Broadsheet

This is the fourth part (I, IIa, IIb, III) of our honestly-who-knows-how-many part series laying out some general guidelines for how pre-modern armies are organized. We’ve talked about how armies are recruited, equipped and paid for. In particular, as we’ve seen so far, the structure of recruitment, organization and payment (such as it was) is heavily dependent on the underlying civilian structures, often mirroring them quite closely. Armies cannot help but recreate their civilian social structures on the battlefield.

The same is absolutely true for leadership and cohesion, essential for getting an army to fight effectively. Now we need to clear up some definitions here at the start between the three ideas we’re going to focus on here: we’re breaking up a multifaceted idea (‘combat motivation’) into component parts because, as we’ll see, effective combat motivation is something of a ‘three-legged stool’ that needs all three legs to stand effectively. Those three legs are leadership, morale and cohesion; the first of which will be our focus this week and the last of which will be our focus next week.

Leadership refers to the to the command structures of an army, which as we’ll see certainly do have a motivation component. This is a top-down sort of combat motivation: good leaders might cultivate the respect or admiration of their troops, might find ways to motivate them in difficult times, might lead by example or otherwise ‘perform’ generalship and so on. What we’re going to focus on here is where leaders come from because, as it turns out, most societies have pretty strong ideas about where military leaders are supposed to come from, what backgrounds they’re supposed to have and (no surprise) they tend to mirror civilian leadership structures.

Meanwhile morale refers to the bottom-up motivation of the combatants. Specifically, I tend to use this to mean their attachment to the cause, both their loyalty to it and also their belief that it can be achieved. We aren’t going to deal too much with morale here because it is often very conflict-specific: different causes come with different morale implications. However, I do want to stress an important idea here: morale is what gets soldiers to a battlefield, not what keeps them on it (generally).

Finally cohesion is a side-together sort of motivation: the ability of a unit to cohere under pressure, to ‘hold together’ rather than breaking up when things get difficult. In the terror of combat, the high sounding reasons for service (the foundations of morale) are hard to keep in mind and combatants need something a bit more primal to keep them in the ranks: that is cohesion and it is generally based in some kind of strong attachment to the other fellows in the ranks next to them. As we’ll see, just like leadership systems tend to mirror civilian leadership structures, the options for fostering strong cohesion among soldiers are heavily dependent on what a civilian society looks like. We’ll treat cohesion principles next week.

By way of clarifying contrast: a force with low morale might melt away from desertion even when there’s not fighting going on, because no one is invested in the cause. A force with low cohesion (but high morale) might panic and disperse in a battle but reform later to fight again: they remain committed to the cause, but unable to handle the terror of battle collectively. A force with bad morale but high cohesion is very dangerous to a general, because that is the raw material for mutinies: the men will hold together against you as quickly as for you.

Naturally, most military systems that have existed for more than a single campaign have some effective system for arranging leadership and ensuring cohesion on a repeat basis. And that is what we’ll be looking at this week: how the structures of societies shape and constrain leadership and cohesion of the armies they form.

But first, as always, recruiting and maintaining large pre-modern armies is expensive! Much like many of those pre-modern armies, this project is supported by devolving the costs of my ruinous book-buying habit on to ~~recruits~~ readers. You can help by spreading the word to new readers and by supporting this project over at Patreon. If you want updates whenever a new post appears or want to hear my more bite-sized musings on history, security affairs and current events, you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social). I am also active on Threads (bretdevereaux) and maintain a de minimis presence on Twitter (@bretdevereaux).

Where Leaders Come From

Polities have a bewildering array of ways that they chose military leaders – some are determined by hereditary positions, others by professional career tracks, other elected and so on – but the general rule to understanding all of them is this: the same sort of people who exercise positions of authority to organize civil society also lead the armies and navies of that society. The biggest distinction between leadership system is often just the question of if the civil leader are the exact same people as the military leadership, or different fellows drawn from the same class. Those who lead in peace, almost always lead in war.

So from the worldbuilding perspective, before you can think about your ‘officer class,’ you need to think about the ruling class of your society. This isn’t quite the place to get into every possible permutation of ruling class a pre-modern society can have, but we can make do with a few examples to give a sense of how these notions connect. One thing I will note: in pre-modern societies, professional leadership classes are extremely rare – even as they are very common in modern societies. So while your instinct may be that ‘to be a general, someone just goes to ‘general school’ and then works up the career ladder’ that is almost never the career path for pre-modern military leadership. To the degree these societies have professional classes, they are usually politically marginal and politically marginal groups do not get to lead a society’s army.

Instead, as a rule, the aristocrats who organize large institutions and groups in peacetime assume, as a matter of course, that they have the necessary skills to organize the same large groups in war time. Coming from a modern viewpoint, with our emphasis on ‘scientific’ leadership approaches and specialist knowledge, the idea that experience at large-scale farming or Confucian philosophy fully qualified one to lead armies seems strange, but those historical aristocrats are generally untroubled by the idea that their training might not prepare them to lead. After all, the skills of the aristocrat – whatever they might be – are the large-scale leadership skills of the society and it usually takes quite a sharp and humiliating experience of defeat to cause any aristocracy to reconsider that (and often not even then).

So let’s look at some connected civilian-and-military leadership structures to get a sense of how they can work, keeping in mind that we’re not being exhaustive.

The most common system by far is some form of military-aristocracy: a hereditary or nearly hereditary class that wields military leadership as its prerogative. In complex, agrarian societies, these are almost always leisured large-landholders who live off of the rents of their lands. There is thus often an inherent tension in how a leisured class justifies its role of power and privilege in society by pointing to its military leadership role. One of the classic summations of this was the medieval European division of society into “those who work (the commons), those who pray (the clergy), and those who fight (the nobility)” – it is the role as ‘those who fight’ (or who lead the fight) which justifies aristocratic privilege and wealth.

Crucially, I want to stress: the aristocrat earns their position of command by wealth and birth, they do not earn wealth and birth by martial excellence. These aristocracies are ‘rich mens’ clubs’ not ‘good fighters’ clubs,’ and they are buttressed with ideologies that assume people born from the lower classes make poor soldiers and generals by their very nature. Pre-modern societies are, by modern standards, extremely low in social mobility and so they create cultures and customs which justify and normalize those systems.

But – as I’ve been alluded to this whole series – not all military aristocracies are the same. In particular, there is a marked difference between warrior-aristocracies and what I am going to call (very roughly) officer-aristocracies – the core difference is the precise martial skill that justifies aristocratic power, but that has all sorts of ramifications with how these fellows behave.

In a warrior-aristocracy, a core part of being an aristocrat is mastery of a specific style of personal combat, most frequently cavalry combat (or chariot combat, before the advent of true cavalry). Part of this is simply the expense of it – you have to be rich to have access to horses from a young age to learn to ride well – but there is also a heavy skill component, in that it is very hard to learn to be a truly excellent horseman if you do not start early. The thing to keep in mind is that because warrior-aristocrats’ social position is contingent on performing a specific kind of warfare, they are going to want to be visible performing that sort of warfare. As a result, these fellows are often socially constrained to lead from the front and to fight personally even when it might be wiser not to.

Via Wikipedia, a detail of the Alexander Mosaic from the House of the Faun in Pompeii, an early first century BC copy of a likely third century BC original. Alexander’s Macedonian nobility are a good example of a state-society that nevertheless maintains a warrior-aristocracy: the clear expectation was that Macedonian noblemen in command fought **in person**. Alexander, of course, was famously wounded many times, but his father too lost an eye and gained a limp in battle from a broken tibia. Several of Alexander’s companions, like Antigonus I Monophthalmus (‘the one-eyed’) sported battle wounds as well.

