Podcasts about acemoglu

Çerçeve'nin yeni bölümünde Mert Söyler ve İlkan Dalkuç; Alp Buğdaycı ile Daron Acemoğlu'na Nobel getiren kurumlar üzerine çalışmalarını, politik ekonomiye katkılarını, Trump'ın ekonomi politikalarını konuşuyorlar.Alp Buğdaycı'nın Daktilo1984'teki yazıları

En este episodio, analizamos el reciente Premio Nobel de Economía y el sesgo presente en la obra de Robinson y Acemoglu, 'Por qué Fracasan las Naciones'.

En este episodio, analizamos el reciente Premio Nobel de Economía y el sesgo presente en la obra de Robinson y Acemoglu, 'Por qué Fracasan las Naciones'.

Fala, pessoal! Neste 449, Caio Augusto está com Rachel de Sá, Renata Kotscho e Fernanda Peres de Melo! Os assuntos analisados são os seguintes: Rachel, no Nobel de Economia de 2024 tivemos uma premiação que há anos era aguardada. Conte mais sobre isso! Renata, com o Boletim Internacional: os cinco setores que mais estão em risco com as eleições americanas; ⁠Fernanda, nearshoring no México começou a recuar. Por que isso acontece? Confira nossa Linktree, lá você nos encontra em todos os lugares! https://linktr.ee/terracoeconomico Você encontra esse podcast nas seguintes plataformas: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, CastBox, Deezer, iHeart, JioSaavn, Listen Notes, Player FM, Podcast Addict, Podchaser, YouTube e YouTube Music Episódio editado por ATHELAS Edições de Áudio

El Premio Nobel de Economía de este año fue otorgado a Robinson y Acemoglu, autores del libro "Por qué Fracasan las Naciones". Esta obra pretende explicar algo que sin duda a todos nos interesa saber a qué se debe que los que los países hispanos no logran despuntar económicamente después de varios siglos de intentarlo.

El Premio Nobel de Economía fue otorgado este año a Robinson y Acemoglu, autores de "Por qué Fracasan las Naciones". Esta obra, que busca explicar por qué Hispanoamérica sigue sin despegar económicamente, atribuye su subdesarrollo a la explotación indígena durante el colonialismo español. Sin embargo, este análisis reproduce la narrativa simplista de la Leyenda Negra.❌

Noah Smith and Erik Torenberg tackle the shift in economic research from empirical studies to "big think" theories, critically examine Acemoglu's work on institutions and AI's impact on jobs, and debate the future of economics as a science. For full show notes, visit: https://highlightai.com/share/d1548747-43db-4b71-b0a8-af285d3deafd  —

This week the dialectic explores the Nobel Prize in Economics, awarded to Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson for their “contribution to Institutional Analyses” of long-run economic development.  We critically examine the claim that “settler colonialism” results in progress and development. Professors Wolff and Azhar discuss how the real economic history of colonized and indigenous peoples rebelled against the “whitewashing” in Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson's work.  The dialectic revisits the work and contributions of Paul Baran, including his analysis of the historical tendencies within capitalist development, and how it leads to under-development in the Global South.    About The Dialectic at Work is a podcast hosted by Professor Shahram Azhar & Professor Richard Wolff. The show is dedicated to exploring Marxian theory. It utilizes the dialectical mode of reasoning, that is the method developed over the millennia by Plato and Aristotle, and continues to explore new dimensions of theory and praxis via a dialogue. The Marxist dialectic is a revolutionary dialectic that not only seeks to understand the world but rather to change it. In our discussions, the dialectic goes to work intending to solve the urgent life crises that we face as a global community. Follow us on social media: X: @DialecticAtWork Instagram: @DialecticAtWork Tiktok: @DialecticAtWork Website: www.DemocracyAtWork.info Patreon: www.patreon.com/democracyatwork

Since Daron Acemoglu just won the 2024 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences alongside MIT Sloan professor Simon Johnson and University of Chicago professor James Robinson, we're revisiting  this powerful episode featuring Acemoglu's insights from 2023. In his groundbreaking book Power and Progress, Acemoglu exposes how the elite have weaponized technology to tighten their grip on wealth and influence, and explains how we can ensure that technological progress works for everyone, not just the wealthy few. This episode originally aired on August 22, 2023. Daron Acemoglu is the Institute Professor of Economics at MIT, the university's highest faculty honor, and a 2024 Nobel laureate. For the last twenty-five years, he has been researching the historical origins of prosperity, poverty, and the effects of new technologies on economic growth, employment, and inequality. He is an author (with James Robinson) of The Narrow Corridor and the New York Times bestseller Why Nations Fail. Twitter: @NarrowCorridor Further reading:  Trio of professors win Nobel economics prize for work on post-colonial wealth Democracy is in a ‘tough stretch.' New Nobel winners explain how to strengthen it Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty Website: http://pitchforkeconomics.com Twitter: @PitchforkEcon, @NickHanauer, @civicaction Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics Threads: pitchforkeconomics YouTube: @pitchforkeconomics Substack: The Pitch

Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson és James Robinson kapták a 2024-es közgazdasági Nobel-díjat. Kik ők? Miről írtak? Miért fontos a munkájuk magyar szempontból? Mi az az intézményi közgazdaságtan?

durée : 00:58:52 - Entendez-vous l'éco ? - par : Aliette Hovine, Bruno Baradat - Lundi dernier, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson et James Robinson ont obtenu le prix Nobel d'économie pour leurs recherches sur la compréhension des différences de prospérité entre les nations. - réalisation : Françoise Le Floch - invités : Denis Cogneau; François Bourguignon Économiste, professeur émérite à l'Ecole d'économie de Paris, ancien vice-président de la banque mondiale.; Thierry Verdier

Daron Acemoglu has been awarded the 2024 Nobel-prize for Economic Science. This is a great testament to his impressive career. But the award was given for his early work on global inequality, together with Johnson and Robinson. The Swedish Riksbank did not pay attention to his new work on inequality within rich countries. Should we? And is his new theory even consistent with the old? I got to ask this from Acemoglu during our 2023 interview. I thought this would be a good time to re-post his answer. In this highlight, we also discuss: The hidden tragedy behind growing wages Is automation the problem? Why we need a more "pro-human" direction of technology Lessons from (an imperfect) Germany Why fixing the economy starts from celebrating humanity If you want to enjoy the full show, head to episode 26 of this feed. You can also read my essay breakdown of Acemoglu's theory here. Get these and other resources at ⁠OnHumans.Substack.com⁠. Thank you to all the patrons who make On Humans possible! You can join the club at Patreon.com/OnHumans⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. You can get in touch for other ways to support at ⁠makela.ilari@outlook.com⁠⁠⁠. KEYWORDS Economics | economic history | wage-stagnation | wage growth | inequality | economic inequality | automation | AI | robotics | US economy | German economy | Nobel-prize | labour unions | worker power | Elon Musk | Tesla | car manufacturing | co-determination | humanity

This week on Econ 102, Noah Smith and Erik Torenberg tackle the shift in economic research from empirical studies to "big think" theories, critically examine Acemoglu's work on institutions and AI's impact on jobs, and debate the future of economics as a science. --

In today's episode for 17th October 2024, we tell you why Dr. Daron Acemoglu, Dr. Simon Johnson and Dr. James A. Robinson won the prestigious Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences ― commonly known as the Nobel Prize in Economics. Speak to Ditto's advisors now, by clicking the link here - https://ditto.sh/9zoz41

Outline00:00 - Intro02:14 - Early steps in control05:36 - L1 control17:09 - Relay feedback systems24:32 - Agile robotic maneuvers29:31 - Abstractions and models41:59 - Causality49:35 - Markets and power grids1:00:20 - Role of network structure1:05:03 - Data, systems, and society1:16:17 - On writing1:22:57 - Cascaded failures in networks1:30:40 - Information design1:34:29 - Data markets1:42:27 - On economics and engineering1:48:18 - Systems thinking for societal problems1:58:24 - Advice to future studentsLinksWebsite: https://dahleh.lids.mit.edu/Data Nation podcast: https://tinyurl.com/2fxwxw2dS. Bhattacharyya: https://tinyurl.com/4z93f6n7Wonham's geometric control: https://tinyurl.com/mrxxkrv9B. Pearson: https://tinyurl.com/3vaz9yc9L1-optimal control: https://t.ly/NuXp8M. Vidyasagar: https://tinyurl.com/4z3zamh6Relay feedback systems: https://tinyurl.com/47tr23a4J. Tsitsilkis: https://tinyurl.com/yc7jmzm6Maneuver-based motion planning: https://tinyurl.com/bdduu2eaNutonomy: https://tinyurl.com/426s7stvFeedback control with noisy channels: https://tinyurl.com/2yschy2sBode's integral: https://tinyurl.com/2s47rjmpFundamental limits and molecular fluctuations: https://tinyurl.com/5n8k4maaVolatility of power grids: https://tinyurl.com/2vfpjfy7Bayesian learning in social networks: https://tinyurl.com/3mk9p486D. Acemoglu: https://tinyurl.com/3nphek9hA. Ozdaglar: https://tinyurl.com/yvdnddh9Cascade failures in networks: https://tinyurl.com/u2ckx94vA marketplace for data: https://tinyurl.com/esvbtprbSupport the showPodcast infoPodcast website: https://www.incontrolpodcast.com/Apple Podcasts: https://tinyurl.com/5n84j85jSpotify: https://tinyurl.com/4rwztj3cRSS: https://tinyurl.com/yc2fcv4yYoutube: https://tinyurl.com/bdbvhsj6Facebook: https://tinyurl.com/3z24yr43Twitter: https://twitter.com/IncontrolPInstagram: https://tinyurl.com/35cu4kr4Acknowledgments and sponsorsThis episode was supported by the National Centre of Competence in Research on «Dependable, ubiquitous automation» and the IFAC Activity fund. The podcast benefits from the help of an incredibly talented and passionate team. Special thanks to L. Seward, E. Cahard, F. Banis, F. Dörfler, J. Lygeros, ETH studio and mirrorlake . Music was composed by A New Element.

¿Cuáles fueron sus principales contribuciones a la ciencia económica? Análisis del economista Luciano Magnífico.

⬇⬇⬇APRIMI⬇⬇ Vuoi imparare l'analisi dati partendo da zero? Registrati gratuitamente al nostro corso! Acquisisci le competenze necessarie compilando il form di iscrizione qui: https://forms.gle/aQNDdsjKc33C8o6v8 Non perdere questa opportunità di ampliare le tue conoscenze in analisi dati. Iscriviti ora! NOBEL ECONOMIA 2024 ACEMOGLU: un nobel discutibile Abbonati qui: https://www.youtube.com/economiaitalia/join https://www.patreon.com/join/EconomiaItalia? Fonti e spunti: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2024/press-release/ https://www.gatesnotes.com/Why-Nations-Fail Qui per segnalare temi: https://tellonym.me/dr.elegantia Podcast (su tutte le piattaforme): https://www.spreaker.com/show/dr-elegantia-podcast COME SOSTENERCI: Il nostro nuovo libro sull'economia: Guida Terrestre per Autoeconomisti https://www.aristodemicaedizioni.com/product-page/economiaitalia-guida-terrestre-per-autoeconomisti Acquistando le nostre T-shirt dedicate ai dati stampate in Serigrafia Artigianale con passione e orgoglio dai detenuti del Carcere Lorusso e Cutugno di Torino https://fairenough.it/prodotto/t-shirt-show-me-the-fkn-data/ Guida al VOTO 2024: https://amzn.to/3RGRMO9 DonazionI Paypal: https://paypal.me/appuntiUAB Vuoi sostenermi ma non sborsare nemmeno un euro? Usa questo link per per il tuo prossimo acquisto su Amazon: https://amzn.to/2JGRyGT Qui trovi i libri che consiglio per iniziare a capirne di più sull'economia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEaIk8wQ3z8 Dove ci trovi: https://www.umbertobertonelli.it/info/ https://linktr.ee/economiaitalia La mia postazione: Logitech streamcam https://amzn.to/3HR6xq0 Luci https://amzn.to/3n6qtgP Shure MV7https://amzn.to/3HRh7k1 Asta https://amzn.to/3HSRvzY #economiaitalia #drelegantia #economiaDiventa un supporter di questo podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/dr-elegantia-podcast--5692498/support.

⬇⬇⬇APRIMI⬇⬇ Vuoi imparare l'analisi dati partendo da zero? Registrati gratuitamente al nostro corso! Acquisisci le competenze necessarie compilando il form di iscrizione qui: https://forms.gle/aQNDdsjKc33C8o6v8 Non perdere questa opportunità di ampliare le tue conoscenze in analisi dati. Iscriviti ora! NOBEL ECONOMIA 2024 ACEMOGLU: un nobel discutibile Abbonati qui: https://www.youtube.com/economiaitalia/join https://www.patreon.com/join/EconomiaItalia? Fonti e spunti: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2024/press-release/ https://www.gatesnotes.com/Why-Nations-Fail Qui per segnalare temi: https://tellonym.me/dr.elegantia Podcast (su tutte le piattaforme): https://www.spreaker.com/show/dr-elegantia-podcast COME SOSTENERCI: Il nostro nuovo libro sull'economia: Guida Terrestre per Autoeconomisti https://www.aristodemicaedizioni.com/product-page/economiaitalia-guida-terrestre-per-autoeconomisti Acquistando le nostre T-shirt dedicate ai dati stampate in Serigrafia Artigianale con passione e orgoglio dai detenuti del Carcere Lorusso e Cutugno di Torino https://fairenough.it/prodotto/t-shirt-show-me-the-fkn-data/ Guida al VOTO 2024: https://amzn.to/3RGRMO9 DonazionI Paypal: https://paypal.me/appuntiUAB Vuoi sostenermi ma non sborsare nemmeno un euro? Usa questo link per per il tuo prossimo acquisto su Amazon: https://amzn.to/2JGRyGT Qui trovi i libri che consiglio per iniziare a capirne di più sull'economia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEaIk8wQ3z8 Dove ci trovi: https://www.umbertobertonelli.it/info/ https://linktr.ee/economiaitalia La mia postazione: Logitech streamcam https://amzn.to/3HR6xq0 Luci https://amzn.to/3n6qtgP Shure MV7https://amzn.to/3HRh7k1 Asta https://amzn.to/3HSRvzY #economiaitalia #drelegantia #economiaDiventa un supporter di questo podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/drelgantia-podcast--5623073/support.

