Daron Acemoglu

Throughout history, the advantages and costs of technological innovations have been unevenly distributed between the powerful and the rest of society, assert economists Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson in their new book, Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity. In a Q&A, they discuss what's wrong with today's approach to automation, why machine usefulness is more important than machine intelligence, and what techno-optimists...

From the authors of the international bestseller Why Nations Fail, a crucial new big-picture framework that answers the question of how liberty flourishes in some states but falls to authoritarianism or anarchy in others—and explains how it can continue to thrive despite new threats.
Liberty is hardly the "natural" order of things. In most places and at most times, the strong have dominated the weak and human freedom has been...