Warrior-aristocracies cover, as best I can tell, the great majority of complex, agrarian non-state societies and it isn’t hard to see how all of the systems fit together: the warrior-aristocrats, their retinues of lesser warrior-aristocrats and common-soldier retainers, the fragmentation of violence in the society and the leadership role of those warrior aristocrats. Naturally, the most senior (by wealth, generally, because this is about power within a society) warrior-aristocrats will lead the army in battle, with more junior warrior-aristocrats leading common soldiers in a retinue-of-retinues army structure: the biggest Big Man leads the army, with the retinues of his subordinate Big Men beneath him and so on, down to the common soldiers at the bottom of each of these retinues.

Via Wikipedia, another part of the Bayeux Tapestry (depicting the Battle of Hastings, 1066), here showing the climax of the battle, including the death of king Harold II. It is worth noting here how the members of both the mounted Norman warrior-aristocracy and the dismounted Anglo-Saxon military aristocracy are shown in full-size in the center, while lesser soldiers (the Norman archers) are shown in miniature on the lower register. Also note how both William of Normandy and Harold of England had to be **personally present** at this battle because that was the kind of military leadership their society expected.

As a society gets more complex and a state emerges, the state often comes with new kinds of non-military, non-aristocratic civilian leadership roles (note that religious leadership roles invariably pre-date the state – but priests and the state is a topic (voted on by the Senate) for another day). That opens up new forms of military-aristocracy but also new forms of civil leadership – the interactions between them are complex.

On the one hand, the form of military leadership might change, from warrior-aristocrats to what I am calling officer-aristocrats. In this second form, military leadership remains largely hereditary, limited to large landholders, but they understand their military role not as personally fighting in a given way, but as leading or organizing. The Roman aristocracy functions this way: Roman generals are invariably aristocratic senators, but their model of leadership is not based on the demonstration of personal combat ability or even necessarily personal physical bravery. They are thus free, as a matter of social expectation, to ‘command from the rear’ – a Roman general can get ‘stuck in,’ but they do not have to and it is rarely the wise thing to do so they don’t do it often. Instead of performing personal fighting, these fellows are often expected to be performing organizational and logistical leadership. I cannot see any specific reason why this form of leadership couldn’t emerge in a non-state society, but I struggle to think of an example – even Chinggis Khan and his heirs had to demonstrate their martial bona fides in riding and hunting to maintain legitimacy within their aristocracies, in a way that no Greek strategos, Roman general or Chinese general seems to have had to.

Via Wikipedia, a statue of Trajan from the Roman settlement of Colonia Ulpia Traiana, now Xanten, Germany. It is an example of Trajan performing Roman generalship, visually, but in that context you may notice that he strikingly carries no weapon. While his martial qualities are communicated with his armor, this is now a fellow expecting to fight man-to-man on the field, but rather he appears ready to deliver a rousing speech and then manage the battle from the rear.

The other quirk for increasingly complex aristocracies is the relationship between budding civil administrations and older military aristocracies. Often, even as the civilian administration is taken over by an educated sub-aristocratic class (professionals, burghers, etc.) the command of armies remains in the hands of the old aristocracy. The classic example of this was the distinction in Ancien Régime France between the noblesse d’épée (‘Nobility of the Sword’) – the old nobility, which still exercised most military command – and the noblesse de robe (‘Nobility of the Robe’), a newer nobility that generally held administrative or judicial positions, but not generally military ones. Likewise, the old Prussian aristocracy, die Junker, maintained a clear presence in military posts in the German army through the Second World War.

In other cases, the rising civil administrative class and the military aristocracy remain the same. The Greek polis and the Roman Republic both provide paradigmatic examples, where the assumption clearly was that the same sort of skills that prepared a man to lead in peace also prepared him to lead in war. To greatly simplify, in both Greece and Rome, there was generally a hereditary landed aristocracy of elite families in any given community and often the function of voting systems was to choose which of those hereditary elites would exercise power (by holding this or that office) at a given time.

The other major option for states are to forgo a military aristocracy more or less altogether and professionalize their officers. Because this is how most modern militaries work, I think it is what people reach to first, but I have put it last because it is so incredibly rare. Vocational leadership classes – our military aristocracies where men are born into command – are very common; professional leadership classes, where men are selected and trained for the task, are very rare. This runs counter to most folks’ expectations, but it remains broadly true: the enlisted ranks (the ‘common soldiers,’ though by the time we’re talking about them as ‘enlisted ranks,’ we’re obviously talking about quite well established states) are professionalized long before the leadership class is. The Roman army by the first century AD is fully professional in its ‘enlisted’ ranks (through the centurions), but retains its senatorial military-aristocrat command class. Likewise, European armies in the sixteenth and seventeenth century increasingly consist of professional soldiers, supported by an increasingly professional civil bureaucracy, lead by the same old military-aristocracy as the Late Middle Ages. Professional soldiers often come before – and often simply without – professional officers.

That said, the Chinese state bureaucracy, particularly as it comes to be dominated by the civil service examination system during the Tang Dynasty (618-907) and subsequently does represent a kind of professionalization of military leadership, albeit professionalized not around military skills but rather around skills in writing, literature and philosophy. If that seems shocking, remember that Roman aristocrats got formal training in philosophy and rhetoric, not command, as boys too. We’ll cover in a moment how military leadership skills were communicated. Nevertheless, these scholar-officials show up pretty often in military leadership roles.

Leader Selection

Now briefly, we should also talk about how these leaders are selected. After all, a society has more potential generals than armies, so there must be some way to decide who gets command. In non-state societies, where the potential generals are also military-aristocrats with their own retinues, chieftains and kings often have very limited options on who to put in command: if the king is present, the expectation is that he leads the army (that’s what kings are for), but if he isn’t, then often there’s a strong impulse for the biggest of the magnates to do so. After all, if you snub Duke so-and-so for command despite his bringing the largest retinue, he might just leave and take his retinue with him.

Indeed, for many non-state polities where military power is highly fragmented and fluid, the answer to ‘who leads the army’ is often ‘whoever can.’ In pre-Roman Spain and Gaul, the pattern we see in our sources looks fairly fluid, with charismatic or capable warlords emerging – invariably out of the warrior-aristocracy, these men are not peasants – to knit together large coalitions and thus large armies through personal leadership and charisma.

By contrast, as the state grows stronger, it can exercise more choice on who gets command. For monarchies, that often means royal selection, which may be quite personal (if the aristocracy is small) or, in large bureaucratic states, institutionalized and impersonal. Often the lower ranks have an institutional system of advancement (as we’ll see below), but major commands need to be signed off on at the center of power, simply because generals and admirals represent substantial risks to central authority and must be vetted for loyalty even more than for ability.

Republics are comparatively rare, but they tend to elect their generals and often elect lower officers as well. For states which structure recruitment through contractors, those contractors generally become the officers who lead units, typically led by a general chosen by the king. But those colonels (the contractors) and the general are almost invariably drawn from the same military aristocracy that would have provided them in a vassalage-based system (though in some cases the captains beneath the colonels may come from lower social backgrounds, in which case their career path may be different and may reach its ceiling earlier).