“There's nothing natural about 30-, 40-, 50- fold differences in income per capita in a globalised, connected world.” Daron Acemoglu, economic sciences laureate 2024, speaks about the root causes of persistent poverty among the poorest nations and how to build the types of inclusive institution that can support prosperity. In this conversation with the Nobel Prize's Adam Smith, recorded shortly after the prize announcement, Acemoglu also highlights the importance of democracy and his fears regarding AI, and how its misuse could result in a two-tier society. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The 2024 winners of the Nobel prize for Economics were announced this morning. One of the winners was the MIT economist Simon Johnson, who, as the co-author (with his MIT colleague Daron Acemoglu) of Power and Progress, appeared on KEEN ON just over a year ago to talk about technology & prosperity. Given that the prize was given to Johnson (and Acemoglu) for their work on explaining the gaps in prosperity between nations, we thought it worthwhile to rerun the interview from last year. Particularly since, if anything, the relationship between new technologies like AI and economic inequality is even more pertinent in 2024 than it was last year. SIMON JOHNSON is the Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he is head of the Global Economics and Management group. In 2007-08 he was chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, and he currently co-chairs the CFA Institute Systemic Risk Council. In February 2021, Johnson joined the board of directors of Fannie Mae. Johnson's most recent book, with Daron Acemoglu, Power and Progress: Our 1000-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, explores the history and economics of major technological transformations up to and including the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence. His previous book, with Jonathan Gruber, Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream, explained how to create millions of good new jobs around the U.S., through renewed public investment in research and development. This proposal attracted bipartisan support.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Il caso Stellantis che tiene banco dopo l'audizione di Carlos Tavares alla Camera di venerdì scorso, durante la quale il gruppo italo-francese ha chiesto all'Italia nuovi incentivi. Una richiesta che ha sollevato le reazioni della politica. E non solo. Intervenendo alla trasmissione "Amici e nemici", su Radio24, il segretario generale della Cgil Maurizio Landini ha ricordato che gli incentivi non hanno funzionato: a fronte di 950 milioni di euro già erogati, Stellantis ha aumentato la cassa integrazione e diminuito la produzione in Italia. Landini ha anche chiesto un intervento di Palazzo Ghigi. Ancor più diretto è stato il presidente di Confindustria, Emanuele Orsini: «La richiesta di Stellantis di ulteriori incentivi è una pazzia», ha detto il numero uno di Viale dell'Astronomia a margine della convention di Capri organizzata dai Giovani di Confindustria. Intanto oggi è tornato a parlare Carlos Tavares, Ceo di Stellantis, durante la prima giornata del Mondial de l'Auto, il Salone dell'auto di Parigi: "Altri hanno creato il caos e voi chiedete a me di risolvere la situazione e di garantire posti di lavoro. Non sono un mago, sono un essere umano come voi. Voi mi chiedete di risolvere problemi creati da altri, per risolvere quelle situazioni potrei dovere fare cose che non saranno accolte bene". Il Ceo ha risposto a chi chiedeva se fosse in grado di garantire che non saranno tagliati posti di lavoro all'interno del gruppo.Il commento di Paolo Bricco, Il Sole 24 Ore.Boing tra crisi e scioperi si avvicina al licenziamento di massa (e a una crisi di liquidità)Boeing, nella bufera di crisi e scioperi, vola verso licenziamenti di massa: nei prossimi mesi eliminerà 17.000 posti di lavoro, a tutti i livelli, pari al 10% dei suoi dipendenti. Accanto ai tagli, il colosso aerospaziale ha ammesso nuovi ritardi nel decollo del progetto di un nuovo, grande velivolo per le rotte internazionali, il 777X, che, avviato nel 2013, ha da tempo sfondato ogni budget e traguardo. Ora è slittato al 2026 dal 2025. Sarà inoltre cancellato dal 2027, in nome dell'austerity, uno dei modelli finora più noti della sua flotta: la versione cargo del 767.La società americana non fa profitti dal 2018 e secondo il New York Times a breve dovrebbe annunciare ricavi per 17,8 miliardi di dollari, con perdite di 10 dollari per azione. Il suo debito è salito a 58 miliardi, ossia nove in più di un decennio fa. Le decisioni sulla produzione, annunciate dal nuovo chief executive Kelly Ortberg, si tradurranno in oneri straordinari per 5 miliardi di dollari: tre miliardi per gli interventi sui programmi civili che si sommeranno a 2 miliardi di svalutazioni anche nel settore della Difesa, dove Boeing, uno dei principali fornitori del Pentagono, ha a sua volta incontrato difficoltà. A conti fatti, l'azienda ha avvertito che dovrà contabilizzare perdite trimestrali per 6 miliardi.Lo sciopero in atto da cinque settimane da parte di 30.000 tecnici e ingegneri del gruppo, con in gioco il contratto, si è aggiunto alle sfide. L'agitazione, secondo alcune stime, da sola costa al gruppo oltre un miliardo al mese. I negoziati sono nell'impasse: Boeing ha accusato il sindacato di malafede; le union hanno risposto che è Boeing a non trattare con trasparenza. «Il ceo Ortberg ha fatto sapere uno dei leader dello sciopero - ha l'opportunità di agire diversamente, invece di ricorrere a minacce e intimidazioni».È stato ospite a Focus Economia Alessandro Plateroti, nuovo Direttore di NewsMondo.it Il dibattito sul colonialismo torna attuale con il Nobel a Acemoglu, Johnson e Robinson Il premio Nobel per l economia 2024 va a Daren Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, entrambi del Mit di Boston, e James A. Robinson della University of Chicago per gli studi su come le istituzioni si formano e influenzano la prosperità. I tre economisti hanno dimostrato che una buona parte della differenza nella ricchezza e nello sviluppo degli stati dipende da come funzionano le istituzioni. Società con uno scarso stato di diritto e istituzioni fragili non riescono a generare crescita e cambiamento, e i loro studi sono in gran parte volti a capire perché questo avvenga. "Ridurre le enormi differenze di reddito tra i Paesi è una delle maggiori sfide del nostro tempo. I vincitori", ha detto Jakob Svensson, presidente del Comitato per il Premio di Scienze Economiche, "hanno dimostrato l importanza delle istituzioni sociali per raggiungere questo obiettivo».«Quando gli europei colonizzarono ampie zone del mondo, le istituzioni di quelle società cambiarono. Questo cambiamento è stato a volte drammatico, ma non si è verificato ovunque nello stesso modo. In alcuni luoghi l obiettivo era sfruttare la popolazione indigena ed estrarre risorse a vantaggio dei colonizzatori. In altri, i colonizzatori hanno creato sistemi politici ed economici inclusivi per il beneficio a lungo termine degli immigrati europei», si legge nella nota a dell Academy che spiega la ricerca dei tre economisti. «I vincitori hanno dimostrato che una spiegazione delle differenze di prosperità dei Paesi è data dalle istituzioni sociali introdotte durante la colonizzazione. Le istituzioni inclusive sono state spesso introdotte in Paesi che erano poveri al momento della colonizzazione e, nel tempo, hanno portato a una popolazione generalmente prospera. Questo è un motivo importante per cui le ex colonie un tempo ricche sono ora povere e viceversa.Il commento di Mario Deaglio, docente Economia Internazionale Università di Torino, al microfono di Sebastiano Barisoni.

Este lunes han sido reconocidos con el galardón por demostrar la importancia de las instituciones sociales en la prosperidad de un país

Il Nobel per l'Economia 2024 è stato assegnato a Daron Acemogliu, Simon Johnson e James A. Robinson, dell'Università di Chicago “per gli studi su come le istituzioni si formano e influenzano la prosperità”.

Like this? Get AIDAILY, delivered to your inbox, every weekday. Subscribe to our newsletter at https://aidaily.us Could AI Win a Nobel Prize? Scientists are exploring if AI can make Nobel-worthy discoveries. The "Nobel Turing Challenge" aims to create an AI capable of achieving this by 2050. Early "robot scientists" like "Adam" and "Eve" have made small breakthroughs, but AI needs significant advancements to rival human researchers. While AI tools like AlphaFold have revolutionized protein structure predictions, they still lack deep scientific understanding. Experts predict that within the next decade, research aided by AI could win a Nobel Prize.  MIT Economist Says AI Can Only Handle 5% of Jobs, Fears Stock Crash MIT economist Daron Acemoglu predicts that AI will replace or heavily assist just 5% of jobs in the next decade. He warns that current AI systems are unreliable, which could lead to wasted investments by companies. This unrestrained spending could result in a tech stock crash, or “AI winter.” Acemoglu compares the current hype to the early 2000s dot-com bubble. The Cognitive Disconnect Between Physicians and AI Recent research shows that GPT-4 outperforms physicians in diagnostic accuracy, yet doctors using GPT-4 see only minimal improvement. This disconnect stems from trust issues, lack of AI training, increased cognitive load, and differing diagnostic methods. Doctors often mistrust AI, struggle with optimal prompts, and find integrating AI suggestions cumbersome. Improving collaboration between AI and clinicians requires trust-building, better workflow integration, and training. Judge Blocks California's New AI Law in Case Over Kamala Harris Deepfake A federal judge temporarily blocked California's new AI law, AB 2839, shortly after it was signed by Governor Gavin Newsom. The law targets individuals who post AI deepfakes of political candidates that could confuse voters, potentially forcing them to take down the content. However, the judge ruled that AB 2839 is too broad and could infringe on constitutionally protected speech, such as satire and parody. Is Quantum Computing an Unlikely Answer to AI's Looming Energy Crisis? AI's growing energy consumption is a concern, with US data center electricity demand potentially doubling by 2030 due to AI. Quantum computing could offer a solution, as it is up to 100 times more energy-efficient than traditional supercomputers. Quantum processors use qubits, allowing them to solve complex problems faster. Companies like IonQ are developing quantum chips for AI, aiming to reduce energy requirements. While promising, solving AI's power challenge will likely need a multi-pronged approach, including expanding grid infrastructure and integrating renewable energy sources.

AI has been hailed as a transformative technology with McKinsey estimating it could add $26 trillion to the global economy. While many investors have already jumped on the AI bandwagon, not everyone agrees. Daron Acemoglu, Institute Professor at MIT and author of books including Why Nations Fail, takes a critical look at AI and explains why the economic and social benefits may have been overstated. He joins John Lee of Bloomberg Intelligence and Katia Dmitrieva of Bloomberg News on the Asia Centric podcast.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

PDS Debt is offering a free debt analysis. It only takes thirty seconds. Get yours at https://PDSDebt.com/WHATIFALTHIST Link to my second podcast on world history and interviews: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0NCSdGglnmdWg-qHALhu1w Link to my cancellation insurance: https://becomepluribus.com/creators/20 Link to my Twitter - https://x.com/whatifalthist Link to my Instagram-https://www.instagram.com/rudyardwlyn... Bibliography The Ruling Classes by Gaetano Mosca The Rise of the West by McNeil The Story of the Americas by Leland Dewitt Baldwin Forgotten Continent by Michael Reid American Nations by Colin Woodard The WEIRDest people in the world by Joseph Heinrich Why Nations Fail by Acemoglu and Robinson War, Peace and War by Peter Turchin The Art of Not Being Governed by James Scott Seeing like a State by James Scott The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by Shirer The History of Philosophy by Bertrand Russel Democracy the God that Failed by Herman Hoppes Atrocities by Matthew White The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama The Soul of France by Fernand Braudel A History of Civilizations by Fernand Braudel The Best of Times and Worst of Times by Michael Burleigh After Liberalism by Paul Gottfried The Leviathan and Its Enemies by Sam Francis  Politics by Aristotle The Pursuit of Power by McNeil Tragedy and Hope by Carroll Quiggley The Evolution of Civilizations by Carroll Quiggley Enlightenment Now by Stephen Pinker The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell Envy by Helmut Schoeck Dominion by Tom Holland The True Believer by Eric Hoffer The Dictators by Richard Overy Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari The Invention of Yesterday by Tamim Ansary After Liberalism by Matthew Rose Destiny Disrupted by Tamim Ansary The Master and His Emissary by Ian McGhilchrist Japan and the Shackles of the Past by Taggert Murphy The True Believer by Eric Hoffer Shadow World by Chandler The Righteous Mind by Haidt The Strange Death of Europe by Douglas Murray Islamo Leftism by Philippe Fabry Fire in the Minds of Men by Billington Political Order and Political Decay by Francis Fukuyama War in Human Civilization by Azar Gat

Listening to the ongoing debate about artificial intelligence, one could be forgiven for assuming that the technology is either a bogeyman or a savior, with little ground in between. But that's not the stance of economist Daron Acemoglu, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author, with Simon Johnson, of the new book Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity. Combining a cogent historical analysis of past technological revolutions, he examines whether a groundbreaking new technology “augments” the status quo, as opposed to merely squeezing out human labor. “[M]y favorite term is ‘creating new tasks' because I think it really clarifies what the quote unquote augmenting needs to take the form of,” he tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. “It's not just making a worker more productive in tightening the screws, but it's really creating new jobs that didn't exist.” And so, he explains to those perhaps afraid that a bot is gunning for their livelihood, “Automation is not our enemy. Excessive automation is our enemy.” This is not to depict Acemoglu as an apologist for our new silicon taskmasters. Current trends such as the consolidation of power among technology companies, a focus on shareholder returns at the expense of all else, a blind trust in companies to somehow muddle through to societal equilibrium, and a slavish drive to automate everything immediately all leave him cold: “I feel AI is going in the wrong direction and taking us down with it.” His conversation doesn't end there, thankfully, and he offers some hopeful words on how we might find that modus vivendi with AI, including (but by no means only relying on) “the soft hand of the state in tipping the scales one way or another.” Acemoglu is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the British Academy of Sciences, the Turkish Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, the European Economic Association, and the Society of Labor Economists. He is also a member of the academic-cum-policymaker group of economic movers and shakers known as the Group of 30. Besides Power and Progress, his books include the popular bestseller Why Nations Fail: Power, Prosperity, and Poverty written with James Robinson. Acemoglu has received a number of prizes, including two inaugural awards in 2004, the T. W. Shultz Prize from the University of Chicago and the Sherwin Rosen Award for outstanding contribution to labor economics. He received the John Bates Clark Medal in 2005, the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in 2012, and the 2016 BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award, as well as the Distinguished Science Award from the Turkish Sciences Association in 2006 and a Carnegie Fellowship in 2017.

