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The system that conked out that in turn prevented the feed generation script from seeing new content has conked out once before in recent memory — last October. But when it conked out in October I noticed within a few hours, because readers kept complaining about the same typo that I had fixed, in my CMS, but which was still visible on the home page, because the home page only gets updated from the feed content. I never previously considered adding some sort of alert to check on this, because I always presumed I’d notice if new items I published weren’t appearing on the home page or in the feeds. ↩︎

This is the second half of the final part (I, IIa, IIb, III, IVa, IVb, Va, Vb) of our apparently five-part series laying out some general guidelines for how pre-modern armies are organized, with fictional worldbuilding and historical patterns in mind. Last time we started checking some fictional militaries against the general patterns we’ve laid out and we’re going to continue doing that this week.

This week, I want to turn to some of the more complex militaries structures we’ve discussed and I found they were more common in my repertoire of video games than film or literature, perhaps because the ultra-long-form structure of many video games provides a lot more space to explore complex institutions. So this week, we’re going to look at an example of a professional standing army in the Imperial Legion of The Elder Scrolls series, some private enterprise war through the Vailian Trading Company of Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire and the finally try to untangle the military system of Baldur’s Gate from the broader Forgotten Realms constructed world (including but not limited to Baldur’s Gate 3).

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).

The Imperial Legion

Now I should start by noting one of the obvious quirks of discussing any sort of worldbuilding when it comes to video games which is that video games are the product not of a single vision but of many hands, even more so than film or tv. After all, even just the dialogue of a single game is the product of more than one writer (Oblivion credits six ‘Quest Designers’ and two more for ‘Additional Writing,’ for instance) and of course a lot of the creative decisions are also made by artists, level designers and so on. And of course that team might be very different from one game to the next: there’s a lot of turnover from Morrowind to Skyrim.¹ So it shouldn’t surprise us that there may be some inconsistencies or contradictions; nevertheless there is enough continuity here to proceed.

We can begin by sketching out our civilian society. I really think the society of The Elder Scrolls is something we should come back to in more depth, because while it often models itself as the most generic ‘generic fantasy world,’ it actually isn’t in some interesting ways. But we’ll have to stay brief here.

Tamriel (the world of The Elder Scrolls) is, like our previous examples, a complex agrarian society, but it is different in important ways: Tamriel is substantially more urban than either Westeros or Middle Earth. That isn’t just reflected in it having larger cities – these games city sizes are invariably products of graphical limitations, rather than direct one-to-one expressions of worldbuilding – but in the organization of society: in the places we’ve seen mostly clearly (Cyrodiil, Morrowind and Skyrim) the Cyrodiillic Empire (from here on, just ‘the Empire’ for short) is able to organize its administration entirely through urban centers. Castles – fortified private homes in the countryside – exist in this world, but local administration is urban, even in a relatively under-developed province like Skyrim, where each of the administrative divisions (‘Holds’) has a capital in an urban settlement, be that a major city for the larger holds (Riften, Windhelm, Whiterun, Markarth and Solitude all seem to be intended as major cities) or smaller towns for the lesser holds (Falkreath, Dawnstar, Morthal and Winterhold). This is a society organized around cities, rather more like the ancient Mediterranean world than medieval Europe in that regard (and given the frequent Roman theming of the Empire, this hardly seems like an accident). Still agrarian – most of what is going on is still farming – but meaningfully more urban.

The Empire is in turn organized into provinces (nine of them) roughly corresponding to the historic areas of settlement of its constituent fantasy races. Cyrodiil is the capital province and by far the largest (only Morrowind comes close and much of it is thinly settled) and most populous – it is the imperial core and its size and population helps explain why the government in Cyrodiil is able to more-or-less (mostly less, by the time of Skyrim) hold the rest of Tamriel. Each of the provinces has its own internal customary local systems of government. That may seem strange but pre-modern territorial empires often left local ruling systems in place when they could and Cyrodiil does as well. In Cyrodiil proper, we see the province is divided into sub-regions (Counties) with a local ruler (a count) who is strongly subordinated to the center. While the position of count is hereditary, the position has very limited authority (as the wiki notes). in practice, Cyrodiil itself is a state with one legal system dictated from the capital and local ‘rulers’ reduced mostly to functionaries who implement that system, rather than independent powers in their own right.

Via the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Page wiki, the map of Tamriel released alongside Oblivion, which has been the standard map of the whole empire since that game. You can see that Cyrodiil is **much larger** than any other province, which is remarkable because it is also more densely peopled than any other province as well.

Outside of Cyrodiil, local communities are organized by local laws under local leaders: Morrowind is still ruled by its Great Houses, each with their own territory, while Skyrim is ruled by its Jarls. These entities retain their own local militaries independent of the Empire and so we ought to understand the periphery here as consisting of vassal polities. In short the state part of the Empire is Cyrodiil (and perhaps small parts of the other provinces), but much of the area it rules is non-state client rulers. That also shouldn’t be surprising: this was the normal structure for a lot of large empires – the empires of the Late Bronze Age come to mind especially. Notably though – and we’ll come back to this – the Imperial Legions (the military force of the Empire proper) maintain pretty obvious ‘escalation dominance’ over Cyrodiil’s vassals (at least until things get pear-shaped in Skyrim).²

So we have a fairly well-consolidated state in Cyrodiil which provides the imperial core for the Empire and then a periphery of vassal state- and non-state polities (mostly non-state, as we see them) which the Empire very much controls. How does the military system map onto that?