Crucially, the ‘roster’ from which the state – be that a king personally or a bureaucracy generally – can select from tends to remain limited to the tradition, generally hereditary leadership class. After all, a king who tried to fill his posts with commoners would find all of his other key stakeholders – who are military aristocrats – swiftly moving against him. There are occasional exceptions, of course, but they remain occasional because the state, in whatever form it is, needs these magnates in order to function and so it cannot simply sideline them. Of course eventually the modern administrative state emerges which no longer needs these fellows and thus may dispense with them, but that is quite explicitly a modern creature and in any case it merely creates a new leadership class.

There is, after all, a reason that modern armies are led by college-educated officers, often with advanced degrees in the higher ranks, drawn from the same system of elite education that produces our presidents, prime ministers, senators and MPs. Because no army can help but recreate its civilian social structures on the battlefield, so a society where the divide is no longer aristocrat and peasant, but blue-collar and white-collar has blue-collar soldiers and white-collar officers.

How Leaders are Trained

Now generals, admirals and other officers are not, in fact, born ready to command, whatever the social mythology of a ruling class may think. Armies – even smaller units within armies – are complex creatures that require a fair bit of knowledge and skill to control properly. As important, leadership is a skill itself: it is a performance, the exact elements of which will vary from one culture to the next, but it has to be learned. So clearly there must be some way in each of these societies to teach the fellows who will lead.

Here is a spot where I see worldbuilders who aren’t necessarily familiar with historical systems err quite badly, because they import the assumptions of how individuals are prepared and selected for leadership from modern societies. Sometimes the assumption is that command preparation works more or less like an idealized becoming the manager of a small franchise: one starts as the cash register and works upwards. But that absolutely does not work: these societies have low social mobility and a military leadership class which is jealous of its privileges. Service ‘in the ranks’ may or may not be an expectation of command preparation for that military leadership class, but even for societies where it is, no one expects to simply ‘work their way up’ from the ranks. Instead, in pre-modern armies as in modern ones, there is generally a sharp and rarely bridged (in pre-modern armies, often flatly unbridgeable) divide between officers and senior enlisted personnel, because there is a class difference being expressed.

The alternative assumption is to assume that pre-modern command preparation must look rather a lot like modern command preparation or at least some version of modern education: there has to be a ‘generalship academy,’ with classes and competitive exams and so on. This tendency is, I think, heightened in a lot of fiction where the audience are young adults and so the core conceit is basically, “what if high school and college was all facets of life?” because high school and college is the social structure the reader knows and cares about. So you get the military academies of Fire Emblem: Three Houses or Trails of Cold Steel or Final Fantasy VIII (a trope that clearly started in Japan but feels like it has worked into English-language young adult fiction over time as well). Pre-modern societies functionally never have these formal institutions for officer training. The only major exception here is the aforementioned Chinese civil service system, but that didn’t train command or military skills, which were left to be acquired through experience and apprenticeships.

But of course leaders must be trained. These societies engage in quite a lot of warfare and they cannot afford to simply be bad at it, so leaders have to be prepared.

The most common answer by far is some form of apprenticeship system: young potential leaders (from the right social class) are trained with a mix of informal tutelage (at the hands of more senior leaders) and experience, often in a sequence of experiences and roles that is quite clearly and often rigidly defined. Not always so, mind you – the path by which became a general in ancient Greece was often a lot less predictable, for instance – but frequently so.

So, for instance, the Roman cursus honorum, the sequences of posts and offices a Roman aristocrat embarking on a political career might hold, has a pretty clear bent towards military preparation. A young man would first serve a few years ‘in the ranks’ (typically as a cavalryman, because he’s rich), before trying to obtain a post as a military tribune (essentially a staff officer), where the expectation was that the commanding general he served under (a consul or a praetor) would take his tribunes under his wing. Military tribunes also had some command duties, generally lower-stakes and usually accomplished in pairs. Then came the quaestorship, a financial and administrative office which often meant handling logistics for an army (or the finances of the whole state), again under the watchful eye of more senior magistrates. Then the praetorship represented the first independent opportunity for command, but generally with a small force in a largely pacified region. Only then might a Roman aristocrat, now approaching the eligibility age of 42, consider the consulship and real field command – which of course came with it an expectation of tutoring the next generation of military tribunes and quaestors and so the process repeated. In short, the career path is a series of ‘command apprenticeships.’

The education of a medieval western European knight started even earlier, but was also structured effectively as a series of apprenticeships, although in this case focused as much on personal combat skills (because this is a warrior-aristocracy, unlike the Roman one) as leadership.¹ High-born boys would be effectively apprenticed to another noble house as a page at age seven to serve and also be trained in the necessary skills of his rank, including combat and leadership. At fourteen, that boy would graduate into being a squire, a knight’s on-the-field shield-and-armor bearer, learning the skills of the warrior-aristocracy first hand, ideally becoming a knight himself in his early 20s. Even then, he is probably not going to be handed a large unit, but rather be expected to lead his own small unit, while the more senior (by both age and wealth) members of the nobility lead larger retinues.

As an aside, popular depictions of knights miss a component of this because they tend – the recent Knight of the Seven Kingdoms does this, albeit with a plot excuse that the main character is a very poor knight – to have a knight on his own with just a squire or a page. But in practice even a relatively humble knight was expected to lead a small unit (a ‘lance fournie‘) of at least a half-dozen men. Of course the kind of boy who might, by dint of birth, expect to end up commanding much larger retinues would probably squire for a lord who also commanded much larger retinues.

Alternately, we might even jump well into the early modern period and look at the career path for an officer in the French army of the 17th century.² Aspiring officers, drawn from France’s old knightly and noble classes, first served a couple of years as a regular soldier (either as a cadet or as a volunteer serving with a relative), before being pulled into service as one of the very junior officers (ensigns and sous-lieutenants). Service at that level qualified a young man to seek to purchase a commission as a captain to lead a company, where he served under a colonel. In each step, a young men relied substantially on patronage and support from his superiors and so young officers were encouraged to attach themselves to more senior ones both to try to learn and to try to impress. Captains who came from wealth could eventually purchase a commission as a colonel, while those who lacked it might instead advance to the dead-end administrative post of major. The king then chose the officers above the post of colonel, but generally from men who had processed through this system. Lynn openly describes the system as one of “military apprenticeship.” The period’s navies worked much the same, except that the highly technical nature of naval warfare meant the apprenticeship was longer and involved more formal learning.³

In literate societies, these apprenticeships might be supplemented with written guidebooks, military manuals of various kinds. There is an odd tendency in modern fantasy fiction to pooh-pooh this sort of thing – Game of Thrones (the show, in particular) goes out of its way a few times to cast aspersions on the usefulness of such works – but the fact that societies with literate military aristocracies produce and preserve these kinds of works with regularity suggests that the fellows who would know best – the one’s actually leading armies – found them useful.

In the pre-modern era, however, such military manuals are rarely strictly technical in nature – they are not very much like a modern field manual. Instead, they tend to be framed more like a work of philosophy, laying out general principles for command, compiling lists of strategems or famous examples of tactics and so on. Often they extend beyond what we might consider strictly military matters, to include general advice on rulership, blending into a genre we call ‘mirrors for princes,’ guidebooks on how to rule well. The key thing to keep in mind is these manuals were not intended as textbooks for classics, but often works for reflection, intended to be read (and re-read) alongside a man’s trip through his military apprenticeships. Purely technical ‘reference’ books existed as well (Vitruvius’ De architectura is a paradigmatic example), but seem to have been more rare; they get a lot more common after gunpowder, when a command of engineering and mathematics (for ballistics) suddenly become a lot more important.