Daron Acemoglu is an esteemed economist and author, currently serving as the Killian Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His main areas of research include political economy, economic development and growth, network economics, human capital and technological innovation. Much of his work studies the political, economic and social origins of the differences in economic development across societies. He has also explored the institutional and political evolution of nations and the role that technology plays in shaping economic growth. Acemoglu's track-record of addressing conventional economic principles in a highly original and astute fashion makes him one of the best regarded thought leaders in the field. Acemoglu is probably best known for his book - Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (co-authored with James Robinson), which made the New York Times Bestseller List in 2012. His other books include: Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (also with James Robinson), which was awarded the Woodrow Wilson and the William Riker prizes, Introduction to Modern Economic Growth and Principles of Economics (co-authored with David Laibson and John List) and The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty (with James Robinson).

Neste episódio da quarta temporada do Metanoia Lab, patrocinado pela Oi Soluções, o Andrea (andreaiorio.com) analisa uma frase do Daren Acemoglu, economista turco-americano, professor no Instituto de Tecnologia de Massachusetts e um dos economistas mais influentes de sua geração, que fala sobre a desinteligência artificial. O "paradoxo da produtividade" e o porque a IA pode não cumprir suas expectativas. Tudo isso comentado pelo Andrea Iorio nesse episódio do Metanoia Lab. 

Se acompanha o IN-Pertinente, saberá certamente que a economia se divide em duas grandes áreas de estudo: a microeconomia e a macroeconomia. Mas será que a segunda vive sem a primeira?Granularidade, networks (económicas) e as narrativas na economia são três mecanismos da chamada Nova Economia, e a conversa entre Mariana Alvim e José Alberto Ferreira vai explorá-los em detalhe, neste episódio. A dupla traz à ‘antena' não apenas a explicação teórica destes conceitos da macroeconomia, mas também exemplos reais: a chuva na Eslovénia que afetou a Autoeuropa em Portugal, a crise da indústria automóvel nos Estados Unidos que fez com que marcas concorrentes se protegessem umas às outras, os efeitos do ‘fenómeno Taylor Swift' ou como um desenho num guardanapo e uma história bem contada desencadearam cortes de impostos na América.Um único evento ou um único agente (uma empresa ou uma pessoa) – ou até uma simples história que se torna viral – pode ter grandes consequências macroeconómicas, chegando mesmo a ser capaz de originar uma recessão ou alavancar o crescimento da economia.REFERÊNCIAS E LINKS ÚTEISLivrosNarrativas Económicas:Shiller, R. J. (2019). Narrative economics: How stories go viral and drive major economic events. Princeton University Press.Sobre a economia da indústria musical:Krueger, A. B. (2019). Rockonomics: A backstage tour of what the music industry can teach us about economics and life. Currency.Artigos científicosNetworks (redes) de produção:Carvalho, V. M., & Tahbaz-Salehi, A. (2019). «Production networks: A primer. Annual Review of Economics», 11, 635-663.Acemoglu, D., Carvalho, V. M., Ozdaglar, A., & Tahbaz-Salehi, A. (2012). «The networkorigins of aggregate fluctuations. Econometrica», 80(5), 1977-2016.Grandes empresas e granularidade:Giovanni, J., Levchenko, A. A., & Mejean, I. (2014). «Firms, destinations, and aggregate fluctuations». Econometrica, 82(4), 1303-1340.Gabaix, X. (2011). «The granular origins of aggregate fluctuations». Econometrica, 79(3), 733-772.Links úteisO famoso guardanapo com a Curva de Laffer, no SmithsonianA importância da NOKIA para a FinlândiaO testemunho do CEO da Ford Alan Mulally, ao Congresso dos EUA, em novembro de 2008, no qual explica como o colapso da concorrência poria em causa a existência da própria Ford.As chuvas na Eslovénia e a AutoeuropaUma radiografia das empresas portuguesas (e a importância das grandes)O peso da Autoeuropa na economia portuguesaBIOSMARIANA ALVIMÉ locutora da rádio RFM há 15 anos. Depois de quase 10 a fazer o «Café da Manhã», agora leva os ouvintes a casa, com Pedro Fernandes, no «6PM». É autora de livros para adolescentes e criou o podcast «Vale a Pena», no qual entrevista artistas enquanto leitores.JOSÉ ALBERTO FERREIRADoutorando em Economia no Instituto Universitário Europeu, em Florença. Trabalhou no Banco Central Europeu, com foco na investigação em modelos de política monetária e macroprudencial.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Contra Acemoglu on AI, published by Maxwell Tabarrok on June 29, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. The Simple Macroeconomics of AI is a 2024 working paper by Daron Acemoglu which models the economic growth effects of AI and predicts them to be small: About a .06% increase in TFP growth annually. This stands in contrast to many predictions which forecast immense impacts on economic growth from AI, including many from other academic economists. Why does Acemoglu come to such a different conclusion than his colleagues and who is right? First, Acemoglu divides up the ways AI could affect productivity into four channels: 1. AI enables further (extensive-margin) automation. Obvious examples of this type of automation include generative AI tools such as large language models taking over simple writing, translation and classification. 2. AI can generate new task complementarities, raising the productivity of labor in tasks it is performing. For example, AI could provide better information to workers, directly increasing their productivity. Alternatively, AI could automate some subtasks (such as providing readymade subroutines to computer programmers) and simultaneously enable humans to specialize in other subtasks, where their performance improves. 3. AI could induce deepening of automation - meaning improving performance, or reducing costs, in some previously capital-intensive tasks. Examples include IT security, automated control of inventories, and better automated quality control 4. AI can generate new labor-intensive products or tasks. Each of these four channels is referring to specific mechanism in his task-based model of production. Automation raises the threshold of tasks which are performed by capital instead of labor Complementarities raises labor productivity in non-automated tasks Deepening of automation raises capital productivity in already-automated tasks New tasks are extra production steps that only labor can perform in the economy, for example, the automation of computers leads to programming as a new task. The chief sin of this paper is dismissing the latter half of these mechanisms without good arguments or evidence. "Deepening automation" in Acemoglu's model means increasing the efficiency of tasks already performed by machines. This raises output but doesn't change the distribution of tasks assigned to humans vs machines. AI might deepen automation by creating new algorithms that improve Google's search results on a fixed compute budget or replacing expensive quality control machinery with vision-based machine learning, for example. This kind of productivity improvement can have huge growth effects. The second industrial revolution was mostly "deepening automation" growth. Electricity, machine tools, and Bessemer steel improved already automated processes, leading to the fastest rate of economic growth the US has ever seen. In addition, this deepening automation always increase wages in Acemoglu's model, in contrast to the possibility of negative wage effects from the extensive margin automation that he focuses on. So why does Acemoglu ignore this channel? I do not dwell on deepening of automation because the tasks impacted by (generative) AI are quite different than those automated by the previous wave of digital technologies, such as robotics, advanced manufacturing equipment and software systems. This single sentence is the only justification he gives for omitting capital productivity improvements from his analysis. A charitable interpretation of this argument acknowledges that he is only referring to "(generative) AI", like ChatGPT and Midjourney. These tools do seem more focused on augmenting human labor rather than doing what software can already do, but more efficiently. Though Acemoglu is happy to drop the "generative" qualifier everywhere ...

Muitos termos nos vêm à cabeça quando falamos de inovação: «startups», unicórnios, «venture capital», «business angels», entre outros. Mas antes de explorarmos o que significam, importa compreender o que é realmente inovar. Quem inova? Pessoas ou empresas? O setor público ou o setor privado? Quem financia a inovação? Será Portugal um país que acolhe boas ideias? A radialista Mariana Alvim estreia-se com este tema na dupla da Economia, com a curiosidade de quem quer traduzir o significado de todos aqueles termos em ‘economês' para português.  Com a ajuda do economista José Alberto Ferreira, vamos ficar a conhecer a diferença entre inovações incrementais e radicais, qual o papel do Estado no incentivo às (boas) ideias, e que o falhanço – de que gostamos tão pouco em Portugal – é quase parte do verbo inovar. Talvez isso explique porque inovamos tão pouco no nosso país. REFERÊNCIAS E LINKS ÚTEISLivros:Acemoglu, D., & Johnson, S. (2023). «Power and progress: Our thousand-year struggle over technology and prosperity». John Murray Press. Mazzucato, M. (2018). The entrepreneurial state: Debunking public vs. private sector myths (2nd ed.). Penguin Books. Artigos científicos:Bloom, Nicholas, John Van Reenen, and Heidi Williams. 2019. «A Toolkit of Policies to Promote Innovation», Journal of Economic Perspectives, 33 (3): 163-84. Bruland, K., & Mowery, D. C. (2006). «Innovation through time». In J. Fagerberg & D. C. Mowery (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of innovation (online edn, 2009). Oxford University Press. Aghion, Philippe, Ufuk Akcigit, and Peter Howitt. 2015. «Lessons from Schumpeterian Growth Theory», American Economic Review, 105 (5): 94-99. Boldrin, Michele, and David K. Levine. 2013. «The Case against Patents.», Journal of Economic Perspectives, 27 (1): 3-22. Acemoglu, Daron, Ufuk Akcigit, and Murat Alp Celik. 2022. «Radical and Incremental Innovation: The Roles of Firms, Managers, and Innovators.», American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 14 (3): 199-249. Links úteis:Estudo da FFMS sobre o financiamento do empreendedorismo em Portugal e o papel do programa «Montante Único».A Inteligência Artificial: substituto ou complemento dos trabalhadores?Inovação e impostos (artigo de opinião, de Ricardo Reis). Project Syndicate: o papel dos governos da direção da inovação em IA. A inovação e o desaparecimento da NOKIA.BIOSMARIANA ALVIM É locutora da rádio RFM há 15 anos. Depois de quase 10 a fazer o «Café da Manhã», agora leva os ouvintes a casa, com Pedro Fernandes, no «6PM». É autora de livros para adolescentes e criou o podcast «Vale a Pena», no qual entrevista artistas enquanto leitores.JOSÉ ALBERTO FERREIRADoutorando em Economia no Instituto Universitário Europeu, em Florença. Trabalhou no Banco Central Europeu, com foco na investigação em modelos de política monetária e macroprudencial.

Warum ist Europa viel reicher als der Rest der Welt? Um diese Frage zu beantworten reisen wir in dieser Folge zurück in die Geschichte der Industriellen Revolution.  Es erklärt der Historiker Andreas Resch.Andreas Resch ist Historiker an der Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien. ***Drei Buchtipps von Andreas Resch:A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy von Joel MokyrThe British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective von Robert AllenGreat Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy von Kenneth Pomeranz***Weiterführende Links zum InterviewAdam Smith und die Nadelfabrik (Arbeitsteilung)David Ricardo und sein komparativer Kostenvorteil, einfach erklärtDie Studie zu Bangladesch, die Andreas zitiert hat: Manufacturing growth and the lives of Bangladeshi womenDie Erfolge Indiens bei der Armutsbekämpfung kann man etwa bei der Brookings Institution nachlesenÜber die Wichtigkeit von Institutionen hat etwa Joel Mokyr geschrieben: The Institutional Origins of the Industrial RevolutionDouglass North hat den Nobelpreis für seine Arbeit zu Institutionen gewonnen. Seine Rede hier ist eine gute EinführungRobert Allen über die Spinning Jenny: The Industrial Revolution in Miniature: The Spinning Jenny in Britain, France, and India.Die Arbeit von Acemoglu, die angesprochen wurde: The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade, Institutional Change and Economic GrowthNoch eine ganz zentrale, einflussreiche Arbeit von Acemoglu: The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical InvestigationPeer Vries: The California School and Beyond: How to Study the Great Divergence?Jan de Vries: The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution  ***Erklär mir die Welt hilft dir dabei, die Welt besser zu verstehen. Hilf wie 370+ andere Hörer:innen mit, den Podcast zu finanzieren. Danke an alle Unterstützer:innen! ***So kannst du noch mithelfen Schick uns deine Fragen und Wünsche für EpisodenErzähl uns von dir! Mach bei der Hörer:innen-Befragung mit ***Du willst mehr?Bewirb dich als Hörer:in des MonatsHol dir Updates zum Podcast per WhatsApp, Newsletter, Telegram oder SignalFolge uns bei Tiktok, Instagram und FacebookQuatsche mit anderen Hörer:innen auf DiscordAlle Folgen ab Mai 2023 gibt es mit Video auf YouTubeSchau im Merch-Shop vorbeiHier kannst du Werbung im Podcast buchenAndreas' Buch "Alles gut?!" darüber, was er im Kampf gegen Armut auf der Welt beitragen kann ***Das Team:Mitarbeit: Sidonie SagmeisterVermarktung: Missing LinkAudio Production: Audio Funnel Video Production: DomotionLogo: Florian HalbmayrMusik: Something Elated by Broke For Free, CC BYBeatbox am Ende: Azad Arslantas

