Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality
Hexapodia Is the Key Insight! By Noah Smith & Brad DeLong
Hexapodia XLIX: We Cannot Tell in Advance Which Technologies Are Labor-Augmenting & Which Are Labor-Replacing
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Hexapodia XLIX: We Cannot Tell in Advance Which Technologies Are Labor-Augmenting & Which Are Labor-Replacing

Back After a Long Spring Hiatus; Noah Smith & Brad DeLong Record the Podcast We, at Least, Would Like to Listen to!; Aspirationally Bi-Weekly (Meaning Every Other Week; Aspirationally an hour...
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Key Insights:

  1. Brad’s microphone is dying, and a new one is on order.

  2. However, 75% of the talking on this episode is Noah: he came loaded for bear.

  3. Although Noah has not yet read Acemoglu & Johnson’s Power & Progress, he nevertheless has OPINIONS!

  4. Friedrich von Hayek was right when he pointed out that we could not know the shape of future technologies

  5. Particularly, we cannot know where, as new technologies develop, they will settle in the balance between tacit-local and formal-generalizable-centralizable knowledge with respect to what is needed to make them actually work.

  6. Thus the ex ante error rate in figuring out in advance whether a branch of knowledge is labor-augmenting or labor-replacing is high.

  7. Better not to try to channel R&D in labor-augmenting directions: we have powerful, well-known, useful, and reliable tools for improving equity: use them rather than trying to guide future technologies in a labor-augmenting equality-promoting direction.

  8. Noah will read Power & Progress before mid-August.

  9. Brad will try to come up with examples of technologies other than the power loom that we wish had been adopted more slowly.

  10. Hexapodia!

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