'Power & progress', the book review of Nobel laureates Acemoglu and Johnson

The Enlightenment has been out of fashion for quite some time. The first consequence of this, shall we say, 'cultural climate' is the lack of faith in progress. Usually, however, criticism of the Enlightenment and progress has a vaguely messianic and in any case anti-rationalistic tone. To have chosen an alternative strategy to this is one reason - among many - to appreciate the very recent Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu (a celebrity in his field, author with James Robinson of the classic Why Nations Fail , translated in Italian by Saggiatore) and Simon Johnson, both professors of economics at MIT Boston and winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics 2024. The book in question offers a critical analysis of progress based on rational arguments and an original reinterpretation of economic history.

Power and Progress is a long (546 pages) but extremely clear and readable book. The basic thesis is that if by progress we mean - as we should - the improvement of the human condition, then technological innovation as such is not progress. On the contrary, according to the authors, the history of the last thousand years of human economic development shows unequivocally that "prosperity in the broad sense has never been the result of automatic and guaranteed advantages due to technological progress...". Rather, the undoubted evidence that humans on average are better off today than before is due to the fact that our predecessors in industrial societies 'challenged the choices of elites regarding working conditions and technology'.

The main consequence of these struggles is that in order to fairly distribute the benefits of technological innovation, it is necessary for citizens and workers to impose their vision and needs over that of the proponents of dominant narratives.
As if to achieve substantial progress, it takes politics. Thus, there is no automatism between technological innovation and progress. The so-called bandwagon effect, i.e. the widespread idea that the improvement in the living conditions of elites due to innovation sooner or later extends to everyone, is a fallacious myth.

Agriculture as a mode of production was undoubtedly a positive innovation in its own right, but there is no doubt that the human and social progress that resulted from it was not enjoyed by the serfs for centuries.
The Industrial Revolution represented a decisive innovation, perhaps the most important in the history of mankind, but the workers referred to by Marx in Capital and Dickens in his novels were not able to enjoy the progress in living conditions for long.
Substantial progress that instead took place after the Second World War, a period in which states, resorting to Keynesian-inspired economic policies and creating the welfare state allowed prosperity to be more equally shared. A progressive process that, as we know, was later interrupted by the Thatcher-Reagan era, neoliberalism and unregulated globalisation.

Acemoglu and Johnson's underlying thesis is, without a doubt, inherently interesting. But it must be said that it comes particularly to the point at a time when the big digital companies are imposing their own narrative on the world based on technological utopia (which has replaced the hacker euphoria of the early days). It is precisely on the digital utopia and the ideology that accompanies it that we find what are probably the most stimulating pages of the book.

The dominant narrative tells us that technological innovation is unstoppable, and that it will sooner or later lead everyone to live in a better world. But, say the authors, this is false. Rather, it is an ideology serving the likes of Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and the ubiquitous Google. An ideology, by the way, whereby the more automation and surveillance of workers the better.