《力量与进步》读书笔记

来源：张明宏观金融研究

注：转载请注明出处。文中配图2003年摄于北京国子监。

Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson. Power and Progress, Basic Books UK, 2023.

1.New digital technologies are everywhere and have made vast fortunes for entrepreneurs, executives and some investors, yet real wages for most workers have scarcely increased.

2.There is nothing automatic about new technologies bringing widespread prosperity. Whether they do or not is an economic, social and political choice.

3.How productivity benefits are shared depends on how exactly technology changes and on the rules, norms, and expectations that govern how management treats workers.

4.Automation raises average productivity but does not increase, and in fact may reduce, worker marginal productivity.

5.There will be few new jobs created, however, when the productivity gains from automation are small – what we call “so-so automation”. There is no productivity bandwagon from so-so automation and worker surveillance.

6.The first step in the productivity bandwagon causal chain depends on specific choices: using existing technologies and developing new ones for increasing worker marginal productivity – not just automating work, making workers redundant, or intensifying surveillance.

7.It will do so only when new technologies increase worker marginal productivity and the resulting gains are shared between firms and workers.

8.They can focus on automation and surveillance to reduce labor costs. Or they can create new tasks and empower workers. More broadly, they can generate shared prosperity or relentless inequality, depending on how they are used and when new innovative effort is directed.

9.Technology is about control, not just over nature but often over other humans. More fundamentally, different ways of organizing production enrich and empower some people and disempower others.

10.There is a cautionary tale for any history of technology: great disaster often has its roots in powerful visions, which in turn are based on past success.

11.Rather than focusing on machine intelligence, it is more fruitful to strive for “machine usefulness”, meaning how machines can be most useful to humans – for example, by complementing worker capabilities.

12.It illustrates how a compelling vision takes hold and pushes the frontiers of technology, for good and bad.

13.Visionaries derive their power partly from the blinders that they have on – including the suffering that they ignore.

14.Vision demanded ambition.

15.What you do with technology depends on the direction of progress you are trying to chart and what you regard as an acceptable cost.

16.But vision also implies distorted lenses, limiting what people can see.

17.If you have a compelling idea, you are more likely to set the agenda, and the more you are successful in setting the agenda, the more plausible and powerful your idea becomes.

18.For an idea to be successful, you need to articulate a broader viewpoint that transcends your interests or, at the very least, appears to do so.

19.The more power and status you have, the easier it is for you to set the agenda, and when you set the agenda, you obtain even more status and power.

20.Even when there were Black politicians in Washington, they are far from the true seat of power, such as the important congressional committees and the back rooms where deals were made.

21.Economic and political institutions shape who has the best opportunities to persuade others.

22.Persuasion power is more potent if you have a compelling idea to sell.

23.Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

24.In the modern world the power to persuade is the most important source of social power.

25.Visions of technology thus permeate almost every aspect of our economy and society.

26.By building institutions that provide access to a broader range of people and create pathways for diverse ideas to influence the agenda, we can break the monopoly over agenda setting that some individuals would otherwise enjoy.

27.Yet others follow Jean-Jacques Rousseau and maintain that settling down to till fields full-time was human society’s “original sin”, paving the way to poverty and social inequality.

28.Unfortunately, four decades of digital-technology deployment have undermined the sharing mechanisms that developed earlier in the twentieth century. And with the arrival of artificial intelligence, our future begins to look disconcertingly like our agricultural past.

29.By the mid-1700s, the “middling sort” of people – from modest origins but viewing themselves firmly in the middle class – could dream big and rise fast in Britain.

30.What was critical for the British industrial revolution was the entrepreneurship and innovativeness of a cadre of new men from relatively modest backgrounds. These men had practical skills and the ambition to be technologically inventive.

31.The social bias of technology also had a broader impoverishing effect.

32.The productivity bandwagon needs two preconditions to operate: improvements in worker marginal productivity and sufficient bargaining power for labor.

33.The second half of the nineteenth century was different, but no because there was an inexorable arc bending toward progress. What set this period apart was a change in the nature of technology and the rise of countervailing power, forcing the people in charge to get serious about sharing the benefits of higher productivity.

34.New technologies of the second phase started creating some new opportunities for both skilled and unskilled workers.

35.Equally, institutional changes moved in the direction of bolstering worker power so that this higher productivity would be shared between capital and labor. In Britain, Chartism and the rise of trade unions expanded political representation and transformed the scope of government action.

36.This growth had two critical building blocks. First, a direction of travel for new technology that generated not just cost savings through automation but also plenty of new tasks, products, and opportunities. Second, an institutional structure that bolstered countervailing powers from workers and government regulation.

37.The American path of technology strove to raise productivity to maker better use of labor that was relatively in short supply.

38.What was the secret sauce of shared prosperity in the decades following World War II ? The answer lies in the two elements: a direction of technology that created new tasks and jobs for worker of all skill levels and an institutional framework enabling workers to share productivity increases with employers and managers.

39.New tasks during this era played a critical role in driving productivity growth and in spreading the gains across the skill distribution. In industries with new task we see higher productivity growth as well as higher demand for lower-skilled workers, who thus also benefit from technological progress.

40.The Beveridge Report offered a blueprint for a state-run insurance program protecting people from cradle to grave, with redistributive taxation, social security, unemployment insurance, worker compensation, disability insurance, child benefits, and nationalized health care.

41.Three groups were excluded from both political power and some of the economic benefits: women; minorities, especially Black Americans in the US; and immigrants.

42.In this way, monitoring is a “rent-shifting activity”, meaning that is can be used to prevent sharing of productivity gains and to shift rents away from workers, without improving their productivity much or at all.

43.The most important is that they are both examples of so-so technologies: they create little productivity gains, despite substantial costs for workers.

44.Focusing more on MU (machine usefulness), rather than AI, is more likely to get us there.

45.The US model of shared prosperity broke down as power became concentrated in the hands of big corporations, the institutions and norms of rent sharing unwound, and technology went in a predominantly automating direction starting around 1980.

46.AI-based automation often fails to increase productivity by that much.

47.There is now abundant evidence that Facebook triggers not just outrage at political content but also strong negative emotions in other social context.

48.THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT provides a historical perspective on the three prongs of a critical formula necessary for escaping our current predicament: The first is altering the narrative and changing norms; The second is cultivating countervailing powers; The third is policy solutions.

49.The same combination – altering the narrative, building countervailing powers, and developing and implementing specific policies to deal with the most important issues – can work in redirecting digital technology.

50.Digital technology can complement humans by: improving the productivity of workers in their current jobs; creating new tasks with the help of machine intelligence augmenting human capabilities; providing better, more usable information for human decision-making; building new platforms that bring together people with different skills and needs.

51.Government subsidies for developing more socially beneficial technologies are one of the most powerful means of redirecting technology in a market economy. Technologies that raise the labor share can be encouraged via subsidies for their use and their development.

52.Data unions can negotiate prices and terms for all users or subgroups, thus circumventing “divide-and-conquer” strategies by platforms.

53.Wealth taxes would have to be coupled with stronger international cooperation among tax authorities, including an overhaul of the rules for offshore tax havens and a concerted effort to close loopholes.

54.Technology depends on vision, and vision is rooted in social power, which is largely about convincing the public and decision makers of the virtues of a particular path of technology.

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