Plus Zuck Regains Cred (subscribe in the links below) Get a free 20-page AI explainer: AI FROM ZERO plus these stories and more, delivered to your inbox, every weekday. Subscribe to our newsletter at https://aidaily.us  Like this? Get AIDAILY, delivered to your inbox, every weekday. Subscribe to our newsletter at https://aidaily.us Hardly Anyone Actually Uses Generative AI A study by the Reuters Institute and Oxford University reveals that while ChatGPT is the most recognized generative AI tool, only a small percentage use it daily. Younger people are more likely to use these tools, but overall regular usage remains low. Bilingual AI Brain Implant Helps Stroke Survivor Communicate Scientists at UCSF have developed an AI-powered brain implant enabling a stroke survivor to communicate in both Spanish and English. The implant decodes brain activity into sentences, allowing the user to switch languages seamlessly, offering hope for more natural communication among bilingual individuals with paralysis.  Zuck Regains Cred Mark Zuckerberg has regained favor in Silicon Valley by promoting open-source artificial intelligence. Developers appreciate that Meta's AI system, released last summer, allows for free modification and reuse, contrasting with the closed models of Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft. This move aligns Zuckerberg with the hacker ethos and has earned him support from the tech community. AI Writes More Convincing Restaurant Reviews Than Humans A Yale study led by Balázs Kovács revealed that GPT-4 generates restaurant reviews more convincingly than humans. Participants misidentified AI reviews as human-written more often than not and expressed greater confidence in these misidentifications. This raises concerns about AI's potential to produce hyperrealistic fake content, affecting trust in various domains, including elections. AI Models Have Favorite Numbers AI models display surprising human-like biases in selecting random numbers. A study by Gramener showed that major AI chatbots, including OpenAI's GPT-3.5 Turbo, Anthropic's Claude 3 Haiku, and Google's Gemini, consistently prefer certain numbers and avoid others, mimicking human tendencies. This behavior highlights AI's reliance on past data rather than true randomness, underscoring the anthropomorphic traits AI can exhibit. MIT Professor Predicts AI Won't Boost GDP as Expected AI's impact on GDP and productivity may be overestimated, argues MIT professor Daron Acemoglu in a National Bureau of Economic Research paper. Skeptical of optimistic forecasts, Acemoglu estimates AI will only boost GDP growth by 0.93% to 1.16% over the next decade. Additionally, AI might not reduce inequality and could widen the income gap between capital owners and workers. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/aidaily/message

In which Noah Smith & Brad DeLong wish Daron Acemoglu & Simon Johnson had written a very different book than their "Power & Progress" is...Key Insights:* Acemoglu & Johnson should have written a very different book—one about how some technologies complement and others substitute for labor, and it is very important to maximize the first.* Neither Noah Smith nor Brad DeLong is at all comfortable with “power” as a category in economics other than as the ability to credibly threaten to commit violence or theft.* Acemoglu & Robinson's Why Nations Fail is a truly great book. Power & Progress is not.* We should not confuse James Robinson with Simon Johnson* Billionaires running oligopolistic tech firms are not trustworthy stewards of the future of our economy.* The IBM 701 Defense Calculator of 1953 is rather cool. * The lurkers agree with Noah Smith in the DMs.* The power loom caused technological unemployment because the rest of the value chain—cotton growing, spinning, and garment-making—was rigid, hence the elasticity of demand for the transformation thread → cloth was low.* We need more examples of bad technologies than the cotton gin and the Roman Empire.References: * Acemoglu, Daron, & Simon Johnson. 2023. Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity. New York; Hachette Book Group. * Acemoglu, Daron, & James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Crown Publishers. * Besi. 2023. “Join us Tues. Oct. 10 at 4pm Pacific for a talk by @MITSloan's Simon Johnson…” Twitter. October 9. .* DeLong, J. Bradford. 2024. “What To Do About the Dependence of the Form Progress Takes on Power?: Quick Takes on Acemoglu & Johnson's "Power & Progress”. Grasping Reality. February 29.* DeLong, J. Bradford; & Noah Smith. 2023. “We Cannot Tell in Advance Which Technologies Are Labor-Augmenting & Which Are Labor-Replacing”. Hexapodia. XLIX, July 7. * Gruber, Jonathan, & Simon Johnson. 2019. Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream.The book is available on the Internet Archive: .* Johnson, Simon, & James Kwak. 2011. 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown. New York: Vintage Books. .* Smith, Noah. 2024. “Book Review: Power & Progress”. Noahpinion. February 21. * Walton, Jo. 1998. “The Lurkers Support Me in Email”. May 16. .+, of course:* Vinge, Vernor. 1992. A Fire Upon the Deep. New York: TOR. . Get full access to Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality at braddelong.substack.com/subscribe

Seconde partie de l'épisode en compagnie d'Ishac Diwan (enseignant à l'ENS et directeur de recherche du FinDevLab, ex-HKS, ex-Banque Mondiale).Dans cette partie nous évoquons avec lui les conclusions de l'école de la nouvelle économie institutionnelle (North, Williamson, Olstrom, Acemoglu&Robinson) sur le rôle que jouent les institutions dans la croissance économique inclusive des pays et le contrôle de la violence.Nous abordons ce cadre analytique à la fois d'un point de vue théorique, et en traitant d'exemples concrets : Egypte, Argentine, Tunisie, etc.Ishac Diwan nous livre également son analyse de la situation du Liban, et sa proposition de roadmap pour une sortie de crise rapide et juste.

Economist Daron Acemoglu is officially Prospect's Top Thinker of 2024. A professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Acemoglu is an expert in labour, technology, development and political economy. His work tackles a difficult problem: how can we ensure power and reward are shared fairly as technology remakes our world? Acemoglu joins Prospect contributing editor Tom Clark on the podcast to discuss all that, plus democracy, liberty and the institutions that uphold them. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

James Robinson is an economist and political scientist. He is currently the Reverend Dr. Richard L. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies and University Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago. Robinson has conducted influential research in the field of political and economic development and the factors that are the root causes of conflict. His work explores the underlying relationship between poverty and the institutions of a society and how institutions emerge out of political conflicts.Robinson has a particular interest in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. He is widely recognized as the co-author of Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, with Daron Acemoglu, the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics at MIT. Translated into 32 languages since its publication in 2012, the book offers a unique historic exploration of why some countries have flourished economically while others have fallen into poverty. He has also written and coauthored numerous books and articles, including the acclaimed Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (also with Acemoglu). Portrait of Henry VIII by Joos van Cleve Subscribe to our newsletter today A Correction Podcast Episodes RSS

Machines allow us to do more work with less effort. They sound like an obviously good thing. But there is a tension here. New gadgets and new technologies - new simple “machines” - have been invented throughout history. But it looks like the living standard of the average person did not change for most of that time. So what happened to all the extra output from new technologies? And how is this relevant to our age of computers, robots, and AI?  To discuss these themes, I am joined by MIT professor Daron Acemoglu. Acemoglu is a true legend in his field. In 2015, he was ranked the single most cited economist of the past 10 years. And his most famous book, Why Nations Fail, (co-authored with James Robinson) is known by many students of economics as the only history book they ever had to read.  But today's conversation is not about Why Nations Fail. It is about Acemoglu's new book, Power and Progress: Our 1000-Year Struggle Over Technology (co-authored with Simon Johnson). In many ways, this is a typical Acemoglu book: it is a doorstopper that uses an array of historical lessons to draw messages for the present. And as before, it asks economists to take democratic politics more seriously. But in other ways, this is quite different from his previous books. For me, it felt much darker – especially in its portrayal of rich countries such as the US. But Acemoglu affirmed to me that he is still an optimist. He even tells me that the reason is related to the theme of this podcast series... I will let him tell you why. We discuss topics such as: Why have so many machines failed to benefit the common folk?  Why things changed for the better in the late 1800s - and why my past guests are wrong about the reasons? Have we started backsliding again?  Does this explain the political turmoil of today - especially in the US? Why Acemoglu is not against technological progress - but has a message to tech leaders  What has his work in economics taught Acemoglu about humanity? ____ SUPPORT THE SHOW Please consider becoming a supporter of On Humans. Even small monthly donations can make a huge impact on the long-term sustainability of the program. Visit: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon.com/OnHumans ⁠⁠⁠⁠ Get in touch: ilari@onhumans.org _____ Oded Galor (episodes 12 & 13), Brad DeLong (episode 18) / Josh Ober / Ian Morris / Samuel Bowles / Herbert Gintis /John Hicks / H. J. / Robert Allen / Habakkuk / Joel Mokyr / Elon Musk / Pascual Restrepo Other terms and references Malthusian dynamics (of population growth “eating away” any increases in production)  Chartists and Luddites (19th Century British political movements)

Economist and author Daron Acemoglu of MIT discusses his book Power and Progress with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Acemoglu argues that the productivity and prosperity that results from innovation is not always shared widely across the population. He makes the case for the importance of regulating new technologies to ensure that the benefits of innovation are distributed equitably.

In this episode we welcome renowned academic and author, Daron Acemoglu, Institute professor and Economist at MIT.Drawing upon his rich experiences and his forthcoming book 'Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity,' Acemoglu navigates the complex landscape of technological progress. He sheds light on how technology can either sideline or empower humans, depending on how it's harnessed. With a focus on the potential for technological disparity and the importance of steering advancements towards inclusivity, Acemoglu's insights provoke thoughtful reflection.Whether you're a technologist, an economist, or simply someone intrigued by the future of our society, this episode with Daron Acemoglu will offer you fresh perspectives on the intersection of technology, economics, and power dynamics. Full transcript, list of resources, and art piece: https://www.existentialhope.com/podcasts Existential Hope was created to collect positive and possible scenarios for the future, so that we can have more people commit to the creation of a brighter future, and to start mapping out the main developments and challenges that need to be navigated to reach it. Find all previous podcast episodes here, always featuring a full transcript, artwork inspired by the episode, and a list of recommended resources from the podcast. Existential Hope is a Foresight Institute project. The Foresight Institute is a research organization and non-profit that supports the beneficial development of high-impact technologies. Allison Duettmann is the president and COO of Foresight Institute. She directs the Intelligent Cooperation, Molecular Machines, Biotech & Health Extension, Neurotech, and Space Programs, Fellowships, Prizes, and Tech Trees, and shares this work with the public. Beatrice Erkers is Director of the Existential Hope project at Foresight Institute. Her special interest in the integration of technology and society has led her to work for Foresight Institute.Apply to Foresight's virtual salons and in person workshops here!We are entirely funded by your donations. If you enjoy what we do please consider donating through our donation page.Visit our website for more content, or join us here:TwitterFacebookLinkedInEvery word ever spoken on this podcast is now AI-searchable using Fathom.fm, a search engine for podcasts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chapter 1:Is Why Nations Fail Useful？ The book provides a comprehensive analysis of various historical case studies and presents a compelling framework to explain why some nations thrive while others struggle. It highlights the importance of inclusive institutions that promote property rights, equal opportunities, and the rule of law, as opposed to extractive institutions that concentrate power and wealth in the hands of a few. By examining the interplay between politics, economics, and history, "Why Nations Fail" offers valuable insights into the root causes of poverty, inequality, and underdevelopment. It challenges conventional wisdom and sheds light on how institutional arrangements shape a nation's trajectory. Furthermore, the book sparks important debates and discussions among scholars, policymakers, and those interested in development issues. Its accessible writing style makes it suitable for a wide audience, allowing readers to understand complex concepts and theories without prior expertise. Overall, "Why Nations Fail" is a valuable resource that can deepen our understanding of the dynamics behind national success or failure. It offers a framework for analyzing and addressing the challenges faced by different countries, providing insights that can inform policy decisions and efforts to promote inclusive growth and development. Chapter 2:Why Nations Fail Main Perspectives Institutional Perspective: According to Acemoglu and Robinson, successful nations have inclusive economic and political institutions, while failed nations have extractive institutions. Inclusive institutions are characterized by properties such as secure property rights, equal access to economic opportunities, impartial rule of law, and a level playing field for all individuals. These institutions encourage innovation, entrepreneurship, and investment. Extractive institutions, on the other hand, concentrate power and resources in the hands of a few elites, leading to widespread corruption, political instability, and limited economic growth. Historical Perspective: The authors also emphasize the importance of historical events and path dependence in shaping a nation's institutions and its subsequent success or failure. Critical junctures, such as revolutions, wars, or major social changes, can alter the trajectory of a country. For example, nations that experienced inclusive institutions during these pivotal moments tend to continue on a path of development and prosperity, while those with extractive institutions may remain trapped in poverty and underdevelopment. Chapter 3:How Does Why Nations Fail End In the concluding chapters of the book, Acemoglu and Robinson argue that inclusive institutions are crucial for sustained economic growth and prosperity. They emphasize that nations with inclusive institutions, which provide a level playing field and allow for broad participation and opportunity, tend to be more successful in fostering innovation, investment, and entrepreneurship. On the other hand, the authors highlight the detrimental effects of extractive institutions, where power and wealth are concentrated in the hands of a few individuals or groups. Such institutions hinder economic progress, stifle innovation, and perpetuate poverty by limiting access to resources and opportunities for the majority of people. Acemoglu and Robinson present historical case studies from various countries to support their arguments. They explore how different types of institutions have shaped the destinies of nations throughout history, focusing on...