Surprisingly well, actually, so long as we account for the limitations in scale imposed by the genre (an RPG cannot have 90,000 men on the screen or it will crash) and the requirement for things like ‘town guards’ (so they player doesn’t murder-hobo entire towns).

The political structure (an imperial government with a core territory that also rules over vassal polities) is mirrored in the military structure: there is both the Imperial Legion but also local military forces. In Oblivion, these local forces (commanded by the counts) are little more than constabularies, something that actually is expressed pretty well in-game by how immediately out-matched they are by the Oblivion Crisis compared to the heavier forces of the Imperial Legion. In Morrowind and Skyrim, the forces of the local governments (the Jarls in Skyrim, the [dissertation on the wonderfully complex government of Morrowind here] in Morrowind) look to be quite a bit more substantial: particularly in Morrowind, one gets the sense that the armies of the Great Houses and of the Tribunal Temple are quite formidable (heavier, more expensive equipment, more magic, and so on), even if not a match for the Imperial Legion itself.³ That makes sense: in order to maintain control, the Imperial Legion has to maintain ‘escalation dominance’ – the ability to win at higher levels of escalation (thus dissuading potential foes from escalating) – over the many regional armies of the empire’s provinces.

Via the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Wiki, a selection of Imperial Legion soldiers, with rank descending from left to right. You can see quite clearly that this is n army with relatively uniform, rank-stratified equipment. The largest difference is gender-based (some armor looks different on women and female legionaries tend to wear skirts in addition to their armor), but by and large the legion is uniform apart from very low ranking recruits.

The major problem with the local military forces is that they appear to be standing forces to a substantial degree. We see a lot of ‘guards’ standing around on duty and such. But in practice, such local rulers aren’t going to have much need for a standing military force on duty all the time: most communities have sporadic security needs and small communities generally do not even require much of a permanent, standing constabulary. Instead, we might expect the permanent force to be a small retinue around the local ruler (we actually do see this in Skyrim with the concept of thanes), but beyond that, we might expect a ‘raised for the moment’ form of military organization: some sort of levy or militia, possibly with a standing component that is just a rotating period of duty among those liable to be drawn into the full militia in an emergency (a select levy to go with the general levy). In that case, ‘guard’ wouldn’t so much be a career as it would be something like a two-week shift every year that you had to do, effectively as part of your taxes.

The Imperial Legion (or legions) itself is also a recognizable structure: it seems pretty clearly to be a professional army. Members of the legion are very clearly deployed far from home (a point often exemplified by the legion’s multicultural recruiting) on a permanent basis and are full-time soldiers. Recruiting seems to be done through volunteers. While we see some recruitment of local auxiliary forces in Skyrim, these tend to be lighter troops and might be local auxiliaries: the clear nucleus of the force, we’re told, arrived with General Tullius from Cyrodiil. The legion is most often stationed in permanent fortifications (we see a lot in Morrowind) or key cities (like the Imperial City in Oblivion) – it is not a local militia and makes no effort to be ‘everywhere.’ Its equipment is remarkably (though not perfectly) uniform even in regions where its styles are distinctly foreign such as Morrowind or Skyrim, suggesting that equipment is state-issued and somewhat standardized. It also seems to be a long-service professional organization: we see quite a few ‘old soldiers’ still serving, both in desk-jobs and in combat roles.

A pair of Imperial Legion soldiers from Oblivion. While they retain some of their Roman theme (including an out-of-place Corinthian style helmet that I think is supposed to give Roman vibes, even though it is Greek-inspired), it is striking how much **heavier** the armor’s design is here than in either Morrowind or Skyrim. It makes the distinction between the plate-armored Imperial Legion and mail-armored town guards very visually striking.

And this is a structure that actually makes a fair bit of sense for a state like this: vassal rulers retain smaller local forces and the Empire largely lets them deal with the day-to-day work of order and administration. Meanwhile, the imperial center, with its greater resources, maintains a large, professional, well-equipped standing army that enables it to coerce those local rulers as well as engage in large-scale warfare. One imagines that, in the event of a major security threat, we’d see the Imperial Legion forces form the core of a field army, probably supplemented by non-legion local forces. The amusing thing is, while I think the developers imagine this structure as ‘Roman-ish,’ the state it actually recalls to me most clearly is the Neo-Assyrian Empire (fl. 911-626) which maintained a core professional army of full-time infantrymen (in matched pairs of archers and shield-bearers) who were then supported by levies drawn up from the empire’s vassals.⁴

The Imperial Legion in Skyrim. It is interesting that the legion seems a bit lighter in terms of equipment in Skyrim as compared to previous entries (although the pseudo-Roman theme remains clear). I wonder if this was an effort to more clearly express that the Empire is ‘on the ropes’ in Skyrim’s time period as compared to previous games, or simply a product of the decision to almost evenly divide the Legion between heavy and light armor troops (whereas Stormcloaks and town guards are mostly light armor types).