However, for someone looking to come to grips with the leadership culture of a pre-modern society, I would encourage you to see military manuals and mirrors for princes operating within a continuum of other literary works: histories, epics, religious texts and so on, all of which are telling aristocrats how to be aristocrats. These men, after all, are not generally professionals trained in a school, they are members of a permanent, hereditary (or semi-hereditary) military-leadership class and so excellence at command for them often consists of the refinement of the manners and habits of their class. That might include careful logistics or sound tactical planning, but equally it might include poetry, courtly manners, the habits of a good patron and so on. The delineation we expect between the professional skills of ‘military science’ and the social skills of the professional managerial class (to which most modern officers belong) simply does not exist for pre-modern societies where military leadership is not professionalized.

Thinking About Leadership

For the worldbuilder then, thinking about fictional armies (or the student of history thinking about real ones), be sure to think about the entire military-leadership life-cycle. After all, when the important council of war gathers, it isn’t just going to be the top generals involved: those generals have their own subordinates (who are also their apprentices), who may have their own subordinates (who are their apprentices) and so on. One thing that is often missing in these sorts of stories are the host of junior officers we know would normally be present, observing the decision-making process – even if, because they’re more junior in age or rank, they aren’t expected to say anything.

So the first question should be “where does the ‘officer class’ as it were, of this society come from?” Some kinds of armies can get away with fairly minimal numbers of officers and relatively amateurish ones, but most more sophisticated kinds of warfare demand a fair bit of organization. Keep in mind, when thinking about this question, the sharp limits on both information gathering and on issuing commands, which is going to mean that leaders even relatively small distances away from the ‘center’ (whoever is in overall command) are going to be exercising a lot of independent leadership. As a result, there are probably a fair number more fellows involved in leadership and decision-making than you might expect for even a very modest army.

Next, think about what kinds of peacetime life habits the officer class might have. Since they’re unlikely to be professionals, chances are they are large landholders, or (in a pastoral society), large herd owners. The war leader is more often the fellow who wields the most influence within a society – on account of wealth, charisma, family connections and so on – than the best fellow at commanding, so think about what kinds of power matter within the aristocracy and what latitude the social system has for advancement based on merit. But also think about how these fellows interact with subordinates in their peacetime role, because that is likely how they will default to acting in a military role – it is the ‘leadership skillset’ they are learning even when they are not in the saddle. Roman command behavior, I’d argue, flows very directly out of Roman patron-client relations and their habits. Likewise, it is hard not to see medieval leadership language conditioned both by the war aristocrats related to fellow aristocrats in their household (the knights in the retinue of a lord, for instance) and also the far more domineering way they interacted with their peasants (who might be their common soldiers).

Above all: these men are attempting to perform generalship. They are not so much moving pieces on a chessboard as they are playing on a stage, attempting to look the part of being a general because that is actually what often mattered the most.

Finally, think about how these men advance – not merely who decides who gets to be the general, but also who gets to decide who advances through more junior offices. Systems will, after all, select for the skills which ensure advancement and a system of elected generals is going to work quite differently from a system where advancement has more to do with patronage from senior officers to more junior ones, which in turn is also going to be very different from a system where state power is so weak that ‘advancement’ just means having the largest private army within a larger retinue-of-retinues force.

Next week, we’ll shift our focus from leadership back to the common soldiers to look at how to think about the cohesive principles of a given force, since different armies rely on different systems to generate that all important cohesion.

My elderly rabbit Giggles has unfortunately been quite sick the past two days (he’s recovering now), so I haven’t had as much time to write. Instead I thought I would repost a book review I did two years ago. I’ll be back with more original content tomorrow!

In my post yesterday about the “We Must Act Now” statement, I noted that Daron Acemoglu successfully got the writers to alter some key language in exchange for his signature — most likely, adding the “steering” idea that I took issue with. Technological “steering” is the central policy recommendation of Acemoglu’s 2023 book Power and Progress, with Simon Johnson.

As it happens, I wrote a review of Power and Progress, back in 2024. In fact, it was by far the longest book review I’ve ever written.1 I actually read the book cover to cover in detail, marking passages and looking up sources as I went; this took a very long time, and it was very frustrating, since I had serious objections to nearly every part of the book. I took out that frustration by writing a very long and highly critical review.2

So anyway, here’s that review for you to enjoy. Hopefully it gets a few people to think a little harder about the AI-related ideas that Acemoglu has been promoting throughout the econ world, and why it would be a big mistake to make those ideas the default position of the economics profession on the AI issue.

“Do not be fooled by the monumental technological achievements of humankind.” — Acemoglu and Johnson

It’s hardly surprising that Power and Progress made it onto practically every list of the most important business books of 2023. First, there’s the unrivaled pedigree of the authors themselves. To call Daron Acemoglu a powerhouse in the world of economics would be a ludicrous understatement:

Acemoglu is also the main proponent of the institutional explanation for national development, through his famous book Why Nations Fail and its sequel, The Narrow Corridor (both with James Robinson). If you hear me talk about “inclusive institutions” and “extractive institutions”, I’m channeling Acemoglu.

Simon Johnson, meanwhile, is the author of some of my favorite popular books about economic policy, especially Jump-Starting America (with Jonathan Gruber) and 13 Bankers (with James Kwak). When I write more about the need to spend more on science and to restrain the excesses of the finance industry, I’m channeling Johnson.

The second reason this book was destined to garner attention is that it brings together two extremely timely strains of thought: 1) the widespread distrust of tech companies that has grown in American society over the last few years, and 2) the wave of anxiety over AI-driven automation. Power and Progress weaves those two anxieties into a more-or-less coherent whole — a sum of all technological fears, if you will. And it seems to have been spectacularly well-timed, since its release coincided closely with the coming of ChatGPT and other generative AI.

But given all of those powerful tailwinds, I have to say I’m kind of surprised at how little of a splash Power and Progress seems to have made. This is anecdotal of course, but in the 9 months since it came out, I’m not sure I’ve once heard someone reference the book or any idea in it. The authors clearly intended it to be a handbook for people who are scared about AI putting humans out of a job, the way Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century became a handbook for people worried about inequality, or Robert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth became a handbook for people concerned about technological stagnation. But I don’t think it did.

Why not? One reason might be that the timing wasn’t as favorable as it might appear. Contrary to Acemoglu and Johnson’s assertion (on p.24 of the hardcover edition) that we live in an age of “blind techno-optimism”, the internet is absolutely chock-full of arguments and warnings about the downsides of AI. Concerns over the risk of rogue Artificial General Intelligence resulted in a boardroom coup attempt that almost drove Sam Altman out of OpenAI. Worries that AI wouldn’t uphold diversity led Google to implement some pretty hilarious countermeasures. Fears of mass surveillance, deepfakes, etc. are widespread. And of course the idea that AI is going to lead to mass unemployment is absolutely ubiquitous — so much so that practically every San Francisco tech event I go to features discussions about exactly this subject. Yes, even dance parties.

In other words, Power and Progress may have come out a little too late to make a big splash, and instead ended up just being one more voice shouting in the chorus.

On top of that, though, I have to say that this book…well, I just don’t think it’s very good. I winced while I wrote that sentence, because Simon Johnson is a personal friend, and Acemoglu is a celebrated genius, and because both of them have written such good books in the past. This is the first broadly negative book review I’ve written since 2014, and I’m a lot less combative of a blogger than I was a decade ago. I did not want to pan this book, especially because I think the topic is a good and important one, and I think the authors are brilliant people whose hearts are in the right place.

