Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity

I am old, now retired from careers in universities, engineering, and government. For years I have been concerned - personally and professionalliy - with issues raised in this book. These authors have done an outstanding job of cutting through the noise and rhetoric of much if not most literature on these topics. They transcend the narrowness and self-promotion found in academic disciplines - poliitical science (sic), economics, sociology, etc. - and guide the reader through concerns that matter most in the real world.What technology is, who controls it, and how the latter manipulate our thinking to "sell" the results and mandates of those technologies.In sum, reading this book is relatively easy, often thrilling, and perhaps emotionally stressful if it leads the readers to question fundamental understandings of how societies function.

I’ve been studying the impact of automation and ai on the job market since 2017, and you often hear speculation or attempts to downplay the number of jobs that will be lost to AI. Now with ChatGPT getting headlines, people are taking this issue more seriously.Bottom line, job destruction is automated but job creation is not. And though data is not easy to find (very few companies are willing to say how many people are let go from AI), it is there, and half of companies across verticals report significant headcount reduction from robotic process automation.And just recently more CEO’s are more open and honest about this.Society needs to act. I hope every member of congress, the senate, parliaments around the world read this book and take it very seriously.Daron and Simon are not alarmists - they lay out a realist perspective.

There's a lot to like in this book, with some good work on how innovation has not panned out to be a panacea. The authors cover a lot of ground, and the MIT professors that they are, do it well. The book has lots of stories that the authors tell well. That had me enjoying the flavor of the book.But then just enough hubris and politics crept in to spoil the taste. There wasn't much of that, but it doesn't take much to put me off. I find a more objective take more to my taste.MIT professors don't have the ability to analyze the evidence and propose a solution that is sure to work. No one can. In a complex system like our society solutions have to be laboriously developed over time, with trial and error. It's hubristic and arrogant for the authors to offer their policies as based on fact rather than the mere opinion they are based on. As being practical rather than just academic as they are.This is not at heart a political book, and the political slant the authors have would have best been left out. Comments about Donald Trump and his supporters and the "January 6, 2021 insurrection" in a chapter called "Breaking Democracy" seem self-righteous, gratuitous and overblown.Ideas and opinions mean little. Ideas are easy to come up and unless executed accomplish nothing. The difficulty is in the execution, not the idea. Imagine if you went to a doctor and he or she just lectured you on what he or she thought. You would want an examination and diagnostic tests, and some sort of treatment. Not just talk.Books by academic economists are valuable if they do one of two things. Either lay out facts in a neutral manner that lets people weigh the facts for themselves, giving the results of experiments or field research. Or propose concrete actions in the real world -- a treatment plan -- and push to have those things done.The authors do neither.

This book is a tour de force. Leveraging decades of their own research and centuries of research from other great thinkers, Acemoglu and Johnson explain exactly why we ought to be skeptical of "techno-optimism" (the idea that we need to just invent as quickly as possible and everything will work out fine), parrying the common refrains about how "everyone will benefit eventually" with historical and contemporary evidence that the process of inclusive growth and a fair society is neither simple nor automatic.Unless we want a few technological elites to control all data, accrue all value, and amass all power, we must act quickly and decisively to head off what might otherwise be an impending disaster for democracy and prosperity.Read this book!!

Acemoglu's latest book, sent the very first day it in on shelves.I bought it for my son who is 3rd year student in Bilkent Business Administration. He is delighted to see such a precious book in his hand well before his friends and teachers!Thank you Amazon and Ekol/UPS for seamless delivery well ahead of commented schedule.

The book delves into the historical context and societal impact of technological advancements, providing valuable insights into the complex challenges and opportunities they present. The author's engaging narrative and thorough research make this an enlightening read for anyone interested in understanding the dynamic interplay between power, technology, and prosperity throughout history.

Cant compare with Why Nations Fail, but still a good book.

This is a remarkable book that is easy to read as it sets out a range of important ideas. Outstanding.

This book is very topical, being released around the frenzy of this AI boom.People want to know, how will generative AI affect society, what can we learn from the past.Its central message is that technology can be 'guided/controlled' by policy and public will, to push it in a human augmenting rather than human replacing fashion.However, the book was clearly mostly written before GPT-4 was released, and as such drastically undersells the power of this AI wave, treating it as some sort of fancy excel spreadsheet. It doesn't consider the fact that not even the developers know how to fully control them, or the incredible and unprecedented speed of development.

Just got it and have nothing to say about the text but I don’t like the format, the big letters and the design is not sexy.