What I think is somewhat underdeveloped – especially in Oblivion and Skyrim – is the apparatus to pay for all of this. While other kinds of military systems can have their costs effectively devolved, a state-equipped professional army has to be paid out of the treasury, which in turn demands a state with the ability to raise a lot of revenue. Because it is a volunteer professional army, these soldiers would have to be well paid in order to recruit and retain them. Notably, we do not see in The Elder Scrolls, any indication that these costs are being defrayed by private enterprise war – the Imperial Legion is not a contractor-based army and commissions in its officer corps are not purchased, but awarded based in merit and internal promotion.

Now that’s not to say we don’t see any of that apparatus. The Empire clearly raises revenue both through taxes and through state-chartered monopolies. One of the first things we see in Morrowind is the Syda Neen Census and Excise Office, suggesting both head and excise taxes (excise taxes are taxes on specific goods) and there is a quest related to local tax collection. That said, the tax infrastructure in Morrowind is relatively minimal and that makes sense: most of the game takes place on Vvardenfel, which is only in the initial stages of having imperial control established. Notably, what collection we do see is in ports, suggesting customs and excise taxes may be central here, which also makes sense for a region that is only slowly being brought fully into central administration: port duties and excise taxes on luxury goods (I recall, but cannot find the line of dialogue, where we’re told that the excise taxes are on alcohol) are easier and quicker things to set up.

But what we don’t see is a more focused and intense extraction system in Cyrodiil or especially in Skyrim. By the time Skyrim takes place, the Empire is no longer at peace, but is recovering from a large war and trying to rapidly prepare for its seemingly inevitable sequel, which should demand high revenues and thus that taxes would be high as well. Yet ‘tax revolt’ is nowhere in the Stormcloak rebellion’s motivation (they’re focused more on religious persecution and ethno-nationalism) and we see almost none of the apparatus of extraction that we ought to see for a province that has been long-held by the Empire. The same is broadly true for Cyrodiil, though there are a couple of quests in Oblivion related to things like port taxes in Anvil and such.

Alongside that fairly minimal taxation apparatus, we have another major revenue source, which is the East Empire Company, a fairly obvious riff off of the British East India Company (even borrowing the ‘East’ despite appearing in places like Skyrim that are…not in the East), a massive vertically integrated company with a bunch of state-chartered monopolies on luxury goods. That is a very historically rooted way for a state to raise revenue, of course. The problem is that it isn’t enough. Recall, Tamriel is a complex agrarian society: we see no hint of even early mass manufacture, much less industry, so the overwhelming majority of economic activity is going to be in agriculture and pastoralism. That in turn necessarily means that the revenues generated from something like the East Empire Company are going to be somewhat marginal to the state itself. The Roman Empire had, for instance, a slew of state monopolies (on things like silver mines) as well as rents on state-controlled lands and resources which the Romans collectively called vectigalia, but it is very clear that the large majority of Roman taxes were what the Romans called tributum: taxes assessed on agricultural land or produce.

So what we ought to see in order to complete the Imperial Legions is the infrastructure, particularly in Cyrodiil and Skyrim, for substantial tax collection on the common folk, particularly on agriculture. Now that could be structured in two ways: we could see (as we do in Morrowind) direct imperial taxation, with imperial officials in each settlement assessing taxes themselves. Now those officials might be direct employees of the Empire, but an equally likely solution (which we do seem to see in Morrowind in Caldera, as I recall) are tax farmers: private businessmen who have contracted to do tax collection in an area.

Alternately, the Empire might do what the Romans eventually did: assess taxes on communities and leave it up to local leaders and governments on how to collect those taxes. Given how visible and important local ‘vassal’ rulers are in the Empire, this seems to me the more likely solution: tell the local Jarl or Count or Great House that it is responsible for raising a specific amount of money (or revenue in kind, so a specific amount of grain or recruits or whatever else) and then let them sort it out with their own local administrative apparatus. That said, if this was the system, we ought to hear about it more, especially in Skyrim where the local revolt against the Empire ought to mean that imperial taxes are being collected in some places and are not being collected in others.

All of that said, the fact that the Empire in The Elder Scrolls has a somewhat fragmented structure and then has a fragmented military apparatus – with a professional army enforcing imperial power over a bunch of much smaller local militaries which do the day-to-day work of maintaining law and order – works as a reflection of the society we’re shown. What is missing is mostly just the apparatus of empire itself, which has really been neglected in the setting’s worldbuilding since Morrowind.

The Vailian Trading Company

That said, bringing up the East Empire Trading Company of the Elder Scrolls games highlights one odditiy: the EEC lacks its own military force, instead relying primarily on the Imperial Legion (something we see clearly in Solstheim) and only occasionally on local goons. But of course a massive, state-chartered trading company of this sort is frequently going to have to operate far from the center of imperial control and potentially with local communities that object quite loudly to being so obviously exploited. As a result, these sorts of ‘mega-corps’ tend to operate their own independent military forces: the societates of Roman publicani that managed the tax-farming system (prior to Augustus’ reforms to the largely community-centered tax system mentioned above, though some taxes remained farmed) maintained private security forces we can see clearly in documentary evidence from Roman Egypt, while early modern trading ‘mega-corps’ like the British East India Company or the Dutch VOC maintained full-on private militaries, complete with armies and warships.

But we do see that structure in Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire. And let me also just say: if you are a fan of classic computer role-playing games (BG3, Wrath of the Righteous, Rogue Trader, Solasta, that sort of thing), you really ought to give Deadfire a spin. It is very good and very tightly written (and the stronger of the two Pillars games). It’s also, I think, a better introduction to Eora than the more recent Avowed and I really liked Avowed.

