Our Thousand-Yr Battle over Know-how and Prosperity
Profs Simon Johnson And Daron Acemoglu have written a brand new e book: Power and Progress.
RO Johnson of INET discusses the book with Simon Johnson:
Rob Johnson:
So, you’ve gotten this e book, extraordinary e book, 500 pages plus every kind of lovely explorations as a physician’s son, prognosis, potential treatments, the yin and yang of every perspective situation and treatment and prospects. It doesn’t come throughout as dogmatic, it comes throughout as considerate, it comes throughout as deep. What impressed you to write down this e book? What did you see and what did Daron see that introduced you to the concentrate on this effort?
Simon Johnson:
Effectively, Rob, as I believe Daron and I’ve labored collectively a extremely very long time, truly 25 years, fairly shut. And we’ve been speaking about when societies do higher and when there are issues. However it was actually the election of 2016 I believe that catalyze us to suppose that possibly maybe we would have liked to focus a bit extra on the know-how of right this moment and the know-how of tomorrow and perceive why what many individuals in together with me personally had thought was going to be the promise of the web. The promise of digital know-how, why that had not solely did not ship however why that had truly created some issues that we needed to now take care of.
And naturally, as we began to write down, it turned clear that synthetic intelligence and now what everybody’s calling generative AI or variations of chat GPT, this was going to develop into actually essential for the dialogue about financial coverage in addition to the whole lot else. So, all these threads got here collectively as we wrote the e book, Rob.