#daron acemoglu

Dracula is obsessed with those train schedules. This teaboo fucking loves trains. Trains that are a result of a rapidly industrializing society and the dense cities industrialism creates, full of people and their blood. And it’s like that because their political institutions moved away from absolute monarchy with the Glorious Revolution and so their economic institutions didn’t exist solely to extract wealth for that absolute monarch.

Whereas, Acemoglu argues, the countries further east feared this. They liked absolute rule and didn’t want to give it up. They suppressed technological innovation because the rents gathered from feudal land arrangements was more profitable than people moving out of the countryside into cities. They keep their political institutions exclusive of the populace, and so the economic institutions exist only to extract. Vampire-like, one might say.

And Dracula is the symbol of that, isn’t he? He’s not just one of the land-owning nobility enforcing this, he’s literally a relic of centuries of ruling the serfs, and in addition to figuratively bleeding them dry with taxes, he’s literally bleeding them dry.

By Cliff Potts Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — June 22, 2026 One of the persistent puzzles in political economy is why societies sometimes fail to make reforms that could stabilize their institutions before crisis occurs. Economists, sociologists, and historians have repeatedly observed that the people most capable of implementing such reforms are often the ones most reluctant to pursue…

In the context of universal history, free labor, wage labor is the peculiar institution.

From the massive slave economies of ancient Egypt to serfdom in Europe, to modern slavery in the New World and various types of forced labor in other colonies, including those in Africa, labor coercion has played a fundamental role in most civilizations. Coercive practices directed at workers were not uncommon in the early stages of industrialization, and disappeared in Britain only after the 1889 repeal of various Masters and Servants Acts. But large-scale labor coercion has gradually withered away in most economies over the last half century except in a few dystopian corners of the world, such as North Korea and, until recently, Uzbekistan and Nepal. A major driver of this trend, as in South Africa, has been the expansion of industry, where labor coercion has always been less widespread than in agriculture and mining. This is largely because, as we have already emphasized, manufacturing makes coercion less profitable and feasible, both because the more complex production structure reduces the returns from relying on coercion and because the greater opportunities for workers to organize collectively in factories make coercion more costly to maintain. The result is a wider corridor, creating greater room for transitions into the corridor, democracy, and liberty.

By Daron Acemoğlu, Simon Johnson

Hook: A thousand years of history and contemporary evidence make one thing clear. Progress depends on the choices we make about technology. New ways of organizing production and communication can either serve the narrow interests of an elite or become the foundation for widespread prosperity. The wealth generated by technological improvements in agriculture during the European Middle Ages was captured by the nobility and used to build grand cathedrals while peasants remained on the edge of starvation. The first hundred years of industrialization in England delivered stagnant incomes for working people. And throughout the world today, digital technologies and artificial intelligence undermine jobs and democracy through excessive automation, massive data collection, and intrusive surveillance. It doesn’t have to be this way. Power and Progress demonstrates that the path of technology was once—and may again be—brought under control. The tremendous computing advances of the last half century can become empowering and democratizing tools, but not if all major decisions remain in the hands of a few hubristic tech leaders. With their breakthrough economic theory and manifesto for a better society, Acemoglu and Johnson provide the vision needed to reshape how we innovate and who really gains from technological advances.

Me lo he pasado pipa escuchando este podcast. Y es que, al contrario de lo que suele pasar en la mayoría de las entrevistas, el entrevistador ha intentado rebatir tenazmente los puntos en los que no estaba de acuerdo con el entrevistado.  Hay tensión, pero en ningún momento faltas de respeto. Además, los dos perfiles son muy interesantes para potenciar ese contraste de ideas: López de Mántaras es…