But I just don’t think the way this book was written ends up supporting the conclusions it draws. The historical examples it cites simply don’t support a narrative of out-of-touch technologists inventing the wrong sorts of technologies and hurting workers in the process. The book embraces a highly questionable definition of “power” in which persuasion in an open democratic society is painted as a threat. It often seems to assume its conclusions about the impacts of specific technologies, and it tells a jumbled and confusing story about the role of productivity growth. And its central claim — that society can push entrepreneurs to steer innovation in a direction that augments humans instead of replacing them — is not well-supported.

All in all, Power and Progress just fails to convince.

The basic idea

Power and Progress is of the “magisterial sweeping tome” class of econ book, like Capital in the Twenty-First Century, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, or Brad DeLong’s Slouching Toward Utopia. Much of the book is a history of technological innovation in general. As such, it tends to ramble; the authors often seem to get so caught up in the telling of this history that they neglect to tie each event to their central theses. In fact, those are often the most fun and fascinating parts of the book. But if I were to boil down Power and Progress to a set of core ideas, it would be:

Technological innovation’s impact on human welfare depends crucially on social choices about how those innovations are used.
Those choices are determined by the relations of power in a society, and in recent decades our choices have been steered in a negative direction by the power of tech company founders and venture capitalists.
The type of technologies that society invents can be chosen so as to distribute benefits more widely, by avoiding technologies that replace workers and inventing technologies that complement workers.

It’s the last of these that the book is most known for, because it’s the boldest, the most original, and the most controversial. But first let’s talk a bit about the other two.

Questionable historiography

The idea that technology’s impact on society is not determined solely by the nature of the tech itself, but depends on how we choose to use it, is obvious enough to be a truism. Everyone knows how the industrial technologies that have created so much wealth are also put to destructive uses in wars. Everyone knows that the same camera technology that lets you talk to your friend in a different city can allow governments to spy on their citizens. Everyone knows that there is a vast system of laws, international agreements, and social norms whose purpose, at least in theory, is to ensure that technology is used for good and not for ill.

But even though “technology can be used for bad purposes” should be a simple truism, Acemoglu and Johnson pick some very odd examples to illustrate the principle. For example, in the prologue, they have a list of what they claim are “new inventions that brought nothing like shared prosperity”. Here’s the fifth item on their list:

At the end of the nineteenth century, German chemist Fritz Haber developed artificial fertilizers that boosted agricultural yields. Subsequently, Haber and other scientists used the same ideas to design chemical weapons that killed and maimed hundreds of thousands on World War I battlefields.

The idea that the Haber-Bosch process has “brought nothing like shared prosperity” is an absolutely wild claim. Nitrogen fertilizers are so important to human existence that by the most common estimates, about half of the entire population of Earth — 3.5 billion people — is only sustained thanks to this technology. But because that same chemical reaction was used to create one particular type of chemical weapon that was responsible for a tiny fraction of the deaths in one particular war, Acemoglu and Johnson feel comfortable saying that a technology that literally gives life to half of humanity “brought nothing like shared prosperity”. It is the kind of claim that is so obviously wrong as to leave the reader slack-jawed — and yet it is deployed in support of an overall thesis for which countless better examples exist.

Unfortunately, this kind of questionable selection of historical examples is a hallmark of Power and Progress all the way through. For example, in Chapter 6, the authors write:

[Belief in the power of productivity] suggests that as technology advanced rapidly during the early phases of the Industrial Revolution, wages should have risen. Instead, real incomes of the majority stagnated.

Acemoglu and Johnson conclude that because textile manufacturing technologies were biased toward automating workers, they immiserated the working class of 1700s Britain. But those same textile manufacturing technologies have been at the center of the early stage of every other country’s industrialization as well. China went through a period where it made most of the world’s clothes, with its share peaking in the late 2000s. In 1995, apparel was China’s biggest export category.

But during this time, when Chinese garment workers were getting the descendants of the original British industrial technologies of power looms, their wages were skyrocketing — as were wages in the economy as a whole. The same is now true of Bangladesh — the country focuses relentlessly on the garment industry, and has access to all of the old automation technologies, and yet incomes in the country have tripled since 1990.

(As a side note, it’s kind of funny that after we’ve used “Luddite” as a slur for technophobes for all these years, Acemoglu and Johnson explicitly try to rehabilitate the original Luddites, writing that they “were right to worry about knitting frames decimating their livelihoods”. For this reason, I considered subtitling this review “the Bible of the Luddites”, but decided that the negative connotation of the word was too strong and it would be rude.)

A third questionable example in the book is the story of the Panama Canal. Acemoglu and Johnson describe the brutal exploitation of the workers who built the canal, and declare the project a “colossal failure”. That brutality was certainly real. But the authors cite it as a reason that the technology of the canal itself failed to bring broad-based prosperity. In fact, the opposite seems true; thanks to the canal, the people of Panama today enjoy a standard of living much, much higher than that of their Central American neighbors. This is not to say those economic benefits were worth the human cost. But the canal’s problems clearly seem associated with its construction, rather than unfair distribution of the benefits from the technology itself. Could the same canal have been built using more humane labor standards? The authors decline to speculate, simply declaring the whole project a failure and not even mentioning Panama’s prosperity.

A fourth dodgy example is the story they tell about Japan. In Chapter 8, Acemoglu and Johnson praise Japanese companies for “combin[ing] automation with the creation of new tasks”, noting that Japanese automakers didn’t reduce their workforces like American automakers did. But Japan’s manufacturing sector wages, like wages throughout the rest of the country, have been falling since the early 1990s, while American wages have stagnated but not fallen. So this story doesn’t fit the data.

A fifth example is in Chapter 7, when Acemoglu and Johnson write that “Henry Ford was a pioneer” in developing “a more cooperative relationship” with his workforce. I’m just wondering how this “more cooperative relationship” involved hiring thugs to gun down union organizers. Ford did pay higher wages to increase efficiency, but his actual dealings with representatives of labor was brutal and intolerant.

I could go on citing these questionable examples — my copy of Power and Progress is stained blue with all the notes I made in the margins — but this review would run into the dozens of pages, and you would quit long before you finished. But because there are so many questionable examples, Power and Progress is the kind of book that must be read closely and with a critical eye.

Update: In the comments, Brian Potter adds:

Another strike against this book is its terrible scholarship: it frequently gets basic facts incorrect because the authors haven't bothered to actually research the topic. Example: it claims at several points that Eli Whitney was responsible for the development of interchangeable parts, a claim that has been widely and thoroughly debunked.

Source?

Another issue with the book’s examples is the lack of footnotes or endnotes. Instead of citing specific works in support of each specific claim — as most books do — Power and Progress has a bibliographic essay at the end. Many sources are mentioned in this essay, but it’s often difficult, and sometimes impossible, to match the sources to specific claims. As a result, you often end up having to choose between exhaustively searching multiple sources to figure out where the authors got a particular point, or simply giving up and trusting that the authors are accurately representing the data.

For example, in Chapter 1 the authors ask “What if…AI also impoverishes billions in the developing world?”, and asserts that “evidence is mounting” that this concern is “valid”. But where is the evidence that AI threatens to impoverish billions? That’s an astonishingly strong claim about a technology about which little is known, and I can’t find any source in the bibliographic essay. An empirical study I do know is Acemoglu, Autor, Hazell and Restrepo’s 2022 paper “AI and Jobs: Evidence from Online Vacancies”, whose abstract concludes:

We find no discernible relationship between AI exposure and employment or wage growth at the occupation or industry level, however, implying that AI is currently substituting for humans in a subset of tasks but it is not yet having detectable aggregate labor market consequences.

