last highlighted date: 2024-12-12
Highlights
- In 1981, Ronald Reagan became president, and then he started deregulating everything. He had this idea that if you help rich people make more money, then the benefits will trickle down to ordinary people, and everybody will get richer. Well, it turns out that’s not true.
- If you have a factory where the machines do all the work and there are just a few people to supervise the machines, average labor productivity is really high because you only have a few people, but marginal labor productivity is really low because what do you do with extra people?
- Asoglu and Robinson’s point is that you usually don’t get this perfect storm, right? Usually, one of these conditions is not present, and you People need to determine the direction that technology goes in because they’re going to set things up so that they need fewer workers and that workers have fewer rights. You can’t always solve this problem with unions because unions can fight for bargaining power, but they can’t fight for worker demand, right? They can’t make corporations want to hire more people. Therefore, if we want to make sure we live in a good world, we have to control the direction of technology. But the problem with this is that it’s really, really, really, really hard to control the direction of technology.