Javier Mejía (https://twitter.com/JavierMejiaC) es doctor en economía y profesor de Stanford. Pueden encontrar sus investigaciones, columnas, y podcasts en https://javiermejia.mystrikingly.com/ Libros y recursos mencionados: Los orígenes del hombre americano - Rivet (https://www.iberlibro.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=30463947825&searchurl=an%3Dpaul%2Brivet%26pt%3Dbook%26sortby%3D17%26tn%3Dlos%2Bor%25EDgenes%2Bdel%2Bhombre%2Bamericano&cm_sp=snippet-_-srp1-_-title2)Social Categorization and intergroup behavier - Tajfel et al (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ejsp.2420010202)Pensar rápido, pensar despacio - Daniel Kanheman y Amos Tversky (https://bukz.co/products/pensar-rapido-pensar-despacio) Por qué fracasan los países - Acemoglu y Robinson (https://bukz.co/products/por-que-fracasan-los-paises) Is history a process? - Roth (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/social-science-history/article/abs/is-history-a-process-nonlinearity-revitalization-theory-and-the-central-metaphor-of-social-science-history/4A2CAA8D0EB32526089983E1589DFFAC) La eterna parranda - Alberto Salcedo Ramos (https://bukz.co/products/la-eterna-parranda) El ruido y la furia - William Faulkner (https://bukz.co/products/el-ruido-y-la-furia) Empresariado y sociedad - Nicanor Restrepo (https://bukz.co/products/empresariado-antioqueno-y-sociedad-1940)

The idea that artificial intelligence would someday replace humans in certain jobs is nothing new. Now, as some companies make plans for this new reality, it's still an open question as to whether AI should be feared--or embraced as a technology that will make the world a better place. On this episode, Daron Acemoglu, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, tells Stephanie that while it may be right to be concerned, people shouldn't be scared. They discuss a new book co-authored by Acemoglu, Power and Progress, and whether AI will yield benefits similar to those conferred by other technological and scientific advancements throughout history. The key to making AI work in the long run, Acemoglu says, is that workers maintain a role and a voice through protections like unions and government regulation. Without those guardrails, he warned, AI may indeed sideline more humans from the workforce.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In his new book, "Power and Progress: Our 1000-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity", renowned MIT Professor of Economics Daron Acemoglu (with co-author Simon Johnson) argues that the benefits from technological progress are shaped by the distribution of power in society. In this episode, Acemoglu joins Bethany and Luigi to discuss the key challenges of ensuring that this progress benefits everyone, not just the wealthy and powerful. They discuss the rules, norms, and expectations around technology governance, the unintended consequences of AI development, and how the mismanagement of property rights, especially over data, can reinforce inequality and exploitation.Show Notes:In case you missed it, revisit our recent episode with David Autor, referenced in this discussionRevisit "Democracy and Economic Growth: New Evidence," co-authored by Daron Acemoglu, on ProMarket

GrowthChat is a podcast on the social and cultural journey of humankind, hosted by Marco Lecci and Sascha O. Becker. In this episode we chat with Daron Acemoglu about his book "Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity" co-authored with Simon Johnson. 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. 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.

0:29 Uj Péter közleményben teszi helyre Winkler Róbertet. Most akkor miért menjünk el szavazni? Uj Péter digitál-analóg-digitál technológiája. 03:50 Uj Péter most már tényleg közleményben teszi helyre Winkler Róbertet. 06:41 Fák és antifák. Hadházyt azért nehéz belekeverni. Jámbor Andrásra nézve ki lát agressziót? 10:34 Lelkes nemzetközi teljesítménytúrázók Wehrmacht-sisakban. Magyarországon nem a bomberes bohócok jelentik a szélsőjobboldali problémát. Hoppál Péterhez állsz közelebb, vagy a skinheadekhez? 14:22 Az irodalomkönyv súlyos, nem az ustawka. Kiket vertek meg a fák és kiket az antifák? Eddig miért nem volt ilyen és most miért van? A magyar szélsőbaloldali szubkultúra megerősödése. 19:27 Nem, Hitler nem csinált jó dolgokat. Tubával a nácik ellen. Hány szavazatot hoz ez az ISZOMM-nak? Jámbor András elhatárolódása. 23:05 Kínai kémbalom. A háttér-balomipar. Elta Systems. 26:40 Hogy kell balmot irányítani? Winkler Róbert, a tapasztalt légbalmos. Montgolfier József és Béla tüzérségileg pontosít. 28:03 Hozomra ebédelni a külvárosban és a belvárosban. Tartozás az Illatos Csirke büfében. A zöldséges, aki elszégyellte magát. 34:00 És most, művészet! A nem manchesteri Guardian operakritikája. Fradista az Operaházban. Hiányos ismereteink Tolsztojról és Prokofjevről. 38:20 Uj Péter moziban. A Bálna és Brendan Fraser. A bálna három fő része ott obézol egyedül. 42:15 Mi lesz a következő, egy kurva nagy mobiltelefon? 5600 forintért ott ülök! 300 kiló, de nem tud színjátszani. 44:57 Kizsákmányoló intézményrendszer a szlovén kisüzemi sörmanufaktúra ellen. Neked az Acemoglu is kommunista? A sör jó legalább? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Why Nations Fail Full Free Audio Book SummaryCome to Bookey Book Summary to unlock more content. Why are some nations wealthy and others poor? Why is it that vastly different institutions can emerge in two nations of similar backgrounds and origins, with a huge disparity in the respective quality of life of their citizens? Just what exactly determines a country's future? This book combs through the developmental history of human civilization and analyses the case studies of over twenty countries in great detail to show us why different countries have different institutions, and how good and bad institutions can influence a nation's destiny. Overview | Chapter 1Hi, welcome to Bookey. Today we will unlock the book Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty. What is the greatest challenge facing mankind today? Every person has a different answer to this question. Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the bestselling sociology classic Guns, Germs and Steel, which we have unlocked for you in a previous bookey, believes that the problem of income disparity among various countries around the world can be considered the greatest challenge facing humanity today. The per capita income of Egypt is only 12% that of the United States – this is a shocking figure, and it is arguably one of the key factors for Egypt's political instability. However, this example is not even the largest disparity known to exist between countries. The gap between the per capita income of the United States and that of the poorest countries in the world is much larger – in those countries, even a full meal might be considered a luxury. What exactly causes this disparity? Why are some nations prosperous with a flourishing population, while others are impoverished with their people in deep suffering? Can poor countries ever change their destiny, or are they doomed to fail? Since the dawn of time, countless experts have tried to answer this question. The book Why Nations Fail provides us with a short answer: institutions. While this answer appears to be deceptively simple, it is full of complexities. It took the authors of this book fifteen years of dedicated research to arrive at this answer. Both authors are leading economists: Daron Acemoglu is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and recipient of the prestigious John Bates Clark Award, and James Robinson is a professor at Harvard University and world-renowned expert in Latin American and African studies. Over the course of fifteen years, these two experts pored over thousands of years of human history, and compared the developmental processes of over twenty countries. They came to the conclusion that differences in institutions are responsible for the different fates of various countries around the world. In this book, Acemoglu and Robinson analyze volumes of historical case studies to show us why different countries developed different institutions in the first place, how the earliest institutions came about, and how good and bad institutions can influence a nation's destiny.