Here the setting is the Deadfire Archipelago, a smaller region in the larger world of Eora, with three principle military powers along with a fourth minor power (the Principi sen Patrena, a very loose pirate confederation that survives to a significant degree in the shatter-zone created by the other three that we’ll leave aside here) and all three are actually pretty well realized. The actually indigenous local power are the Huana. They are significantly fragmented: the strongest tribe (the Kahanga) are a complex agrarian society with a large capital city (Neketaka) that exert an imperial overlordship over smaller tribes and communities in their periphery. Their society is a caste-based one and their military structure follows that: the priests (including ‘Shapers’ who wield powerful magic) and the warriors both are drawn from the highest caste, the Mataru, which thus acts as a hereditary military-and-religious aristocracy which also – not by accident – controls most of the wealth. Their military is thus drawn primarily from this upper-class, drawing its cohesive principle from the exclusivity and strong social expectations for that class, financed by the wealth of its role as the ruling elite (that is to say, wealth extracted from the lower, worker classes). But of course that system imposes strong limits too: the military cannot be readily expanded beyond those classes effectively and the entrenched class interests of the elite render the Huana military static and unresponsive to new technology – though formidable, their position relative to rivals is deteriorating. As a result, the player’s interactions with the Huana are always contextualized by the Huana leadership’s own sense of growing military vulnerability to incursions from foreign colonial powers, of which they have two.

From Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, the Huana capital of Neketaka. The vertical structure replicates the class structure: the military and religious castes are at the top and their trash and refuse **literally** flow down to the artisan and eventually worker castes at the bottom. It is a neat visual expression of the society made all the more striking by Queen’s Berth (controlled by the VTC) and the Brass Citadel (controlled by the RDC) strangling the city economically from the bottom up. The player can side with the Huana, but their rulers are not interested in changing their culture and it is hard to see how their rigid, unchanging social system can hold out against the dynamic, predatory invaders for long.
Deadfire is a **really good RPG** and I really encourage you to give it a try if you haven’t.

The first is the Royal Deadfire Company, which represents the distant maritime kingdom of Rauatai in the Archipelago. The name is something of a euphemism: the institution began as the Rauatai Trading Company, but was brought under the direct control of the ruler of Rauatai (the ranga-nui) and converted into the RDC, which in practice isn’t really a trade company anymore, but an expeditionary force, an army of the government of Rauatai which aims to conquer the region – albeit gradually, because the Huana are still strong enough to make a direct war of conquest a risky proposition. The RDC is thus effectively an expeditionary force of professional soldiers, funded and maintained by Rauatai (itself a large maritime empire) doing ‘ports-and-forts‘ imperialism. Consequently, what we see of them are fortified staging posts (notably Hasongo) to support their navies and channel goods back to the homeland and nearly all of the people we see are military personnel more or less directly employed by the Rauataian state.

Via the Wiki, the Rauataian main base at Hasongo (which has been better days). While there is a port and storage here, you can very visibly see this is a military outpost first and barely a civilian settlement at all. The contrast with the VTC outposts, which almost invariably have a large local population and lots of civilian economic activity, is marked. The RDC is a predatory, exploitative army of conquest, whereas the VTC is a predatory, exploitative company.

Notably, as an aside, we don’t get as much information about the rest of Rauatai’s military that I recall. Honestly, I’d think something like a core army of conscripts might make sense (given how militarized the society is described as being), with only the forces deployed permanently abroad (like the RDC) being composed of professional ‘long-timers.’

In contrast to the RDC which is almost an army of a foreign state, the third power really is a trading company first: the Vailian Trading Company (itself a pretty clear echo of the Dutch VOC, down to the similar acronym). One oddity worth noting is that the VTC is not attached to one state, but several, representing the combined efforts of the Vailian Republics, a loose confederation of city-states. The nearest historical parallel here may actually be something like the historical Hanseatic League. But where the RDC is essentially an arm of the Rauataian state, the VTC is doing something different: private enterprise war. The VTC is a company, run by a board of directors, answerable to investors in the Vailian Republics under a charter sanctions by their confederation.

From the Wiki, the banner of the Vailian Trading Company. The five stars are meant to indicate the company is recognized by all five of the major constituent Vailian Republics.

And (unlike the EEC of the Elder Scrolls series), it has its own military to secure and advance its operations, every bit as predatory as the RDC. And what we see – and I think this makes sense for the society being presented – is a contractor-based military. Indeed, we meet one of these contractors, Atello Valera, who the VTC has contracted to provide a pretty large security presence, including a number of warships. What I do think is missing here is a greater array of contractors and sub-contractors. Realistically, we might expect the regional heads of the VTC (Ignato Castol and Lueva Alvari, who split maritime and land-based operations between them) to have a few key contractors (whatever the Vailian equivalent to colonels or condottiere is), who would then have sub-contractors running individual ships or companies, with basically everyone in the chain effectively functioning as a sort of ‘military entrepreneur.’ We do get a real sense of that entrepreneurship from the Valeras, but they ought not be the ‘only game in town’ on the military side.

From Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, some VTC troops. There’s actually neat visual storytelling here. The soldier on the far left is a company guard and by far the heaviest armed. Next the three fellows in the one picture are Valera family soldiers, their lighter equipment fitting with the fact that Valera is a **naval** military contractor. Meanwhile the two figures on the far right are soldiers contracted under the Bardattos and resemble more closely the ‘average’ VTC soldier we see throughout the game.
The VTC, in short, has a bunch of different people contracting soldiers for different tasks, so while there’s a clear cultural similarity in their equipment, it isn’t uniform (unlike the RDC, which is quite uniform!)

That said, I think Deadfire actually does a good job of correlating militaries and societies: the Huana, Rauatai and Vailians have quite different societies and thus quite different militaries: a warrior-class military with devolved costs that fits the caste-based Huana society, a professional military with standardized state equipment and regular pay that fits the very centralized Rauataian state and finally a private enterprise warfare military using military contractors that fits the decentralized structure of the Vailian Republics.

Defending Baldur’s Gate

Now we turn to the unusual military structure of Baldur’s Gate, drawing not just on the recent Baldur’s Gate 3, but more broadly on the lore of the city as part of the Forgotten Realms setting. We’re picking one city to focus on in part because it has become the most visible part of the Forgotten Realms’ setting and also because, to be frank, the military, social and economic structures of the Forgotten Realms are kind of a mess. That’s not necessarily a harsh criticism – this was a setting built for specific purposes (facilitating D&D gameplay) rather than worldbuilding verisimilitude. But that still makes them interesting to talk about from this perspective because they often test public assumptions about what pre-modern societies look like.

(Note that in BG3 one of the major plot-points is an effort by one of the villains to unbalance the city’s military system by adding on an army of evil metal golems to it, in a bid to take over. I’m going to leave that part out here, because the Steel Watchers aren’t part of the stable military system of Baldur’s Gate. Ironically, if Gortash had succeeded, the military system of Baldur’s Gate would make a lot more sense: you’d have a tyrant monarch who ruled the city by virtue of controlling its military.)

Via the Wiki, a screenshot of Baldur’s Gate as it appears in Baldur’s Gate III.

Baldur’s Gate, in the setting, is a major seaside mercantile city with a large population, clearly part of a larger complex agrarian society. Its upper-class are wealthy burghers (rather than large landowners) and it is ruled by a council of four ‘grand dukes’ who are elected for life.⁵ It is also a big city by pre-modern standards: the wiki figures a population around 120,000 or so in the urban area.

Now one thing in the lore is that because the city has a natural defensive position (it is located on an inlet) and because it has a very strong outer wall built by the heroic figure Balduran, for whom the city is named, that it is generally peaceful and does not necessarily require a large army. The problem here of course is that Baldur’s Gate doesn’t just need to defend the city core, it needs to defend the agricultural hinterland that feeds it. This is a common problem in fantasy worldbuilding – cities divorced from the agricultural lands they require to survive. Nor can this issue be salvaged by saying the Baldur’s Gate is a city that lives on trade and such. These are agrarian societies, which is to say that food production (via farming) makes up the lion’s share of the economy, with textile production (also via pastoralism, agriculture and peasant labor) making up quite a lot of the rest. Consequently, in the absence of industrial production, there’s no amount of economic activity you can be doing in the remaining small slice (think 10-20% at most) of the economy that is going to allow a city to import all of its food and fabric. The only activity that can manage this feat is empire: the (violent) extraction if someone else’s food and fabric, in which case you still have a hinterland, it is simply held by force and coercion.⁶ The city needs a hinterland and it needs to be defended.

That said, Baldur’s Gate does have an army – indeed it has one-and-a-half armies, in practice. Order in the upper city is kept by an armed constabulary called The Watch which, according to the Wiki, has about a thousand members, of whom perhaps 300 or so are on active duty at any given time, making this effectively a civic militia. What keeps the Watch from acting fully like a military is that they are not empowered to operate outside of the city walls. Amusingly to me, this force of – at any given moment – 300 active soldiers and 700 or so reservists, somehow rates a high command with six major generals and two more senior generals despite being no bigger than a battalion (which would normally by commanded by just one major or captain in our world).

Instead, the main force of Baldur’s Gate’s defense is the Flaming Fist, a mercenary company kept essentially on permanent retainer by the city. It is a standing, effectively professional force, organized on the employment principle, consisting of – according to the wiki – approximately 2,000 soldiers (with a peak strength of 6,000). The Flaming Fist was founded by a grand duke and it seems like its leader (the marshal) is generally one of the four grand dukes that governs the city.

Via the Wiki, the Flaming Fist doing some recruitment.
It is striking how heavy and expensive their equipment is. Maintaining this organization on a permanent basis would be **extraordinarily expensive**, which if I was a citizen of Baldur’s Gate would get really frustrating, because as far as I can tell the Flaming Fist’s job is to spend the first two acts of every story about the place losing until the heroes show up and save everyone.

And there are a few problems here. The first is a problem that afflicts a lot of Forgotten Realms armies which is this is not enough army. A city-state with more than 100,000 people in the core urban area certainly ought to be able to muster up a much larger army. Medieval Ghent had a population by the late Middle Ages around 50,000 and was able to put something on the order of 8,000 men on the field to fight against the city militia of Bruges in 1382 and they were outnumbered by the Bruges militia. Baldur’s Gate is well over twice the size and yet has a far smaller total force. Indeed, its fairly close in size to Classical Athens (especially if we account for the missing rural countryside a city of that size must have), which was able to deploy more than 12,000 men against Syracuse, supported by roughly 200 triremes (so around 40,000 rowers) and was able to recover from the total loss of that force.

