#daron acemoglu

[girl-mercury]

Reading this chapter in Acemoglu’s Why Nations Fail (highly highly recommend, especially if you enjoy Leverage and want to sink your teeth into some of the substance of political and economic institutions and why they allow success or failure) all about the countries that maintained more absolutist and extractive rule that banned a diversifying economy people could participate in on a widespread basis, in contrast with England, and saw this map of the trains in Europe in 1870. Which of course made me think of Dracula, as I’m sure Acemoglu intended.

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.

He longs for the taste of the modern world that England represents, but he’s exactly the person and class keeping his region from doing any of that.

[diegofkw]

La independencia de España fue un paso importante, pero no cambió mucho las cosas. En algunos lugares, incluso las empeoró cuando fueron las élites locales las que se convirtieron en los nuevos amos explotadores. Esa situación ha durado dos siglos.

Daron Acemoglu

[henchred]

...the famous historian of the ancient world Moses Finley quipped:

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.

from from The Narrow Corridor by Daron Acemoglu and James A Robinson

[henchred]

The 1990s were a tough time for autocrats in Africa. With the Cold War over, to hang on to power you had to reinvent yourself as a democrat (or at least as a faux democrat), hold elections, wear a suit, and not be quite so obvious about repressing your opponents. Nigerian military dictator General Sani Abacha, whom we encountered in Chapter 1, died on June 7, 1998, possibly of an overdose of Viagra consumed in anticipation of a sexual liaison with two Indian prostitutes. Soon his wife was attempting to flee the country. When stopped at Kano International Airport, she was found to have slightly exceeded her baggage allowance; she had checked in thirty-eight suitcases, all of which turned out to be packed with cash. The Nigerian military decided they didn’t have it in them anymore. In 1999 they gave up power and Olusegun Obasanjo was democratically elected president. It was a Viagra spring.

"The Narrow Corridor" by Daron Acemoglu and James A Robinson

[lapseinrecs]

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

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.

My thoughts: Okay so technically I haven't finished reading this and I know this isn't exactly like the best audience for receiving this rec but. I've been finding it pretty interesting? Acemoglu has done a bunch of interesting research on inequality; I've had to read his papers for class before and so when I found my dad reading this I was like hmm lemme just take that and idk man. I like history, I like learning random parts of history. I think it's interesting to read about how technology has impacted inequality. I had a professor that said that whenever new technology is introduced, the gap between the richest and the poorest increases and this book made me think of that. I know loads of people probably won't be interested but I like it thus far well enough to rec it.

[vonneumannmachine]

¿Es la IA una estafa? López de Mántaras versus Jon Hernández

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…

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[itsusernotfound]

Prosperity and economic growth originate from a few basic principles. These include incentives for people to invest, experiment, and innovate. Without a state such incentives are largely absent because either there is no law to adjudicate disputes and no protection for property rights in the midst of conflict, or because the norms that have emerged to fill that stateless void distort economic incentives and discourage economic activity—lest economic opportunities destabilize the very essence of these societies. As a result, the fruits of any investments are likely to be stolen, wasted, or scattered. The Despotic Leviathan could enforce property rights and protect people’s investments, but it is often much more interested in imposing high taxes or monopolizing the resources for itself, so economic incentives are often only a little better under his rule than under the Absent Leviathan. Prosperity and economic growth don’t just rest on secure property rights. They critically depend on broad-based economic opportunities. This is the sort of thing that we sometimes take for granted, but it isn’t, and it hasn’t been, the natural way the economy is organized, as we saw in the previous chapter. Under the Absent Leviathan, the cage of norms often implies that economic opportunities are constricted for everybody. Under the Despotic Leviathan, the ruler and his entourage may have their property rights secure (indeed excessively secure, as they are victorious in any dispute), but not so for regular people. This sort of unequal distribution of economic opportunities isn’t enough to undergird economic prosperity either. You need opportunities to be widely and fairly distributed in society, so that whœver has a good idea for an innovation or valuable investment gets a chance to carry it out. This is an important and sometimes overlooked facet of liberty. Recall that dominance can come from the overwhelming economic power some wield against others or from stifling restrictions imposed by norms. Liberty in the economic domain then necessitates the leveling of the playing field and the lifting of these restrictions. This is exactly what we are seeing with social mobility in the Italian communes. Countless men such as Francesco di Marco Datini and Saint Francis’s father benefited from these opportunities and the liberty that they created to invest, found businesses, experiment with new ideas, innovate, and rise from their “inferior status” to become rich merchants. This bottom-up experimentation and the social mobility it brings are the economic fruits of liberty. - Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies and The Fate of Liberty

[itsusernotfound]

… societies without centralized authority are typically organized by a complex of norms that regulate and control conflict-and in fact every aspect of people's lives. Once the process of state formation is under way, state builders have an incentive to destroy these norms or at the very least transform them to serve their own objectives. This is not necessarily because they want to relax the cage of norms and unleash liberty, bet because the norms that restrain and limit political hierarchy are standing in their way to greater power. - The Narrow Corridor by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson