.png)
Reviewed book: Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, 1st Edition (2023) - by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson
Book review by Mariano Varesano
Demonstrating “the importance of societal institutions” in explaining “differences in countries’ prosperity” is the contribution that earned Davon Acemoglu and Simon Johnson the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. The roots of shared prosperity are also the topic of their 2023 Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, where the two MIT professors explore the relationship between technological development and societal progress.
The main thesis of the book is that progress, intended as widespread prosperity and the enhancement of the lives of vast amounts of people, is “not the result of any automatic, guaranteed gains of technological progress. Rather, shared prosperity emerged because […] the direction of technological advances and society’s approach to dividing the gains were pushed away from arrangements that primarily served a narrow elite” (p.6). This political choice is driven by the relations of power in a society, which materialise in both coercive and persuasive ways. While these observations might seem trivial, the main aim of the book is countering what is referred to as a “predominant narrative” (p.7) for which progress is an automatic product of technological advancement when it is left unregulated and free from control. Following the logic of “what is good for my business is good for the country” (p.267), the main tech entrepreneurs support this narrative and depict every attempt to build rules and constraints to technology as luddite, reactonary, and aimed at destroying the fruits of progress.
The argument is supported by an extensive historical analysis of the relationship between technological advancements and societal gains in terms of prosperity over more than 1,000 years. The first and third chapters present the main concepts of the book: the “productivity bandwagon”, that is, the idea that increments in productivity automatically translate into higher salaries (which is deconstructed and criticised by the authors); as well as the notion that “technologies do not exist independent of an underlying vision” (p.25) and that “the visions of powerful people have a disproportionate effect on what we do with our existing tools and the direction of innovation” (p.24). The following chapters apply these concepts to selected technological advancements in history, attempting to demonstrate that the choices made about their implementation and production predicted the presence of widespread social benefits, rather than the technologies themselves. The analysis starts with the construction of the Suez Canal (Ch.2); then moves to the evolution of agricultural technology (Ch.4); the Industrial Revolution (Ch.5) and its “casualties” (Ch.6); the three decades of growth, industrialization and shared prosperity which followed World War II (Ch.7); and the way the world abandoned that model of growth entering the age of digital technologies (Ch.8) and AI (Ch.9). The last two chapters however leave more room for politics, examining the impacts of these processes on democracy (Ch.10) and some ways to arrange social forces so that technological innovation benefits wide masses rather than narrow elites (Ch.11).
The book has the great merit of deliberately placing political choices at the centre of the debate on the economic and political impact of technology. In a time of prevailing techno-determinism and blind techno-optimism (at least in some sectors of society), this approach is a breath of fresh air. More generally and theoretically, the authors treat technology as a part of the wider society, embracing the vision that there is no understanding of technological development without an analysis of the political and economic functioning of the society that produces and uses those technological artifacts. Although the authors do not use this terminology, their work might be framed in the relatively recent and promising theoretical tradition of the “Social Construction of Technology”.
However, two types of weaknesses need to be pointed out: some are structural, while others are specific. On a structural level, an evident weakness is the lack of a transparent and explicit set of criteria for case selection. The general technologies discussed in each chapter and the specific micro-cases analysed are chosen based on unspecified criteria, leaving readers uncertain whether the selection process was objective or influenced by some degree of cherry-picking. The doubt is not only hypothetical: in his review of the book, economist Noah Smith pointed out many historical examples that were used in inaccurate or outright wrong contexts. A second structural weakness is the breadth of the period considered: the same set of concepts is applied similarly to the agricultural revolution as well as to AI, giving the sensation that some rigour and context-specificity were sacrificed in the name of creating a theory of everything. A more limited period would have allowed a more detailed analysis of each case, as well as a consideration of counterfactuals and alternative explanations.
Concurrently, there are weaknesses on a more specific level. To mention one, in the last few chapters, there is a tendency to oversimplify complex and hotly debated topics with the aim of proving a point. This is particularly evident in Chapter 10, dealing with the influence of social media on democracy: while the debate on this issue is still very open - with competing evidence pointing in many different directions - this debate is ignored by the authors, who only focus on the (alleged) detrimental effects. To be sure, taking a decisive stance on the harmful impact of social media on democracy is not unwarranted; however it would have been more constructive to provide a comprehensive overview of the ongoing debate on this topic, incorporating counterarguments and giving them due consideration. The same can be said about the impact of AI on labour markets, which is depicted as potentially “further lower[ing] wages for many people” and “reduc[ing] the demand for workers” (p.304). Given that the book was published in 2023, while many of the most advanced generative AI tools were only released in late 2022, it is unlikely that the authors had sufficient data to assert this with a sufficient degree of certainty.
Despite these weaknesses, Power and Progress remains a precious contribution to the current debates on technological development, helping to locate them in the wider context of power relations (be they material or rhetorical) within societies. With some degree of simplification - which is inevitable when working with theory - this volume leads the reader to reconsider the relationship between big corporations and public interest concerning technology. Using the authors’ words: “Our current problems are rooted in the enormous economic, political, and social power of corporations, especially in the tech industry. The concentrated power of business undercuts shared prosperity because it limits the sharing of gains from technological change” (p.393).
Comments