So that paper certainly doesn’t include mounting evidence that AI threatens to impoverish billions. But I can’t find which paper the authors relied on to make this claim.

In fact, because I’ve read many of the Acemoglu papers that undergird this book, I also know that there are instances where the data doesn’t quite say what the authors claim. For example, in Chapter 8, Acemoglu and Johnson argue that “digital technologies became the graveyard of shared prosperity” over the last few decades. In this chapter, they attribute some meaningful piece of the recent rise in inequality to the introduction of digital technologies to the workplace. But because I’ve read Acemoglu and Restrepo’s 2020 paper “Robots and Jobs: Evidence from U.S. Labor Markets”, as well as the working paper version from 2017, I know to be skeptical of this claim.

Acemoglu and Restrepo found that a narrow category of automation — industrial robots — was associated with decreased employment and wages. But as the Economic Policy Institute’s Larry Mishel and Josh Bivens noted, when Acemoglu and Restrepo measured the effect of workers’ “exposure to IT capital” in general — i.e., how much the employers invested in IT tech overall — they found either no effect or a positive effect on employment and wages. Here’s the relevant table from the 2020 version of the paper:

The estimates of a positive impact of IT capital on employment and wages are in the original working paper version, in table A9.

Now, this doesn’t mean that computers and the internet weren’t a driver of mass unemployment or stagnant wages. Maybe they were! Acemoglu and Restrepo (2020) could simply be wrong; in fact, since their working paper first came out in 2018, many other studies have ended up contradicting their findings about the negative impacts of robots. And all of these papers look within specific industries or companies — as does Acemoglu and Restrepo’s 2022 follow-up paper about automation and inequality between demographic groups. The overall effect of automation on economic growth, absolute wages, and the composition of industries in the economy simply isn’t known.

In other words, it could be very well be that automation has been impoverishing people, or it could be that it has been enriching people overall. I’d simply like to know where the authors get the data to back up their claim about information technology, especially when one of the authors’ most famous papers appears to contradict that claim.

To sum up, footnotes and endnotes are a technology that has unambiguously benefitted the world, and even though they can be a bit of a pain the butt, authors should include them.

A questionable definition of “power”

Anyway I digress; back to the book’s central theses.

Despite the questionable examples, it’s clearly true that technology can be used to benefit average people or to hurt them. But how does society choose how to use technologies? Acemoglu and Johnson’s answer is “power”, from which they get the title of their book. But what is power? Here, in Chapter 3, Acemoglu and Johnson deploy a definition that veers into the tautological:

Power is about the ability of an individual or group to achieve explicit or implicit objectives. If two people want the same loaf of bread, power determines who will get it.

Using this definition, how could we ever conclude that power wasn’t the reason for an observed outcome? Two people want a loaf of bread, and one of them gets it; we know this was due to “power”, because “power” is defined by who gets a loaf of bread. This kind of definition is semantically valid, but empirically useless; if you define “power” such that it simply means “whatever caused an outcome to happen”, you haven’t isolated causality, you have simply given it a new name.

Acemoglu and Johnson have a reason for employing a definition this infinitely broad; it allows them to include persuasion and compulsion in a single category of “power”.

The authors’ historical examples of when power determined the distribution of the benefits of technology include cases when laws and the threat of violence allowed some people to extract the benefits of technology for themselves — the cotton gin increasing slaveowners’ profits in the American South, or lords extracting agricultural surplus from peasants in medieval Britain. These are instances of compulsion, which certainly fit with our common, everyday, colloquial use of the word “power”.

But Acemoglu and Johnson also spend a lot of time arguing that persuasion is also a form of power. They cite instances in which techno-optimists and businesspeople in 18th century England and 21st century America persuaded the public to enact pro-business policies, through articles, speeches, conversations, and so on. Their explanation for why inequality has increased since the 1970s is, in effect, that silver-tongued technologists managed to persuade American society to weaken pro-worker institutions, and to allow the technologists to invent technologies that replaced human labor instead of complementing it.

The authors don’t venture to say exactly why these techno-optimists’ pro-business vision prevailed — they write that “an idea is more likely to spread if it is simple, is backed by a nice story, and has a ring of truth to it,” but they admit that “quite a bit of this process [of persuasion] is random,” and declare that “you are enormously lucky if you get the right idea, with just the right ring to it, at just the right time.”

I have to admit, this kind of surprised me. I expected to see some sort of pseudo-Gramscian theory of cultural hegemony (or at least some references to Gramsci or similar writers). Instead, the authors just sort of shrug and put it all down to luck. For some reason, the techbros just wrote really good posts, and by doing so they ruled the world — at least until their luck ran out and the world turned against them, I suppose.

In fact, I have to confess that the entire chapter on power and persuasion left me bewildered. I do not understand why we should put accidental success in a nonviolent marketplace of ideas in the same conceptual category as chattel slavery and feudalism. It seems to yield neither understanding nor solutions. Perhaps the historical example of the cotton gin might give us some insight about how to explain the spread of laissez-faire economics, but simply labeling both things as varieties of “power” does not yield that insight. And the idea that persuasion is power doesn’t seem to suggest any kind of systemic fix for the problem that sometimes society is persuaded to do things that increase inequality.

That doesn’t mean Acemoglu and Johnson have no solutions to recommend, though. They want to strengthen institutions like unions and labor laws, but their main idea is to redirect technological innovation toward technologies that complement workers instead of replacing them.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a loom

“With such persuasiveness, you tend to convince yourself that you are correct.” — Acemoglu and Johnson

Over the last six years, Acemoglu and Restrepo wrote a series of theoretical papers in which they lay out a number of different ways that new technology can affect workers’ jobs and wages. Basically, this ends up being a fancier version of a very old idea — capital can either substitute for labor or complement it. If capital substitutes for labor, then capitalists win, because they can replace people with machines, and pay people accordingly less. But if capital complements labor, then workers win, because capitalists have no choice but to hire them to work the new machines, and pay them good wages. Acemoglu and Restrepo make this theoretical breakdown a bit more nuanced, but in the end it really boils down to whether machines replace people or augment their abilities (either by making them more productive or by giving them new things to do).

Power and Progress attempts to analyze the history of technology through the lens of this theory. In eras where technology seemed to progress rapidly but workers’ wages didn’t grow much, like 18th century Britain, Acemoglu and Johnson argue that the main cause was technologists inventing machines that replaced human labor; in other eras where wages grew rapidly, like the late 19th century, they argue that technologists were inventing machines that created new tasks for humans to do.

At times this can begin to feel like a just-so story. For example, Acemoglu and Johnson cite electricity as a technology that was good for workers, because it created so many new industries for people to work in. But didn’t electrification also replace human labor in quite a large variety of ways? Electric lights save us the labor of making candles, electric dishwashers and washing machines and dryers automate our housework, and so on. How do we know this task automation outweighed by the new tasks electricity creates?

They also argue that wages in industrial Britain began to increase in the late 19th century because steamships and telegraphs — as opposed to looms — “expand[ed] the set of tasks and opportunities for workers”. As far as I can tell, this is a claim without evidence. Why was the telegraph’s automation of message couriers less significant than its creation of new jobs for telegraph operators? In Chapter 8, Acemoglu and Johnson blame communication technology for increasing inequality by enabling the offshoring of jobs to China and other countries. Why would modern communication technologies have exactly the opposite effect of the telegraph?