Charles C. Mann is the author of three of my favorite history books: 1491. 1493, and The Wizard and the Prophet. We discuss:why Native American civilizations collapsed and why they failed to make more technological progresswhy he disagrees with Will MacAskill about longtermismwhy there aren't any successful slave revoltshow geoengineering can help us solve climate changewhy Bitcoin is like the Chinese Silver Tradeand much much more!Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Some really cool guests coming up, subscribe to find out about future episodes!Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.If you enjoyed this episode, you may also enjoy my interviews of Will MacAskill (about longtermism), Steve Hsu (about intelligence and embryo selection), and David Deutsch (about AI and the problems with America's constitution).If you end up enjoying this episode, I would be super grateful if you shared it. Post it on Twitter, send it to your friends & group-chats, and throw it up on any relevant subreddits & forums you follow. Can't exaggerate how much it helps a small podcast like mine.Timestamps(0:00:00) -Epidemically Alternate Realities(0:00:25) -Weak Points in Empires(0:03:28) -Slave Revolts(0:08:43) -Slavery Ban(0:12:46) - Contingency & The Pyramids(0:18:13) - Teotihuacan(0:20:02) - New Book Thesis(0:25:20) - Gender Ratios and Silicon Valley(0:31:15) - Technological Stupidity in the New World(0:41:24) - Religious Demoralization(0:44:00) - Critiques of Civilization Collapse Theories(0:49:05) - Virginia Company + Hubris(0:53:30) - China's Silver Trade(1:03:03) - Wizards vs. Prophets(1:07:55) - In Defense of Regulatory Delays(0:12:26) -Geoengineering(0:16:51) -Finding New Wizards(0:18:46) -Agroforestry is Underrated(1:18:46) -Longtermism & Free MarketsTranscriptDwarkesh Patel   Okay! Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Charles Mann, who is the author of three of my favorite books, including 1491: New Revelations of America before Columbus. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, and The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World. Charles, welcome to the Lunar Society.Charles C. Mann   It's a pleasure to be here.Epidemically Alternate RealitiesDwarkesh Patel   My first question is: How much of the New World was basically baked into the cake? So at some point, people from Eurasia were going to travel to the New World, bringing their diseases. Considering disparities and where they would survive, if the Acemoglu theory that you cited is correct, then some of these places were bound to have good institutions and some of them were bound to have bad institutions. Plus, because of malaria, there were going to be shortages in labor that people would try to fix with African slaves. So how much of all this was just bound to happen? If Columbus hadn't done it, then maybe 50 years down the line, would someone from Italy have done it? What is the contingency here?Charles C. Mann   Well, I think that some of it was baked into the cake. It was pretty clear that at some point, people from Eurasia and the Western Hemisphere were going to come into contact with each other. I mean, how could that not happen, right? There was a huge epidemiological disparity between the two hemispheres––largely because by a quirk of evolutionary history, there were many more domesticable animals in Eurasia and the Eastern hemisphere. This leads almost inevitably to the creation of zoonotic diseases: diseases that start off in animals and jump the species barrier and become human diseases. Most of the great killers in human history are zoonotic diseases. When people from Eurasia and the Western Hemisphere meet, there are going to be those kinds of diseases. But if you wanted to, it's possible to imagine alternative histories. There's a wonderful book by Laurent Binet called Civilizations that, in fact, does just that. It's a great alternative history book. He imagines that some of the Vikings came and extended further into North America, bringing all these diseases, and by the time of Columbus and so forth, the epidemiological balance was different. So when Columbus and those guys came, these societies killed him, grabbed his boats, and went and conquered Europe. It's far-fetched, but it does say that this encounter would've happened and that the diseases would've happened, but it didn't have to happen in exactly the way that it did. It's also perfectly possible to imagine that Europeans didn't engage in wholesale slavery. There was a huge debate when this began about whether or not slavery was a good idea. There were a lot of reservations, particularly among the Catholic monarchy asking the Pope “Is it okay that we do this?” You could imagine the penny dropping in a slightly different way. So, I think some of it was bound to happen, but how exactly it happened was really up to chance, contingency, and human agency,Weak Points in EmpiresDwarkesh Patel   When the Spanish first arrived in the 15th and 16th centuries, were the Incas and the Aztecs at a particularly weak point or particularly decadent? Or was this just how well you should have expected this civilization to be functioning at any given time period?Charles C. Mann   Well, typically, empires are much more jumbly and fragile entities than we imagine. There's always fighting at the top. What Hernán Cortés was able to do, for instance, with the Aztecs––who are better called The Triple Alliance (the term “Aztec” is an invention from the 19th century). The Triple Alliance was comprised of three groups of people in central Mexico, the largest of which were the Mexica, who had the great city of Tenochtitlan. The other two guys really resented them and so what Cortes was able to do was foment a civil war within the Aztec empire: taking some enemies of the Aztec, some members of the Aztec empire, and creating an entirely new order. There's a fascinating set of history that hasn't really emerged into the popular consciousness. I didn't include it in 1491 or 1493 because it was so new that I didn't know anything about it; everything was largely from Spanish and Mexican scholars about the conquest within the conquest. The allies of the Spaniards actually sent armies out and conquered big swaths of northern and southern Mexico and Central America. So there's a far more complex picture than we realized even 15 or 20 years ago when I first published 1491. However, the conquest wasn't as complete as we think. I talk a bit about this in 1493 but what happens is Cortes moves in and he marries his lieutenants to these indigenous people, creating this hybrid nobility that then extended on to the Incas. The Incas were a very powerful but unstable empire and Pizarro had the luck to walk in right after a civil war. When he did that right after a civil war and massive epidemic, he got them at a very vulnerable point. Without that, it all would have been impossible. Pizarro cleverly allied with the losing side (or the apparently losing side in this in the Civil War), and was able to create a new rallying point and then attack the winning side. So yes, they came in at weak points, but empires typically have these weak points because of fratricidal stuff going on in the leadership.Dwarkesh Patel   It does also remind me of the East India Trading Company.Charles C. Mann   And the Mughal empire, yeah. Some of those guys in Bengal invited Clive and his people in. In fact, I was struck by this. I had just been reading this book, maybe you've heard of it: The Anarchy by William Dalrymple.Dwarkesh Patel   I've started reading it, yeah but I haven't made much progress.Charles C. Mann   It's an amazing book! It's so oddly similar to what happened. There was this fratricidal stuff going on in the Mughal empire, and one side thought, “Oh, we'll get these foreigners to come in, and we'll use them.” That turned out to be a big mistake.Dwarkesh Patel   Yes. What's also interestingly similar is the efficiency of the bureaucracy. Niall Ferguson has a good book on the British Empire and one thing he points out is that in India, the ratio between an actual English civil servant and the Indian population was about 1: 3,000,000 at the peak of the ratio. Which obviously is only possible if you have the cooperation of at least the elites, right? So it sounds similar to what you were saying about Cortes marrying his underlings to the nobility. Charles C. Mann   Something that isn't stressed enough in history is how often the elites recognize each other. They join up in arrangements that increase both of their power and exploit the poor schmucks down below. It's exactly what happened with the East India Company, and it's exactly what happened with Spain. It's not so much that there was this amazing efficiency, but rather, it was a mutually beneficial arrangement for Xcalack, which is now a Mexican state. It had its rights, and the people kept their integrity, but they weren't really a part of the Spanish Empire. They also weren't really wasn't part of Mexico until around 1857. It was a good deal for them. The same thing was true for the Bengalis, especially the elites who made out like bandits from the British Empire.Slave Revolts Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah, that's super interesting. Why was there only one successful slave revolt in the new world in Haiti? In many of these cases, the ratios between slaves and the owners are just huge. So why weren't more of them successful?Charles C. Mann   Well, you would first have to define ‘successful'. Haiti wasn't successful if you meant ‘creating a prosperous state that would last for a long time.' Haiti was and is (to no small extent because of the incredible blockade that was put on it by all the other nations) in terrible shape. Whereas in the case of Paul Maurice, you had people who were self-governing for more than 100 years.. Eventually, they were incorporated into the larger project of Brazil. There's a great Brazilian classic that's equivalent to what Moby Dick or Huck Finn is to us called Os Sertões by a guy named Cunha. And it's good! It's been translated into this amazing translation in English called ​​Rebellion in the Backlands. It's set in the 1880s, and it's about the creation of a hybrid state of runaway slaves, and so forth, and how they had essentially kept their independence and lack of supervision informally, from the time of colonialism. Now the new Brazilian state is trying to take control, and they fight them to the last person. So you have these effectively independent areas in de facto, if not de jure, that existed in the Americas for a very long time. There are some in the US, too, in the great dismal swamp, and you hear about those marooned communities in North Carolina, in Mexico, where everybody just agreed “these places aren't actually under our control, but we're not going to say anything.”  If they don't mess with us too much, we won't mess with them too much. Is that successful or not? I don't know.Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah, but it seems like these are temporary successes..Charles C. Mann   I mean, how long did nations last? Like Genghis Khan! How long did the Khan age last? But basically, they had overwhelming odds against them. There's an entire colonial system that was threatened by their existence. Similar to the reasons that rebellions in South Asia were suppressed with incredible brutality–– these were seen as so profoundly threatening to this entire colonial order that people exerted a lot more force against them than you would think would be worthwhile.Dwarkesh Patel   Right. It reminds me of James Scott's Against the Grain. He pointed out that if you look at the history of agriculture, there're many examples where people choose to run away as foragers in the forest, and then the state tries to bring them back into the fold.Charles C. Mann   Right. And so this is exactly part of that dynamic. I mean, who wants to be a slave, right? So as many people as possible ended up leaving. It's easier in some places than others.. it's very easy in Brazil. There are 20 million people in the Brazilian Amazon and the great bulk of them are the descendants of people who left slavery. They're still Brazilians and so forth, but, you know, they ended up not being slaves.Slavery BanDwarkesh Patel   Yeah, that's super fascinating. What is the explanation for why slavery went from being historically ever-present to ending at a particular time when it was at its peak in terms of value and usefulness? What's the explanation for why, when Britain banned the slave trade, within 100 or 200 years, there ended up being basically no legal sanction for slavery anywhere in the world?Charles C. Mann   This is a really good question and the real answer is that historians have been arguing about this forever. I mean, not forever, but you know, for decades, and there's a bunch of different explanations. I think the reason it's so hard to pin down is… kind of amazing. I mean, if you think about it, in 1800, if you were to have a black and white map of the world and put red in countries in which slavery was illegal and socially accepted, there would be no red anywhere on the planet. It's the most ancient human institution that there is. The Code of Hammurabi is still the oldest complete legal code that we have, and about a third of it is about rules for when you can buy slaves, when you can sell slaves, how you can mistreat them, and how you can't–– all that stuff. About a third of it is about buying, selling, and working other human beings. So this has been going on for a very, very long time. And then in a century and a half, it suddenly changes. So there's some explanation, and it's that machinery gets better. But the reason to have people is that you have these intelligent autonomous workers, who are like the world's best robots. From the point of view of the owner, they're fantastically good, except they're incredibly obstreperous and when they're caught, you're constantly afraid they're going to kill you. So if you have a chance to replace them with machinery, or to create a wage where you can run wage people, pay wage workers who are kept in bad conditions but somewhat have more legal rights, then maybe that's a better deal for you. Another one is that industrialization produced different kinds of commodities that became more and more valuable, and slavery was typically associated with the agricultural laborer. So as agriculture diminished as a part of the economy, slavery become less and less important and it became easier to get rid of them. Another one has to do with the beginning of the collapse of the colonial order. Part of it has to do with.. (at least in the West, I don't know enough about the East) the rise of a serious abolition movement with people like Wilberforce and various Darwins and so forth. And they're incredibly influential, so to some extent, I think people started saying, “Wow, this is really bad.”  I suspect that if you looked at South Asia and Africa, you might see similar things having to do with a social moment, but I just don't know enough about that. I know there's an anti-slavery movement and anti-caste movement in which we're all tangled up in South Asia, but I just don't know enough about it to say anything intelligent.Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah, the social aspect of it is really interesting. The things you mentioned about automation, industrialization, and ending slavery… Obviously, with time, that might have actually been why it expanded, but its original inception in Britain happened before the Industrial Revolution took off. So that was purely them just taking a huge loss because this movement took hold. Charles C. Mann   And the same thing is true for Bartolome de Las Casas. I mean, Las Casas, you know, in the 1540s just comes out of nowhere and starts saying, “Hey! This is bad.” He is the predecessor of the modern human rights movement. He's an absolutely extraordinary figure, and he has huge amounts of influence. He causes Spain's king in the 1540s to pass what they call The New Laws which says no more slavery, which is a devastating blow enacted to the colonial economy in Spain because they depended on having slaves to work in the silver mines in the northern half of Mexico and in Bolivia, which was the most important part of not only the Spanish colonial economy but the entire Spanish empire. It was all slave labor. And they actually tried to ban it. Now, you can say they came to their senses and found a workaround in which it wasn't banned. But it's still… this actually happened in the 1540s. Largely because people like Las Casas said, “This is bad! you're going to hell doing this.”Contingency & The Pyramids Dwarkesh Patel   Right. I'm super interested in getting into The Wizard and the Prophet section with you. Discussing how movements like environmentalism, for example, have been hugely effective. Again, even though it probably goes against the naked self-interest of many countries. So I'm very interested in discussing that point about why these movements have been so influential!But let me continue asking you about globalization in the world. I'm really interested in how you think about contingency in history, especially given that you have these two groups of people that have been independently evolving and separated for tens of thousands of years. What things turn out to be contingent? What I find really interesting from the book was how both of them developed pyramids––  who would have thought that structure would be within our extended phenotype or something?Charles C. Mann    It's also geometry! I mean, there's only a certain limited number of ways you can pile up stone blocks in a stable way. And pyramids are certainly one of them. It's harder to have a very long-lasting monument that's a cylinder. Pyramids are also easier to build: if you get a cylinder, you have to have scaffolding around it and it gets harder and harder.With pyramids, you can use each lower step to put the next one, on and on, and so forth. So pyramids seem kind of natural to me. Now the material you make them up of is going to be partly determined by what there is. In Cahokia and in the Mississippi Valley, there isn't a lot of stone. So people are going to make these earthen pyramids and if you want them to stay on for a long time, there's going to be certain things you have to do for the structure which people figured out. For some pyramids, you had all this marble around them so you could make these giant slabs of marble, which seems, from today's perspective, incredibly wasteful. So you're going to have some things that are universal like that, along with the apparently universal, or near-universal idea that people who are really powerful like to identify themselves as supernatural and therefore want to be commemorated. Dwarkesh Patel   Yes, I visited Mexico City recently.Charles C. Mann Beautiful city!TeotihuacanDwarkesh Patel Yeah, the pyramids there… I think I was reading your book at the time or already had read your book. What struck me was that if I remember correctly, they didn't have the wheel and they didn't have domesticated animals. So if you really think about it, that's a really huge amount of human misery and toil it must have taken to put this thing together as basically a vanity project. It's like a huge negative connotation if you think about what it took to construct it.Charles C. Mann   Sure, but there are lots of really interesting things about Teotihuacan. This is just one of those things where you can only say so much in one book. If I was writing the two-thousand-page version of 1491, I would have included this. So Tehuácan pretty much starts out as a standard Imperial project, and they build all these huge castles and temples and so forth. There's no reason to suppose it was anything other than an awful experience (like building the pyramids), but then something happened to Teotihuacan that we don't understand. All these new buildings started springing up during the next couple of 100 years, and they're all very very similar. They're like apartment blocks and there doesn't seem to be a great separation between rich and poor. It's really quite striking how egalitarian the architecture is because that's usually thought to be a reflection of social status. So based on the way it looks, could there have been a political revolution of some sort? Where they created something much more egalitarian, probably with a bunch of good guy kings who weren't interested in elevating themselves so much? There's a whole chapter in the book by David Wingrove and David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything about this, and they make this argument that Tehuácan is an example that we can look at as an ancient society that was much more socially egalitarian than we think. Now, in my view, they go a little overboard–– it was also an aggressive imperial power and it was conquering much of the Maya world at the same time. But it is absolutely true that something that started out one way can start looking very differently quite quickly. You see this lots of times in the Americas in the Southwest–– I don't know if you've ever been to Chaco Canyon or any of those places, but you should absolutely go! Unfortunately, it's hard to get there because of the roads terrible but overall, it's totally worth it. It's an amazing place. Mesa Verde right north of it is incredible, it's just really a fantastic thing to see. There are these enormous structures in Chaco Canyon, that we would call castles if