Blueprint affiliate and Institute Professor Daron Acemoglu discusses his research career and new book, Power and Progress, with Kathryn Zickuhr, senior labor market policy analyst at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.
They discuss his early research interests in technological change, political power, and economics; his impetus for researching and writing Power and Progress; technological change before and after the Industrial Revolution and its implications for shared prosperity; political power and technological change today; the duality of automation and new-task creation; the decline of worker power and how we can restore the status of workers to promote further growth; and how the research community can reject techno-optimistic hype and hubris in order to answer important questions about technological change, worker power, and the future of socioeconomic inequality.