And in Chapter 6, Acemoglu and Johnson praise the early United States for its direction of innovation, writing that American businesses compensated for a lack of skilled labor by, in the words of engineer Joseph Whitworth, “call[ing] in the aid of machinery in almost every department of industry.” In Chapter 7 the authors write that the American use of interchangeable parts “was first and foremost an effort to simplify the production process so that workers lacking in artisanal skills could produce high-quality products.” But how is that any different from the British use of power tools to help unskilled make textiles in the 1700s? The difference is never explained.

On the other side of the coin, Acemoglu and Johnson cite most modern information technology as something that automates more tasks than it creates. But what about all the new tasks that IT creates — mobile developers, web designers, digital media marketers, content moderators, and so on and so forth? Why are these less economically important than the tasks that the internet automates away (encyclopedia salespeople, etc.)?

One answer is that if we assume that Acemoglu’s theory of automation is the main thing that’s going on, we can just infer the effects of particular technologies from macroeconomic outcomes — if we see wages stagnate, it must be because task automation outweighed task creation. But for anyone who suspects that Acemoglu’s theory might not actually be the main thing going on in the economy, just saying that the proof is in the pudding is a bit unsatisfying. It feels like a just-so story.

Is productivity good or bad?

In fact, the historical examples in Power and Progress leave themselves open to alternate narratives. The main alternative narrative is about productivity.

Acemoglu and Johnson repeatedly argue that if productivity gains are produced by automation, workers don’t see the benefits. They cite the idea that productivity naturally uplifts workers — which they call the “productivity bandwagon” — as one of the main nefarious narratives that technologists use to persuade society to allow them to invent technologies that replace workers.

But what if the “productivity bandwagon” narrative is true?

There are two main historical periods the authors cite as examples of excessive automation leading to stagnant wages — the early Industrial Revolution in 18th century Britain, where textile machines like looms replaced human artisans, and America since the 1970s. (Note: they make an error when they say, in Chapter 8, that “declines in real wages…have been a major part of U.S. labor market trends.” In fact, when you include benefits, real hourly compensation has grown a bit more slowly since 1973, but has still consistently risen.)

But Acemoglu and Johnson also note that both of these eras had sluggish productivity growth. Perhaps wages were stagnant in those eras because productivity was also stagnant?

Regarding the early Industrial Revolution, some researchers argue that the labor share didn’t actually fall. For example, here’s Crafts (2020):

[R]eal wages grew more slowly than real GDP per worker during the industrial revolution. However, the discrepancy was much less than has been claimed such that in 1820 the former had risen by about 12 per cent since 1770 and the latter by about 16 per cent. Second, labour productivity grew quite slowly prior to 1830 averaging a little below 0.4 per cent per year in the 60 years after 1770. Nevertheless, in the context of demographic pressure this was a very good outcome by pre-industrial standards. Third, as relative prices changed and exportable manufactures became cheaper, over the long run real product wages grew somewhat faster than real consumption earnings. Fourth, the share of profits in GDP rose over time from 17.2 per cent in 1770 to 31.3 per cent in 1860 but this was associated with a decline in the share of land rents and the share of labour was little changed. Fifth, looked at through the lens of growth accounting the evidence is of total factor productivity (TFP) growth accelerating only gradually to 0.6-0.8 per cent per year during 1830 to 1860 with the steam age only materializing after 1830.
In sum, this looks more like a story of paradoxically slow productivity growth than of pro-rich growth. The story of the industrial revolution is definitely not one of a new general-purpose technology boosting productivity growth at the expense of a big shift in the distribution of income which is the current fear about AI.

As for the U.S. since the 1970s, inequality has definitely increased, but — contrary to what you may have heard — pay has largely kept pace with productivity. Automation may have made wages more unequal (this is the argument of Acemoglu and Restrepo’s 2022 paper), but the modest decline in labor’s share of the national pie was probably mostly about land values increasing. Which means that aggregate wage stagnation was largely due to slowing productivity growth in recent years as well.

In fact, Acemoglu and Johnson also blame automation for stagnating productivity! In Chapter 8, they write that “productivity gains from automation may always be somewhat limited.” They coin the term “so-so automation” to describe technologies that take humans out of the loop but fail to increase productivity much by doing so. They argue that technologies that make better use of human capabilities lead to faster productivity growth as well as higher wages and lower inequality.

OK so…why isn’t that the book’s central this? You could write a very interesting book about how technologies that complement humans are better for both productivity and broad-based prosperity than technologies that try to substitute for humans wholesale. I would definitely read that book! But Acemoglu and Johnson did not choose to write that book; instead, they warn against a focus on productivity, claiming that it’s a seductive but dangerous narrative used by the greedy, fast-talking techbros. In my mind, this weakens their overall narrative.

Where’s the menu?

Throughout Power and Progress, the authors tell a story about a “menu of technologies” that entrepreneurs can choose from. On one hand, companies can choose to invest in automation, replacing workers, increasing inequality, causing slow wage growth, and maybe reducing productivity in the process. On the other hand, they can choose to invest in technologies that create new tasks for humans to do, thus increasing wages and decreasing inequality. Their story is that out of greed and/or elitism, entrepreneurs often choose the former, so it’s in the interests of society to push them toward choosing the latter.

But when the authors approvingly cite examples of new industries springing into being, they never give an explanation of why entrepreneurs and technologists chose to create these new industries, instead of trying to cut costs in existing industries. My default assumption would be that the people who invented and commercialized steamships, telegraphy, interchangeable parts, autos, electricity, and telephones were driven by the same sort of motivations that animated the people who invented and commercialized power looms, computers, and the internet. If not, why not? Was there ever a case when governments or unions pushed entrepreneurs to select Option A from the “menu of technologies” instead of Option B?

When Acemoglu and Johnson do discuss union power, it’s in the context of worker training. In Chapter 7, they write:

In fact, for unions [in the 1960s] the central issue was worker training. They insisted on training provisions to ensure that workers could be brought up to the necessary skill level to operate the new machinery and benefit from it.

This is very different from affecting the direction of innovation! This is a case of workers collectively pushing companies to invest in human capital, so that worker skills can catch up to the direction in which innovation was already going.

As far as I can tell, this book does not contain even one single example of when a union or government supposedly pushed an entrepreneur or company to choose a different path of technology in order to benefit workers. As far as I can tell, it does not even contain one single example of when an engineer, entrepreneur, company or investor chose to create a technology in order to benefit workers more.

In other words, there is no evidence here that the “menu of technologies” actually exists. It’s not clear that technologists and industrialists even know in advance whether the inventions they create and commercialize will create more new tasks than they automate. And this raises pointed and troubling questions for the authors’ preferred solution to the problems of inequality and wage stagnation.

Can the mandarins act as a check on the techbros?

In Chapter 11, Acemoglu and Johnson roll out their proposed solutions. Having concluded that inequality and wage stagnation are due to “tech billionaires and their agenda” choosing the wrong technologies from the “menu”, they call for democratic people-power to force the techbros back onto the labor-augmenting path.

What’s totally unclear is how to do this. Acemoglu and Johnson admit that “redirecting” the path of technological innovation is going to be an incredibly tall order:

Determining how different digital technologies are used and their impact on wages, inequality, and surveillance is much harder [than assessing their climate impacts]…Moreover, given the difficulty of distinguishing automation from other uses of digital technologies, automation taxes are currently not practical.