they were anywhere else because they're huge. The biggest one, Pueblo Bonito, is like 800 rooms or some insane number like that. And it's clearly an imperial venture, we know that because it's in this canyon and one side is getting all the good light and good sun–– a whole line of these huge castles. And then on the other side is where the peons lived. We also know that starting around 1100, everybody just left! And then their descendants start the Puebla, who are these sort of intensely socially egalitarian type of people. It looks like a political revolution took place. In fact, in the book I'm now writing, I'm arguing (in a sort of tongue-in-cheek manner but also seriously) that this is the first American Revolution! They got rid of these “kings” and created these very different and much more egalitarian societies in which ordinary people had a much larger voice about what went on.Dwarkesh Patel   Interesting. I think I got a chance to see the Teotihuacan apartments when I was there, but I wonder if we're just looking at the buildings that survived. Maybe the buildings that survived were better constructed because they were for the elites? The way everybody else lived might have just washed away over the years.Charles C. Mann   So what's happened in the last 20 years is basically much more sophisticated surveys of what is there. I mean, what you're saying is absolutely the right question to ask. Are the rich guys the only people with things that survived while the ordinary people didn't? You can never be absolutely sure, but what they did is they had these ground penetrating radar surveys, and it looks like this egalitarian construction extends for a huge distance. So it's possible that there are more really, really poor people. But at least you'd see an aggressively large “middle class” getting there, which is very, very different from the picture you have of the ancient world where there's the sun priest and then all the peasants around them.New Book ThesisDwarkesh Patel   Yeah. By the way, is the thesis of the new book something you're willing to disclose at this point? It's okay if you're not––Charles C. Mann   Sure sure, it's okay! This is a sort of weird thing, it's like a sequel or offshoot of 1491. That book, I'm embarrassed to say, was supposed to end with another chapter. The chapter was going to be about the American West, which is where I grew up, and I'm very fond of it. And apparently, I had a lot to say because when I outlined the chapter; the outline was way longer than the actual completed chapters of the rest of the book. So I sort of tried to chop it up and so forth, and it just was awful. So I just cut it. If you carefully look at 1491, it doesn't really have an ending. At the end, the author sort of goes, “Hey! I'm ending, look at how great this is!” So this has been bothering me for 15 years. During the pandemic, when I was stuck at home like so many other people, I held out what I had since I've been saving string and tossing articles that I came across into a folder, and I thought, “Okay, I'm gonna write this out more seriously now.” 15 or 20 years later. And then it was pretty long so I thought “Maybe this could be an e-book.” then I showed it to my editor. And he said, “That is not an e-book. That's an actual book.” So I take a chapter and hope I haven't just padded it, and it's about the North American West. My kids like the West, and at various times, they've questioned what it would be like to move out there because I'm in Massachusetts, where they grew up. So I started thinking “What is the West going to be like, tomorrow? When I'm not around 30 or 50 years from now?”It seems to be that you won't know who's president or who's governor or anything, but there are some things we can know. It'd be hotter and drier than it is now or has been in the recent past, like that wouldn't really be a surprise. So I think we can say that it's very likely to be like that. All the projections are that something like 40% of the people in the area between the Mississippi and the Pacific will be of Latino descent–– from the south, so to speak. And there's a whole lot of people from Asia along the Pacific coast, so it's going to be a real ethnic mixing ground. There's going to be an epicenter of energy, sort of no matter what happens. Whether it's solar, whether it's wind, whether it's petroleum, or hydroelectric, the West is going to be economically extremely powerful, because energy is a fundamental industry.And the last thing is (and this is the iffiest of the whole thing), but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the ongoing recuperation of sovereignty by the 294 federally recognized Native nations in the West is going to continue. That's been going in this very jagged way, but definitely for the last 50 or 60 years, as long as I've been around, the overall trend is in a very clear direction. So then you think, okay, this West is going to be wildly ethnically diverse, full of competing sovereignties and overlapping sovereignties. Nature is also going to really be in kind of a terminal. Well, that actually sounds like the 1200s! And the conventional history starts with Lewis and Clark and so forth. There's this breakpoint in history when people who looked like me came in and sort of rolled in from the East and kind of took over everything. And the West disappears! That separate entity, the native people disappear, and nature is tamed. That's pretty much what was in the textbooks when I was a kid. Do you know who Frederick Jackson Turner is? Dwarkesh Patel  No.Charles C. Mann So he's like one of these guys where nobody knows who he is. But he was incredibly influential in setting intellectual ideas. He wrote this article in 1893, called The Significance of the Frontier. It was what established this idea that there's this frontier moving from East to West and on this side was savagery and barbarism, and on this other side of civilization was team nature and wilderness and all that. Then it goes to the Pacific, and that's the end of the West. That's still in the textbooks but in a different form: we don't call native people “lurking savages” as he did. But it's in my kids' textbooks. If you have kids, it'll very likely be in their textbook because it's such a bedrock. What I'm saying is that's actually not a useful way to look at it, given what's coming up. A wonderful Texas writer, Bruce Sterling, says, “To know the past, you first have to understand the future.”It's funny, right? But what he means is that all of us have an idea of where the trajectory of history is going. A whole lot of history is about asking, “How did we get here? How do we get there?” To get that, you have to have an idea of what the “there” is. So I'm saying, I'm writing a history of the West with that West that I talked about in mind. Which gives you a very different picture: a lot more about indigenous fire management, the way the Hohokam survived the drought of the 1200s, and a little bit less about Billy the Kid. Gender Ratios and Silicon Valley Dwarkesh Patel   I love that quote hahaha. Speaking of the frontier, maybe it's a mistaken concept, but I remember that in a chapter of 1493, you talk about these rowdy adventurer men who outnumber the women in the silver mines and the kind of trouble that they cause. I wonder if there's some sort of distant analogy to the technology world or Silicon Valley, where you have the same kind of gender ratio and you have the same kind of frontier spirit? Maybe not the same physical violence––– more sociologically. Is there any similarity there?Charles C. Mann   I think it's funny, I hadn't thought about it. But it's certainly funny to think about. So let me do this off the top of my head. I like the idea that at the end of it, I can say, “wait, wait, that's ridiculous.“ Both of them would attract people who either didn't have much to lose, or were oblivious about what they had to lose, and had a resilience towards failure. I mean, it's amazing, the number of people in Silicon Valley who have completely failed at numbers of things! They just get up and keep‌ trying and have a kind of real obliviousness to social norms. It's pretty clear they are very much interested in making a mark and making their fortunes themselves. So there's at least a sort of shallow comparison, there are some certain similarities. I don't think this is entirely flattering to either group. It's absolutely true that those silver miners in Bolivia, and in northern‌ Mexico, created to a large extent, the modern world. But it's also true that they created these cesspools of violence and exploitation that had consequences we're still living with today. So you have to kind of take the bitter with the sweet. And I think that's true of Silicon Valley and its products *chuckles* I use them every day, and I curse them every day.Dwarkesh Patel   Right.Charles C. Mann   I want to give you an example. The internet has made it possible for me to do something like write a Twitter thread, get millions of people to read it, and have a discussion that's really amazing at the same time. Yet today, The Washington Post has an article about how every book in Texas (it's one of the states) a child checks out of the school library goes into a central state databank. They can see and look for patterns of people taking out “bad books” and this sort of stuff. And I think “whoa, that's really bad! That's not so good.” It's really the same technology that brings this dissemination and collection of vast amounts of information with relative ease. So with all these things, you take the bitter with the sweet. Technological Stupidity in the New WorldDwarkesh Patel   I want to ask you again about contingency because there are so many other examples where things you thought would be universal actually don't turn out to be. I think you talked about how the natives had different forms of metallurgy, with gold and copper, but then they didn't do iron or steel. You would think that given their “warring nature”, iron would be such a huge help. There's a clear incentive to build it. Millions of people living there could have built or developed this technology. Same with the steel, same with the wheel. What's the explanation for why these things you think anybody would have come up with didn't happen?Charles C. Mann   I know. It's just amazing to me! I don't know. This is one of those things I think about all the time. A few weeks ago, it rained, and I went out to walk the dog. I'm always amazed that there are literal glistening drops of water on the crabgrass and when you pick it up, sometimes there are little holes eaten by insects in the crabgrass. Every now and then, if you look carefully, you'll see a drop of water in one of those holes and it forms a lens. And you can look through it! You can see that it's not a very powerful lens by any means, but you can see that things are magnified. So you think “How long has there been crabgrass? Or leaves? And water?”  Just forever! We've had glass forever! So how is it that we had to wait for whoever it was to create lenses? I just don't get it. In book 1491, I mentioned the moldboard plow, which is the one with a curving blade that allows you to go through the soil much more easily. It was invented in China thousands of years ago, but not around in Europe until the 1400s. Like, come on, guys! What was it? And so, you know, there's this mysterious sort of mass stupidity. One of the wonderful things about globalization and trade and contact is that maybe not everybody is as blind as you and you can learn from them. I mean, that's the most wonderful thing about trade. So in the case of the wheel, the more amazing thing is that in Mesoamerica, they had the wheel on child's toys. Why didn't they develop it? The best explanation I can get is they didn't have domestic animals. A cart then would have to be pulled by people. That would imply that to make the cart work, you'd have to cut a really good road. Whereas they had these travois, which are these things that you hold and they have these skids that are shaped kind of like an upside-down V. You can drag them across rough ground, you don't need a road for them. That's what people used in the Great Plains and so forth. So you look at this, and you think “maybe this was the ultimate way to save labor. I mean, this was good enough. And you didn't have to build and maintain these roads to make this work”  so maybe it was rational or just maybe they're just blinkered. I don't know. As for assembly with steel, I think there's some values involved in that. I don't know if you've ever seen one of those things they had in Mesoamerica called Macuahuitl. They're wooden clubs with obsidian blades on them and they are sharp as hell. You don't run your finger along the edge because they just slice it open. An obsidian blade is pretty much sharper than any iron or steel blade and it doesn't rust. Nice. But it's much more brittle. So okay, they're there, and the Spaniards were really afraid of them. Because a single blow from these heavy sharp blades could kill a horse. They saw people whack off the head of a horse carrying a big strong guy with a single blow! So they're really dangerous, but they're not long-lasting. Part of the deal was that the values around conflict were different in the sense that conflict in Mesoamerica wasn't a matter of sending out foot soldiers in grunts, it was a chance for soldiers to get individual glory and prestige. This was associated with having these very elaborately beautiful weapons that you killed people with. So maybe not having steel worked better for their values and what they were trying to do at war. That would've lasted for years and I mean, that's just a guess. But you can imagine a scenario where they're not just blinkered but instead expressive on the basis of their different values. This is hugely speculative. There's a wonderful book by Ross Hassig about old Aztec warfare. It's an amazing book which is about the military history of The Aztecs and it's really quite interesting. He talks about this a little bit but he finally just says we don't know why they didn't develop all these technologies, but this worked for them.Dwarkesh Patel   Interesting. Yeah, it's kind of similar to China not developing gunpowder into an actual ballistic material––Charles C. Mann   Or Japan giving up the gun! They actually banned guns during the Edo period. The Portuguese introduced guns and the Japanese used them, and they said “Ahhh nope! Don't want them.” and they banned them. This turned out to be a terrible idea when Perry came in the 1860s. But for a long time, supposedly under the Edo period, Japan had the longest period of any nation ever without a foreign war. Dwarkesh Patel   Hmm. Interesting. Yeah, it's concerning when you think the lack of war might make you vulnerable in certain ways. Charles C. Mann   Yeah, that's a depressing thought.Religious DemoralizationDwarkesh Patel   Right. In Fukuyama's The End of History, he's obviously arguing that liberal democracy will be the final form of government everywhere. But there's this point he makes at the end where he's like, “Yeah, but maybe we need a small war every 50 years or so just to make sure people remember how bad it can get and how to deal with it.” Anyway, when the epidemic started in the New World, surely the Indians must have had some story or superstitious explanation–– some way of explaining what was happening. What was it?Charles C. Mann   You have to remember, the germ theory of disease didn't exist at the time. So neither the Spaniards, or the English, or the native people, had a clear idea of what was going on. In fact, both of them thought of it as essentially a spiritual event, a religious event. You went into areas that were bad, and the air was bad. That was malaria, right? That was an example. To them, it was God that was in control of the whole business. There's a line from my distant ancestor––the Governor Bradford of Plymouth Colony, who's my umpteenth, umpteenth grandfather, that's how waspy I am, he's actually my ancestor––about how God saw fit to clear the natives for us. So they see all of this in really religious terms, and more or less native people did too! So they thought over and over again that “we must have done something bad for this to have happened.” And that's a very powerful demoralizing thing. Your God either punished you or failed you. And this was it. This is one of the reasons that Christianity was able to make inroads. People thought “Their god is coming in and they seem to be less harmed by these diseases than people with our God.” Now, both of them are completely misinterpreting what's going on! But if you have that kind of spiritual explanation, it makes sense for you to say, “Well, maybe I should hit up their God.”Critiques of Civilization Collapse TheoriesDwarkesh Patel   Yeah, super fascinating. There's been a lot of books written in the last few decades about why civilizations collapse. There's Joseph Tainter's book, there's Jared Diamond's book. Do you feel like any of them actually do a good job of explaining how these different Indian societies collapsed over time?Charles C. Mann   No. Well not the ones that I've read. And there are two reasons for that. One is that it's not really a mystery. If you have a society that's epidemiologically naive, and smallpox sweeps in and kills 30% of you, measles kills 10% of you, and this all happens in a short period of time, that's really tough! I mean COVID killed one million people in the United States. That's 1/330th of the population. And it wasn't even particularly the most economically vital part of the population. It wasn't kids, it was elderly people like my aunt–– I hope I'm not sounding callous when I'm describing it like a demographer. Because I don't mean it that way. But it caused enormous economic damage and social conflict and so forth. Now, imagine something that's 30 or 40 times worse than that, and you have no explanation for it at all. It's kind of not a surprise to me that this is a super challenge. What's actually amazing is the number of nations that survived and came up with ways to deal with this incredible loss.That relates to the second issue, which is that it's sort of weird to talk about collapse in the ways that they sometimes do. Like both of them talk about the Mayan collapse. But there are 30 million Mayan people still there. They were never really conquered by the Spaniards. The Spaniards were still waging giant wars in Yucatan in the 1590s. In the early 21st century, I went with my son to Chiapas, which is the southernmost exit province. And that is where the Commandante Cero and the rebellions were going on. We were looking at some Mayan ruins, and they were too beautiful, and I stayed too long, and we were driving back through the night on these terrible roads. And we got stopped by some of these guys with guns. I was like, “Oh God, not only have I got myself into this, I got my son into this.” And the guy comes and looks at us and says, “Who are you?” And I say that we're American tourists. And he just gets this disgusted look, and he says, “Go on.” And you know, the journalist in me takes over and I ask, “What do you mean, just go on?” And he says, “We're hunting for Mexicans.” And as I'm driving I'm like “Wait a minute, I'm in Mexico.” And that those were Mayans. All those guys were Maya people still fighting against the Spaniards. So it's kind of funny to say that their society collapsed when there are Mayan radio stations, there are Maya schools, and they're speaking Mayan in their home. It's true, they don't have giant castles anymore. But, it's odd to think of that as collapse. They seem like highly successful people who have dealt pretty well with a lot of foreign incursions. So there's this whole aspect of “What do you mean collapse?” And you see that in Against the Grain, the James Scott book, where you think, “What do you mean barbarians?” If you're an average Maya person, working as a farmer under the purview of these elites in the big cities probably wasn't all that great. So after the collapse, you're probably better off. So all of that I feel is important in this discussion of collapse. I think it's hard to point to collapses that either have very clear exterior causes or are really collapses of the environment. Particularly the environmental sort that are pictured in books like Diamond has, where he talks about Easter Island. The striking thing about that is we know pretty much what happened to all those trees. Easter Island is this little speck of land, in the middle of the ocean, and Dutch guys come there and it's the only wood around for forever, so they cut down all the trees to use it for boat repair, ship repair, and they enslave most of the people who are living there. And we know pretty much what happened. There's no mystery about it.Virginia Company + HubrisDwarkesh Patel   Why did the British government and the king keep subsidizing and giving sanctions to the Virginia Company, even after it was clear that this is not especially profitable and half the people that go die? Why didn't they just stop?Charles C. Mann   That's a really good question. It's a super good question. I don't really know if we have a satisfactory answer, because it was so stupid for them to keep doing that. It was such a loss for so long. So you have to say, they were thinking, not purely economically. Part of it is that the backers of the Virginia Company, in sort of classic VC style, when things were going bad, they lied about it. They're