But that size problem gets us to an underlying problem in matching up this type of society, its resources and security needs with the kind of army it has. If we put the Watch aside for now, the primary defense force for Baldur’s Gate are the Flaming Fists and while the lore describes these fellows as a mercenary company because they sometimes take jobs outside of Baldur’s Gate, they’re really a standing army. No one is going to mistake your mercenary company for an independent outfit if it is also traditional that the marshal of the company is also one of the four elected leaders of the city. That’s not an independent mercenary company being hired, that’s a political alliance with Baldur’s Gate enabling another community to gain the protection of its army.

But you may recall as we discussed recruitment and payment principles that the state-supplied (the Flaming Fists have standardized equipment), full-time, long-service professional army is almost exclusively a creature of large, well-administered empires and there’s a reason for that. For one, only such a large and complex state is capable of mobilizing the resources necessary for such an expensive system and equally only large empires have the kind of round-the-clock security needs to justify one. That is, after all, the feature that makes professional armies so expensive: they have to be fed, paid, housed and equipped in wartime as well as peacetime – there is no option to simply send the men back to their homes and jobs. Thus, while smaller states might maintain a small standing force – a prince’s retinue, a small elite unit or a constabulary force – their military is not built around that force, it is built around forces which can be expanded and contracted to fit changing security needs.

As an aside, this is part of why we can’t just say the Flaming Fist function basically as a condottieri force. Italian states raised condottieri in response to specific military threats – they did not maintain them continuously in peacetime. Indeed, one of the key advantages of condottieri was precisely that: you could pay them in war time and not pay them in peace time, though of course they were also famously untrustworthy.

The Flaming Fists also do not fit the political structure of Baldur’s Gate. There is a reason that states which do use standing armies tend to have a unitary power structure, like a monarchy, because the very nature of a long-service standing professional army is that whoever wields that army is the state. Baldur’s Gate is ruled by four high officials who serve for life, three of whom collectively share control over a gendarmerie of 300-part timers and one of whom has control over and the loyalty of a standing for of at least 2,000 professional full-time soldiers. That is a system that becomes a monarchy very fast. Political power here is fragmented, but for some reason military power is not, which is hardly a stable structure.

And finally, the Flaming Fists do not fit the social structure of Baldur’s Gate either. This is a city dominated by a class of wealthy burghers (the ‘patriars,’ a clear riff off of Roman patricians), whose wealth mostly comes from trade or non-agricultural business. That’s fine – there really should be a landholding aristocracy somewhere too – but the problem is that this class is nowhere represented in the military structure. It’s the ruling class, whose interests the military system is intended to protect yet these families do not make up the elite of the military, nor its officer class.

We can effectively go in two directions ‘fixing’ Baldur’s Gate: we can make the society fit the military or the military fit the society. In the first direction: a city which has a professional military force that answers to just one guy (the marshal of the Flaming Fists) isn’t going to be an oligarchic quasi-democracy. It is going to be some kind of autocracy: the marshal is going to be the autocrat who sets the rules, de iure (as a monarchy) or de facto (as a tyranny). In this case, the weakness of the Watch makes sense: this was the city’s old militia, now sidelined because it would threaten the power of a tyrant-marshal, who is probably also busy breaking the power of the old ruling class (the patriars) and consolidating their wealth into his own political network. Alternately, we might get a sort of monarchy-within-bounds as we see in Venice and to an extent (with its two kings) in classical Sparta: a single leader does have command over the military, but the rest of the political system is heavily focused on constraining that leader, to the point that they have officials whose sole job is to watch their every move and there are other political institutions empowered to unilaterally remove a marshal who behaves badly. Even then, a purely professional force seems like a recipe for a self-coup in which the marshal sidelines everyone else because he alone commands the loyalty of the Flaming Fists, whatever the political system may say.

The alternative is to come up with a military system that fits the society we see: a somewhat representative oligarchy (with some democratic elements) primarily lead by a handful of elite families that wield outsized wealth. That kind of society has little need for a large standing army at all: the people with goons are also the people who wield political power and so the system they need is one that catches petty thieves and resolves disputes between each other, not a system to garrison whole districts of the city. The Flaming Fists are unnecessary for such a society (though the Watch as a gendarmerie which serves the collective interests of the patriars might survive).

Now those elite families could tax themselves extremely harshly in order to maintain a meaningful standing army but why would they? Instead, we ought to expect that Baldur’s Gate would defend itself with a civic militia that mirrors its own social structure: the very poor are excluded (and probably don’t vote), while the bulk of the burghers fight as infantry (and have some token political participation) and the patriars serve as officers and cavalry (and have maximum political roles). Because the patriars – or the middling burghers – would rather not tax themselves, they’re going to devolve military costs: everyone buys their own kit and serves based on wealth. That system might take the form of the sort of conscription-based civic armies we see in Greece and Rome or it might take the form of medieval civic militias, like the aforementioned schuttersgilde. If the latter, we should expect those military guilds to be major political actors in the city’s governance, either de iure (they have fixed places on the ruling council or whatever) or de facto (their members just tend always to get elected). Crucially, unlike the Flaming Fists, they wouldn’t be external to the city’s class system, but tightly integrated into it.