And yet the authors still claim that this can be done! Yet they’re maddeningly vague on the details:

There is a telltale sign of automation technologies: reducing the labor share of value added, meaning that once these technologies are introduced, how much of value added goes to capital increases and how much gets captured by labor decreases…On this basis, technologies that increase the labor share can be encouraged via subsidies for their use and their development.

But how do we know in advance, before a technology is invented, whether it will increase or decrease the labor share? This is just replacing one target of guesswork — new task creation vs. automation — with another target of guesswork.

Fundamentally, it still boils down to some sort of mandarins in a room somewhere — economists? government engineers? bloggers? — trying to assess the economic effects of a technology that doesn’t even exist yet.

As I wrote in a post last June, this is probably an impossible task. Some of the world’s top experts thought that AI would replace radiologists within a few years, but demand for radiologists boomed even as the new AI tools were coming online. The technologists got it wrong.

And the economists are just as likely to get it wrong. For example, industrial robots are the one technology that Acemoglu consistently rails against as an example of harmful automation. That’s based on his 2020 paper with Restrepo, where they found that companies that buy more robots employ fewer humans. But a whole bunch of other economists followed up on this research and found the exact opposite — robot adoption is correlated with more jobs at a company or in an industry. Here was a list I made back in 2022:

I’ll list a few of these studies:
1. Mann and Püttmann (2018) — Where Acemoglu and Restrepo…looked at correlation, this paper attempts to identify causation. They look at automation-related patents in an industry — a proxy for innovation in the automation space — and then look to see whether that industry gains or loses jobs. They find that “advances in national automation technology have a positive influence on employment in local labor markets”, though this isn’t true for every area.
2. Dixon, Hong and Wu (2021) — These authors looked at robot adoption in Canada, at the level of the individual company (or “firm”, as economists say). They found that companies that adopted more robots hired more people, while also improving the quality of their products and services.
3. Koch, Manuylov and Smolka (2019) — This paper looks at firm-level data for manufacturing companies in Spain. They find that robot adoption is associated with a substantial increase in employment as well as output.
4. Adachi, Kawaguchi and Saito (2020) — This paper finds the same thing as the previous one, but for Japanese companies over the course of a 40-year period.
5. Eggleston, Lee and Iizuka (2021) — These authors look at robot adoption by nursing homes in Japan, and find that it strongly increases employment, although it does result in existing nurses working fewer hours (and thus getting paid less).
6. Hirvonen, Stenhammar, and Tuhkuri (2022) — This paper looks at a technology subsidy program in Finland that increased adoption of a broad range of advanced technologies at Finnish firms. They find that this led to employment increases.
In fact, by this point the trend is clear. Essentially everyone is finding that, contra Acemoglu and Restrepo…robots are correlated with — and probably cause — higher employment in the companies and areas where they’re adopted.
What’s happening is that companies that use more robots hire more humans (and retain their existing humans) in jobs that complement the robots. That’s exactly what we saw with previous waves of automation — people find new roles, robots increase their productivity, and they get paid more. Looking at the countries that use the most robots in their manufacturing industry, it seems likely that this virtuous cycle is happening even at the level of whole nations.
Zooming out from just the manufacturing sector, Hötte, Somers, and Theodorakopoulos have a very interesting 2022 review paper in which they look at the literature on the entire range of automation technologies. Here’s an article in which they explain their results. Hötte et al. find that automation does replace jobs, but that this effect is outweighed by the “reinstatement” effect — in other words, people find new jobs to do. And their incomes generally rise as a result.

So no, there’s no possibility that a council of mandarins — engineers, economists, or whoever — can sit there evaluating every potential new technology that companies or inventors want to create, and deciding whether it will raise or lower the labor share. I mean, you could make a council of mandarins, and it could look at plans for new technologies, and it could issue decisions, but in practice it would be throwing darts at a dartboard. And it would be an incredibly costly tax on our companies, since it would introduce massive delays into their decision-making process. Their Chinese rivals, on the other hand, would suffer no such delays.

In other words, I see no hope for Acemoglu and Johnson’s preferred solution. The utter vagueness with which the idea is presented in Power and Progress doesn’t suggest that the authors have thought carefully about how this solution might work in practice.

In particular, these solutions seem inferior to something far simpler: policies to increase labor share ex post. Labor market institutions like co-determination and sectoral bargaining, and direct interventions like wage subsidies funded by taxes on capital income, can push up the labor share without requiring panels of experts to predict the unpredictable. And if entrepreneurs really do have any degree of foresight about whether their innovations will tend to push the labor share up or down, these policies will act like a Pigouvian tax on the kind of cost-cutting that Acemoglu and Johnson decry. With a wage subsidy, for example, the higher the market rate you can afford to pay your workers, the more of a rebate you can get from the government. So if there are technologies that augment your workers and let you hire new workers, a wage subsidy gives you an incentive to create them.

Anyway, I think simple policies like these should be economists’ first go-to solutions, rather than the creation of whole new social institutions.

The old narrative, and the new

At the start of this review, I talked about how Power and Progress may have missed its moment by getting lost in a flood of fears about AI. But there’s another way in which the book might be poorly timed. Wage inequality — the very thing that Acemoglu and Restrepo (2022) try to explain — has flatlined since the early 2010s.

Meanwhile, real wages have been rising strongly for years now, interrupted only by the post-pandemic inflation. And wages for production and nonsupervisory workers have risen more robustly than those for managerial workers:

Meanwhile, employment for prime-age Americans is near all-time highs, and unemployment is at record lows; everyone who wants a job in America has one.

All this has happened in exactly the time frame during which AI has exploded. Predictive AI burst onto the national scene in 2012 with the ImageNet paper, the basic technology for generative AI was created in 2017 with the transformer paper, and generative AI became really widespread in 2022-23 with LLMs and AI art programs. To reiterate: essentially all of the commercialization and implementation of artificial intelligence has happened during a time in which wages have been rising, inequality has been flat or falling, and employment has been high.

Maybe AI just isn’t big enough to kill all the jobs yet; maybe we just have to wait a few years and we’ll all be unemployed or working for pennies. Or maybe AI is actually the kind of technology that improves task productivity and creates new tasks instead of automating old tasks away. Or maybe Acemoglu has something wrong in his models, and further theoretical and empirical explorations will overturn his conclusions about the key role of automation in fostering inequality. I’m not sure.

Whatever is going on, though, I think it should give the AI worriers pause. This was not on the menu. If you went back to 2012, and asked people to predict the impact of a new machine that could recognize objects and imitate speech and create beautiful art, they probably would have assumed that the rising inequality that they had experienced for the last 30 years would now be turbocharged. And — at least so far — they’d have been completely wrong.

To me, that thought experiment illustrates the folly of trying to predict the economic effects of new technology. It also suggests another reason why Power and Progress didn’t make the same kind of splash it might have made in 2018. Obviously, our economic problems haven’t all been solved. But perhaps, underneath all of the anger and pessimism, Americans realize that something has shifted in their economy, for the better. And perhaps that’s making them a bit less interested in the kind of pessimistic economic narratives that flew off the shelves in the 2010s.

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It was about 7000 words, which is 2000 words longer than the review of The Courage to Act that I wrote for International Finance.

I also paywalled it, which was probably a stupid decision. Book reviews, especially highly critical ones, shouldn’t be paywalled; they should be disseminated as widely as possible, in order to reach as many of the book’s readers as possible.