burning through their cash, they did these rosy presentations, and they said, “It's gonna be great! We just need this extra money.” Kind of the way that Uber did. There's this tremendous burn rate and now the company says you're in tremendous trouble because it turns out that it's really expensive to provide all these calves and do all this stuff. The cheaper prices that made people like me really happy about it are vanishing. So, you know, I think future business studies will look at those rosy presentations and see that they have a kind of analogy to the ones that were done with the Virginia Company. A second thing is that there was this dog-headed belief kind of based on the inability to understand longitude and so forth, that the Americas were far narrower than they actually are. I reproduced this in 1493. There were all kinds of maps in Britain at the time showing these little skinny Philippines-like islands. So there's the thought that you just go up the Chesapeake, go a couple 100 miles, and you're gonna get to the Pacific into China. So there's this constant searching for a passage to China through this thought to be very narrow path. Sir Francis Drake and some other people had shown that there was a West Coast so they thought the whole thing was this narrow, Panama-like landform. So there's this geographical confusion. Finally, there's the fact that the Spaniards had found all this gold and silver, which is an ideal commodity, because it's not perishable: it's small, you can put it on your ship and bring it back, and it's just great in every way. It's money, essentially. Basically, you dig up money in the hills and there's this long-standing belief that there's got to be more of that in the Americas, we just need to find out where. So there's always that hope. Lastly, there's the Imperial bragging rights. You know, we can't be the only guys with a colony. You see that later in the 19th century when Germany became a nation and one of the first things the Dutch said was “Let's look for pieces of Africa that the rest of Europe hasn't claimed,” and they set up their own mini colonial empire. So there's this kind of “Keeping Up with the Joneses” aspect, it just seems to be sort of deep in the European ruling class. So then you got to have an empire that in this weird way, seems very culturally part of it. I guess it's the same for many other places. As soon as you feel like you have a state together, you want to index other things. You see that over and over again, all over the world. So that's part of it. All those things, I think, contributed to this. Outright lying, this delusion, other various delusions, plus hubris.Dwarkesh Patel   It seems that colonial envy has today probably spread to China. I don't know too much about it, but I hear that the Silk Road stuff they're doing is not especially economically wise. Is this kind of like when you have the impulse where if you're a nation trying to rise, you have that “I gotta go here, I gotta go over there––Charles C. Mann   Yeah and “Show what a big guy I am. Yeah,––China's Silver TradeDwarkesh Patel   Exactly. So speaking of China, I want to ask you about the silver trade. Excuse another tortured analogy, but when I was reading that chapter where you're describing how the Spanish silver was ending up with China and how the Ming Dynasty caused too much inflation. They needed more reliable mediums of exchange, so they had to give up real goods from China, just in order to get silver, which is just a medium of exchange––but it's not creating more apples, right? I was thinking about how this sounds a bit like Bitcoin today, (obviously to a much smaller magnitude) but in the sense that you're using up goods. It's a small amount of electricity, all things considered, but you're having to use up real energy in order to construct this medium of exchange. Maybe somebody can claim that this is necessary because of inflation or some other policy mistake and you can compare it to the Ming Dynasty. But what do you think about this analogy? Is there a similar situation where real goods are being exchanged for just a medium of exchange?Charles C. Mann   That's really interesting. I mean, on some level, that's the way money works, right? I go into a store, like a Starbucks and I buy a coffee, then I hand them a piece of paper with some drawings on it, and they hand me an actual coffee in return for a piece of paper. So the mysteriousness of money is kind of amazing. History is of course replete with examples of things that people took very seriously as money. Things that to us seem very silly like the cowry shell or in the island of Yap where they had giant stones! Those were money and nobody ever carried them around. You transferred the ownership of the stone from one person to another person to buy something. I would get some coconuts or gourds or whatever, and now you own that stone on the hill. So there's a tremendous sort of mysteriousness about the human willingness to assign value to arbitrary things such as (in Bitcoin's case) strings of zeros and ones. That part of it makes sense to me. What's extraordinary is when the effort to create a medium of exchange ends up costing you significantly–– which is what you're talking about in China where people had a medium of exchange, but they had to work hugely to get that money. I don't have to work hugely to get a $1 bill, right? It's not like I'm cutting down a tree and smashing the papers to pulp and printing. But you're right, that's what they're kind of doing in China. And that's, to a lesser extent, what you're doing in Bitcoin. So I hadn't thought about this, but Bitcoin in this case is using computer cycles and energy. To me, it's absolutely extraordinary the degree to which people who are Bitcoin miners are willing to upend their lives to get cheap energy. A guy I know is talking about setting up small nuclear plants as part of his idea for climate change and he wants to set them up in really weird remote areas. And I was asking “Well who would be your customers?” and he says Bitcoin people would move to these nowhere places so they could have these pocket nukes to privately supply their Bitcoin habits. And that's really crazy! To completely upend your life to create something that you hope is a medium of exchange that will allow you to buy the things that you're giving up. So there's a kind of funny aspect to this. That was partly what was happening in China. Unfortunately, China's very large, so they were able to send off all this stuff to Mexico so that they could get the silver to pay their taxes, but it definitely weakened the country.Wizards vs. ProphetsDwarkesh Patel   Yeah, and that story you were talking about, El Salvador actually tried it. They were trying to set up a Bitcoin city next to this volcano and use the geothermal energy from the volcano to incentivize people to come there and mine cheap Bitcoin. Staying on the theme of China, do you think the prophets were more correct, or the wizards were more correct for that given time period? Because we have the introduction of potato, corn, maize, sweet potatoes, and this drastically increases the population until it reaches a carrying capacity. Obviously, what follows is the other kinds of ecological problems this causes and you describe these in the book. Is this evidence of the wizard worldview that potatoes appear and populations balloon? Or are the prophets like “No, no, carrying capacity will catch up to us eventually.”Charles C. Mann   Okay, so let me interject here. For those members of your audience who don't know what we're talking about. I wrote this book, The Wizard and the Prophet. And it's about these two camps that have been around for a long time who have differing views regarding how we think about energy resources, the environment, and all those issues. The wizards, that's my name for them––Stuart Brand called them druids and, in fact, originally, the title was going to involve the word druid but my editor said, “Nobody knows what a Druid is” so I changed it into wizards–– and anyway the wizards would say that science and technology properly applied can allow you to produce your way out of these environmental dilemmas. You turn on the science machine, essentially, and then we can escape these kinds of dilemmas. The prophets say “No. Natural systems are governed by laws and there's an inherent carrying capacity or limit or planetary boundary.” there are a bunch of different names for them that say you can't do more than so much.So what happened in China is that European crops came over. One of China's basic geographical conditions is that it's 20% of the Earth's habitable surface area, or it has 20% of the world's population, but only has seven or 8% of the world's above-ground freshwater. There are no big giant lakes like we have in the Great Lakes. And there are only a couple of big rivers, the Yangtze and the Yellow River. The main staple crop in China has to be grown in swimming pools, and that's you know, rice. So there's this paradox, which is “How do you keep people fed with rice in a country that has very little water?” If you want a shorthand history of China, that's it. So prophets believe that there are these planetary boundaries. In history, these are typically called Malthusian Limits after Malthus and the question is: With the available technology at a certain time, how many people can you feed before there's misery?The great thing about history is it provides evidence for both sides. Because in the short run, what happened when American crops came in is that the potato, sweet potato, and maize corn were the first staple crops that were dryland crops that could be grown in the western half of China, which is very, very dry and hot and mountainous with very little water. Population soars immediately afterward, but so does social unrest, misery, and so forth. In the long run, that becomes adaptable when China becomes a wealthy and powerful nation. In the short run, which is not so short (it's a couple of centuries), it really causes tremendous chaos and suffering. So, this provides evidence for both sides. One increases human capacity, and the second unquestionably increases human numbers and that leads to tremendous erosion, land degradation, and human suffering.Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah, that's a thick coin with two sides. By the way, I realized I haven't gotten to all the Wizard and Prophet questions, and there are a lot of them. So I––Charles C. Mann   I certainly have time! I'm enjoying the conversation. One of the weird things about podcasts is that, as far as I can tell, the average podcast interviewer is far more knowledgeable and thoughtful than the average sort of mainstream journalist interviewer and I just find that amazing. I don't understand it. So I think you guys should be hired. You know, they should make you switch roles or something.Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah, maybe. Charles C. Mann   It's a pleasure to be asked these interesting questions about subjects I find fascinating.Dwarkesh Patel   Oh, it's my pleasure to get to talk to you and to get to ask these questions. So let me ask about the Wizard and the Prophet. I just interviewed WIll McCaskill, and we were talking about what ends up mattering most in history. I asked him about Norman Borlaug and said that he's saved a billion lives. But then McCaskill pointed out, “Well, that's an exceptional result” and he doesn't think the technology is that contingent. So if Borlaug hadn't existed, somebody else would have discovered what he discovered about short wheat stalks anyways. So counterfactually, in a world where Ebola doesn't exist, it's not like a billion people die, maybe a couple million more die until the next guy comes around. That was his view. Do you agree? What is your response?Charles C. Mann   To some extent, I agree. It's very likely that in the absence of one scientist, some other scientist would have discovered this, and I mentioned in the book, in fact, that there's a guy named Swaminathan, a remarkable Indian scientist, who's a step behind him and did much of the same work. At the same time, the individual qualities of Borlaug are really quite remarkable. The insane amount of work and dedication that he did.. it's really hard to imagine. The fact is that he was going against many of the breeding plant breeding dogmas of his day, that all matters! His insistence on feeding the poor… he did remarkable things. Yes, I think some of those same things would have been discovered but it would have been a huge deal if it had taken 20 years later. I mean, that would have been a lot of people who would have been hurt in the interim! Because at the same time, things like the end of colonialism, the discovery of antibiotics, and so forth, were leading to a real population rise, and the amount of human misery that would have occurred, it's really frightening to think about. So, in some sense, I think he's (Will McCaskill) right. But I wouldn't be so glib about those couple of million people.Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah. And another thing you might be concerned about is that given the hostile attitude that people had towards the green revolution right after, if the actual implementation of these different strains of biochar sent in India, if that hadn't been delayed, it's not that weird to imagine a scenario where the governments there are just totally won over by the prophets and they decide to not implant this technology at all. If you think about what happened to nuclear power in the 70s, in many different countries, maybe something similar could have happened to the Green Revolution. So it's important to beat the Prophet. Maybe that's not the correct way to say it. But one way you could put it is: It's important to beat the prophets before the policies are passed. You have to get a good bit of technology in there.Charles C. Mann   This is just my personal opinion, but you want to listen to the prophets about what the problems are. They're incredible at diagnosing problems, and very frequently, they're right about those things. The social issues about the Green Revolution… they were dead right, they were completely right. I don't know if you then adopt their solutions. It's a little bit like how I feel about my editors–– my editors will often point out problems and I almost never agree with their solutions. The fact is that Borlaug did develop this wheat that came into India, but it probably wouldn't have been nearly as successful if Swaminathan hadn't changed that wheat to make it more acceptable to the culture of India. That was one of the most important parts for me in this book. When I went to Tamil Nadu, I listened to this and I thought, “Oh! I never heard about this part where they took Mexican wheat, and they made it into Indian wheat.” You know, I don't even know if Borlaug ever knew or really grasped that they really had done that! By the way, a person for you to interview is Marci Baranski–– she's got a forthcoming book about the history of the Green Revolution and she sounds great. I'm really looking forward to reading it. So here's a plug for her.In Defense of Regulatory DelaysDwarkesh Patel   So if we applied that particular story to today, let's say that we had regulatory agencies like the FDA back then that were as powerful back then as they are now. Do you think it's possible that these new advances would have just dithered in some approval process that took years or decades to complete? If you just backtest our current process for implementing technological solutions, are you concerned that something like the green revolution could not have happened or that it would have taken way too long or something?Charles C. Mann   It's possible. Bureaucracies can always go rogue, and the government is faced with this kind of impossible problem. There's a current big political argument about whether former President Trump should have taken these top-secret documents to his house in Florida and done whatever he wanted to? Just for the moment, let's accept the argument that these were like super secret toxic documents and should not have been in a basement. Let's just say that's true. Whatever the President says is declassified is declassified. Let us say that's true.  Obviously, that would be bad. You would not want to have that kind of informal process because you can imagine all kinds of things–– you wouldn't want to have that kind of informal process in place. But nobody has ever imagined that you would do that because it's sort of nutty in that scenario.Now say you write a law and you create a bureaucracy for declassification and immediately add more delay, you make things harder, you add in the problems of the bureaucrats getting too much power, you know–– all the things that you do. So you have this problem with the government, which is that people occasionally do things that you would never imagine. It's completely screwy. So you put in regulatory mechanisms to stop them from doing that and that impedes everybody else. In the case of the FDA, it was founded in the 30 when some person produced this thing called elixir sulfonamides. They killed hundreds of people! It was a flat-out poison! And, you know, hundreds of people died. You think like who would do that? But somebody did that. So they created this entire review mechanism to make sure it never happened again, which introduced delay, and then something was solidified. Which they did start here because the people who invented that didn't even do the most cursory kind of check. So you have this constant problem. I'm sympathetic to the dilemma faced by the government here in which you either let through really bad things done by occasional people, or you screw up everything for everybody else. I was tracing it crudely, but I think you see the trade-off. So the question is, how well can you manage this trade-off? I would argue that sometimes it's well managed. It's kind of remarkable that we got vaccines produced by an entirely new mechanism, in record time, and they passed pretty rigorous safety reviews and were given to millions and millions and millions of people with very, very few negative effects. I mean, that's a real regulatory triumph there, right?So that would be the counter-example: you have this new thing that you can feed people and so forth. They let it through very quickly. On the other hand, you have things like genetically modified salmon and trees, which as far as I can tell, especially for the chestnuts, they've made extraordinary efforts to test. I'm sure that those are going to be in regulatory hell for years to come. *chuckles* You know, I just feel that there's this great problem. These flaws that you identified, I would like to back off and say that this is a problem sort of inherent to government. They're always protecting us against the edge case. The edge case sets the rules, and that ends up, unless you're very careful, making it very difficult for everybody else.Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah. And the vaccines are an interesting example here. Because one of the things you talked about in the book–– one of the possible solutions to climate change is that you can have some kind of geoengineering. Right? I think you mentioned in the book that as long as even one country tries this, then they can effectively (for relatively modest amounts of money), change the atmosphere. But then I look at the failure of every government to approve human challenge trials. This is something that seems like an obvious thing to do and we would have potentially saved hundreds of thousands of lives during COVID by speeding up the vaccine approval. So I wonder, maybe the international collaboration is strong enough that something like geoengineering actually couldn't happen because something like human challenge trials didn't happen.Geoengineering Charles C. Mann   So let me give a plug here for a fun novel by my friend, Neal Stephenson, called Termination Shock. Which is about some rich person just doing it. Just doing geoengineering. The fact is that it's actually not actually against the law to fire off rockets into the stratosphere. In his case, it's a giant gun that shoots shells full of sulfur into the upper atmosphere. So I guess the question is, what timescale do you think is appropriate for all this? I feel quite confident that there will be geoengineering trials within the next 10 years. Is that fast enough? That's a real judgment call. I think people like David Keith and the other advocates for geoengineering would have said it should have happened already and that it's way, way too slow. People who are super anxious about moral hazard and precautionary principles say that that's way, way too fast. So you have these different constituencies. It's hard for me to think off the top of my head of an example where these regulatory agencies have actually totally throttled something in a long-lasting way as opposed to delaying it for 10 years. I don't mean to imply that 10 years is nothing. But it's really killing off something. Is there an example you can think of?Dwarkesh Patel   Well, it's very dependent on where you think it would have been otherwise, like people say maybe it was just bound to be the state. Charles C. Mann   I think that was a very successful case of regulatory capture, in which the proponents of the technology successfully created this crazy…. One of the weird things I really wanted to explain about nuclear stuff is not actually in the book.