Conclusions

This series has ended up rather a lot longer-winded than I intended, but what I hope it has served to demonstrate first is that not all societies have the same sorts of armies. My critiques here have focused mostly on complex agrarian societies, because this was a series for worldbuilders and that is most of what fantasy worlds get made out of, but of course the armies of nomadic pastoral peoples or hunter gatherers are really different as well.

Importantly, societies do not pick their military structures at random, nor are they necessarily free to pick and choose whatever military system they like. Instead, military systems, which are defined by the interaction of principles of recruitment, methods of mobilization, systems of equipment, payment and supply and sources of cohesion are generally long-standing legacy institutions that emerge alongside larger social structures. Individual leaders are rarely at leisure to change or redefine these systems (though it does happen sometimes).

Perhaps most importantly, these systems are invariably tightly connected to the structure of a society and its political organization. No army can help but recreate its civilian social structures on the battlefield. So a society in which the dominant political and economic force is a mass of middling farmers who elect their leaders are likely to form armies composed of a mass of infantrymen who elect their generals. A society in which a handful of elites lord over the disenfranchised and largely impoverished peasantry is likely to have armies centered on mounted elites, with infantry that is limited and unreliable at best. More complex forms of organization, like private enterprise war with military contractors or standing, long-service professional armies, demand states with matching levels of revenues and complexity as well as a set of security needs which demand these expensive, complex and difficult solutions to the problem of raising military force.

While those rules may feel constraining, I think – and I hope in this post and the last, I’ve shown – they can also, for the worldbuilder, offer storytelling opportunities. After all, if armies reproduce their society’s social structures – often more explicitly than the civilian society itself – that means any time an army is ‘on screen,’ it provides an opportunity to say something about the underlying society. An observer who noticed, for instance that British military leadership in the early 1900s was generally drawn from the same handful of schools would have learned something about the structure of power in British society. The same might be said if the person glanced at Europe and noticed that despite its modern industrial economy, most of the high military command of early 1900s Germany in the first World War continued to be drawn from the old Junker class (visible because of the ‘von’ in their names), a trend which continued into the second.

And indeed, someone who glanced at the modern American military and noticed that American officers functionally always have college degrees, that high ranking officers generally have advanced degrees and that American enlisted personnel generally do not have either will have learned something about the structure of class, power and wealth in the United States: our ruling class is defined more by where you went to school and for how long than by your last name or hereditary titles (which we do not have). And the military cannot help but replicate that structure.

The same is equally true in fictional worlds. Of course one shortcut to producing these kinds of interesting linkages is to adopt a historical pattern wholesale by imitating a real polity and making modest changes. That said, it can be equally interesting to think about the implications of odd combinations, especially for societies in transition. Because, of course, societies are never static things and as they change – be that change swift or slow – their military structures will be forced to change with them, or else will be bent and deformed by the attempt not to change. In fiction, civil-military failure can be as interesting as success.

And in the end, a society whose institutions are interwoven and interlinked – as all real societies are – is just more interesting to read about than a fictional society which is a mere jumble of tropes.

The Economist has an interesting article this week, in which it goes after Daron Acemoglu. Acemoglu is probably the top economist in the world at this point, having just earned a Nobel prize, and sitting right at the top of the list of most cited economists. So it’s kind of funny that when it talks about people who doubt Acemoglu’s research, the one person it mentions is…me!

Give an economist a few drinks, however, and some of them will venture their true opinions about this giant. “Much of his theoretical work is useful, but he uses his models to inform populist policies that have been tried before and failed,” blasts one well-known economist. Some commentators do not require Dutch courage. “I’ve been yelling about Acemoglu for literally a decade,” Noah Smith, an economics blogger, has said, in response to a flurry of online criticism of Mr Acemoglu’s work.

(For the record, The Economist did not actually interview or contact me for this article. Their quote of me was from a tweet from June, which they did not link to in the article.)

It is true that I have been pretty critical of much of Acemoglu’s work over the years. In 2012 I argued strongly against a paper he wrote in which he claimed that America is more entrepreneurial than Sweden because America’s weaker safety net forces people to work harder (in actuality, Sweden is more entrepreneurial by most measures). In 2022 I pointed out that a famous Acemoglu paper claiming that robots destroy jobs was actually an outlier, and listed a bunch of other papers that reach the opposite conclusion. I liked his book Why Nations Fail, but I also admit that its empirical foundations are fairly shaky. I didn’t like Acemoglu’s more recent book Power and Progress, and I was highly critical of a recent paper Acemoglu wrote about AI and productivity.1 I also think Acemoglu’s argument that skilled immigration has crippled the American education system — now being heavily cited by Breitbart and such — is extremely implausible.

But this is hardly newsworthy. I go after Acemoglu’s work because I know he can take it; he’s a titan of the economics field, and I am but a lowly blogger. Nothing I say is going to affect his reputation or his prestige, even if someone at The Economist mentions my critiques in an article. Indeed, after the article came out, top figures in the profession rushed to condemn it and to defend Acemoglu. The Economist does list a bunch of — usually justified — criticisms of Acemoglu’s work, but this does not mean Acemoglu has been discredited as a researcher or exposed as overrated; indeed, it would be difficult to name a top economist whose body of work does not contain a variety of questionable theoretical assumptions, motivated reasoning, and/or shaky empirical results. This is a problem with the field itself, not the man; it’s part of a broader crisis of unreliability throughout much of academia.

