way, sorry for the cheap shot but didn't that kerfuffle in 1962 in the vicinity of Cuba involve relatively new technology that, I believe, nobody had any qualms about regulating?
Back to the quote at the top: past is not always prologue.
"What do you do with a man like that? The only thing that makes sense is to utilize his talents as best you can, and do your best to prevent him from subverting the national interest along the way."
Is there any concrete legislative or policy proposal to prevent Musk from 'subverting the national interest' that Smith hasn't already come out in fierce opposition to? This is about as vague and empty as Dario Amodei claiming that AI needs to be "accountable to the public" in some totally unspecified way that is nevertheless somehow distinct from any actually-existing proposals to regulate AI.
Please do also write that Piranesi - Backrooms piece, though.
"Unfortunately, however, technological innovation doesn’t fit readily into the standard framework."
Economic theory is not very good at dealing with (the end results) of technologically provoked upheavals and also not with detailed arbitrage processes while moving from one short lived equilibrium to another short lived equilibrium.
Contrary to the Economist's recent, monumentally cretinous argument that Musk, Karp et al are self-made men, let's call them what they really are ... "welfare queens." Simply stated, it would go a long way to stop Andreesen, et al., dead in their tracks.
From the fragments of the article I have seen I get a distinct feeling it was written with a lot of input from (or entirely by) Generative AI, as if The Economist tried an experiment to let Generative AI itself react to what Acemoglu has said.
That would explain the poor depth as well, as Generative AI itself is fundamentally ‘broad & shallow”.
Noteworthy is the fact that Mu卐kRat didn't invent the Tesla, nor was he a founder. Also noteworthy is that Tesla was spiraling down the drain until Obama made subsidies and loans available. If it weren't for Obama, we'd have never heard of Elon Mu卐kRat. He'd be a nobody. Tesla would have gone down the drain, and Mu卐kRat right along with it.
"...perhaps we would indeed discover that Elon Musk and his brethren made an unique and indispensable causal contribution to the progress we have made". More likely we would discover that given sufficient capital, we could easily substitute any old vulture capitalist.
"Neither economic theory or econometrics tells us then, whether it is best to have technological development directed by a self-selecting elite of bold striving [strikeout] entrepreneurs [/strikeout] vulture capitalists..."
"Do their interests reflect the general good? Perhaps you can make a case for that - but you need to make that case". Assuming such a case even exists, it's not likely an honest one.
I believe the problem stems from "Techno-Optimists" living in a fantasy world where their fantasy world comes to fruition thanks to the brilliance of the Vulture Capital elites. That's why they can't present logical arguments in favor of their preferred outcomes - because ther
The Economist does not have anonymous authors. The Economist is written by The Economist.
The Economist is written by callow PPE grads in a glib house style of breezy Whig certainty.
It is unserious in the extreme.
That "technological progress" has lifted the living standards of workers is a favourite claim of right-wing propaganda (like that of a book by Gordon) because then they credit "technological progress" to randian heroes of invention and innovation, the so-called "wealth creators".
However 90+% of the increased living standards of workers is rent extracted from the increased use of coal and then oil which have a tremendous "consumer surplus". Invention and innovation have played a role in increasing diffusion and efficiency of use of coal and then oil, but that has been rather secondary compared to simply adopting coal and then oil based machinery.
Wrigley, "Energy and the english industrial revolution (2013): "Noting that one steam horse power was estimated as providing the power equivalent of 21 manual labourers, he suggested that in France ca 1840 steam engines were performing the work of 1.2 million labourers but that by the mid-1880s the rapid expansion in the use of steam engines meant that this figure had risen to 98 million labourers, ‘two-and-a-half slaves for each inhabitant of France’ [19, III, p. 74]."
Andres Malm "Fossil capital" (2016) https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/135-fossil-capital: "One method used by Wrigley and his followers to illustrate the logic is to convert coal into acres of land required to generate the same amount of energy. In 1750, all coal produced in England would have equalled 4.3 million acres of woodland, or 13 percent of the national territory. In 1800, substituting wood for all coal would have demanded 11.2 million acres, or 35 percent of the British land surface; by 1850, the figures had risen to 48.1 million acres and 150 percent, respectively. As early as in 1750, then, a hypothetical total conversion from coal to wood in the British economy would have ‘represented a significant proportion of the land surface for which there were many other competing uses’; in 1800, it would have been ‘quite impractical’; in 1850 – the threshold of 100 percent crossed – ‘self-evidently an impossibility’. [...] Paolo Malanima, likewise standing on the shoulders of Wrigley, estimates that in the absence of fossil fuels, Europe would have needed a land area more than 2.7 times its entire continental surface in 1900, rising to more than 20 times in 2000."