Forward Thinking on technology and political economy with Daron Acemoglu: The influential economist connects the dots between artificial intelligence, productivity, wages, and inequality, and how to counterbalance the impacts of automation published by McKinsey Global Institute (7/2021).
“Daron Acemoglu (guest): I was born in Istanbul, Turkey, and I grew up in Istanbul until the age of 19, when I moved to the UK to study. And my interest in economics and politics took shape when I was in Turkey. And in fact, many of the questions that I later came to study, such as democracy, the relationship between political institutions, and economic growth, and dictatorship repression, those were things that I started wondering [about] when I was a teenager, especially growing up in a country that had recently suffered a military coup. [Its] economy [was] in the doldrums, inequality was rising, so those were the questions that I thought I would go and study in economics.
Little did I know that that’s not what economists study. But when I went to enroll at the University of York, I still liked what I saw, so I got into it. But then a number of years later, when I was towards the end of my PhD dissertation, the same passions came back. And now I felt I could take a little bit of time off from more conventional topics: unemployment, human capital, and so on.
But over time I think my two interests have merged. Moving forward, I believe that the political economy of growth, how we make it happen, what sort of institutions we have to have in order to undergird growth, who benefits from growth, how you regulate growth, and technology, automation, AI, the direction of technological change—those are intimately connected. Those are the two legs of my research that have, in recent years, come even more together than they were before…”
