Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality
Hexapodia Is the Key Insight! By Noah Smith & Brad DeLong
PODCAST: Hexapodia LVIII: Acemoglu & Johnson Should Have Written About Technologies as Labor-Complementing or Labor-Substituting
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PODCAST: Hexapodia LVIII: Acemoglu & Johnson Should Have Written About Technologies as Labor-Complementing or Labor-Substituting

In which Noah Smith & Brad DeLong wish Daron Acemoglu & Simon Johnson had written a very different book than their "Power & Progress" is...
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In which Noah Smith & Brad DeLong wish Daron Acemoglu & Simon Johnson had written a very different book than their "Power & Progress" is...

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Key Insights:

  1. Acemoglu & Johnson should have written a very different book—one about how some technologies complement and others substitute for labor, and it is very important to maximize the first.

  2. Neither Noah Smith nor Brad DeLong is at all comfortable with “power” as a category in economics other than as the ability to credibly threaten to commit violence or theft.

  3. Acemoglu & Robinson’s Why Nations Fail is a truly great book. Power & Progress is not.

  4. We should not confuse James Robinson with Simon Johnson

  5. Billionaires running oligopolistic tech firms are not trustworthy stewards of the future of our economy.

  6. The IBM 701 Defense Calculator of 1953 is rather cool.

  7. The lurkers agree with Noah Smith in the DMs.

  8. The power loom caused technological unemployment because the rest of the value chain—cotton growing, spinning, and garment-making—was rigid, hence the elasticity of demand for the transformation thread → cloth was low.

  9. We need more examples of bad technologies than the cotton gin and the Roman Empire.

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Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality
Hexapodia Is the Key Insight! By Noah Smith & Brad DeLong
teach the world good economics through every means possible, & some means impossible...