But for that same reason, despite the Economist article’s lack of newsworthiness, I think it’s good that the magazine decided to come at the king. Economics is far too hierarchical and closed of a profession. Younger and less accomplished researchers routinely defer to the authority of famous and senior figures, and critics from outside the field are typically brushed off. Exactly how it got to be this way is a topic that deserves a longer post, but I believe the hierarchical, closed culture of econ has resulted in a research literature that has been too skewed toward the priorities and intuition of top authority figures. I thus think it’s generally a healthy thing to tweak the tails of those Olympian figures, as long as criticisms are grounded in substance. As they say, “science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”

So in that spirit, let’s critique another Acemoglu paper.

First, the background. Recently, a lot of people (including myself, but also prominent economists) have begun worrying about low fertility rates. Across all countries — poor as well as rich — fertility just keeps going down and down, with no floor in sight.

This presents two distinct dangers: population aging and population shrinkage. Aging, rather mechanically, creates a burden for young people, because you have more retirees who have to be supported by each worker, either through taxes or through family support. It also might reduce productivity, for example if older managers are less innovative, but that’s more speculative. Population shrinkage, meanwhile, is a threat to total GDP, which you might care about if you want your country to be more powerful. There’s also the possibility that a smaller population might reduce growth — by reducing the opportunities for specialization, or by reducing the available pool of researchers.

But some people argue that a shrinking population is no problem — or might even be a good thing. When you make human workers scarce, it creates an incentive to invest in labor-saving technology, which boosts productivity. This mechanism has been proposed by some growth theorists, and some economic historians, like Robert Allen, even think this is what caused the Industrial Revolution! This effect might be strong enough to cancel out the aggregate effect of population aging, so that society stays just as rich — or even gets richer — due to low fertility rates.

This is actually a plausible mechanism. I have to say, I’m skeptical that it works in the general case. Human beings aren’t just labor supply; they also create labor demand. The incentive for businesses to buy new machine tools, robots, AI, etc. is that someone is going to buy the stuff they produce with those tools. If you have fewer people, you have fewer consumers. This is probably the reason why the effect of immigration on wages is typically close to zero. Babies are not that different from immigrants. A larger market size can also create an incentive for more rapid innovation — in fact, Acemoglu and Linn (2004) find that faster population growth increases pharmaceutical innovation.2

But anyway, the idea that population scarcity stimulates innovation is the thesis of a new paper by Daron Acemoglu, David Autor, Keelan Beirne, and Andrew Scott. This is from the abstract:

Contrary to the widespread expectation that [low birth rates] hamper economic growth, we find lower birth rates are associated with higher growth in GDP per working-age adult across countries and higher wage growth across US commuting zones, with no negative impact on aggregate GDP or earnings. These patterns are not explained by educational upgrading, rising female labor force participation, the declining importance of agriculture, or neoclassical-Solow mechanisms. We argue that they reflect the endogenous, labor-saving response of technology to the scarcity of younger workers. Consistent with this interpretation, countries and regions with lower birth rates exhibit more labor-saving patents and growing high-tech activity. There is also higher TFP growth across countries and industries. [emphasis mine]

It’s a plausible result. But before we go on to the details of the paper, let’s talk about what this result would imply, if it does turn out to be true.

One of the paper’s basic theses is that technological automation raises wages. That flies in the face of the empirical work that Acemoglu has done on robots.3 It also more broadly seems to contradict what Acemoglu has been saying about AI, both in his research papers and in his public statements. In his 2024 paper, “The Simple Macroeconomics of AI”, Acemoglu writes that “predicted TFP gains over the next 10 years [from AI] are…predicted to be less than 0.53%.” In his 2021 paper, “Harms of AI”, Acemoglu writes:

I argue that if AI continues to be deployed along its current trajectory and remains unregulated, it may produce various social, economic and political harms. These include: damaging competition, consumer privacy and consumer choice; excessively automating work, fueling inequality, inefficiently pushing down wages, and failing to improve worker productivity. [emphasis mine]

This stands in direct contradiction to Acemoglu’s new paper with Autor, Beirne, and Scott. If modern automation technologies push down wages without raising productivity, it cannot compensate for population aging in the way that Acemoglu, Autor, Beirne, and Scott claim that it must — and therefore, population aging is dangerous in a way that it wasn’t before.

Now, it’s fine for a researcher to find two seemingly contradictory things — or even put forward two contradictory theories — in two different papers. The real world is messy and complicated, and there are plenty of “puzzles” in the literature. But if Acemoglu goes around simultaneously telling us:

not to worry about population aging, because automation will compensate for it with higher productivity and higher wages, and
to worry a lot about automation, because it pushes down wages without raising productivity much…

…then we have a problem.4

But anyway, on to the actual details of Acemoglu et al. (2026). First of all, I’m not convinced by their result that lower birth rates raise living standards at the country level. The reason is that once they control for a bunch of stuff — education, urbanization, geographic region, etc. — the result loses statistical significance. Here’s their Table 1, with the estimates I’m talking about circled in red:

In their abstract, the authors declare that “these patterns are not explained by educational upgrading, rising female labor force participation, the declining importance of agriculture, or neoclassical-Solow mechanisms.” But at least some of these patterns can apparently be explained by other things — initial education levels, urbanization, and so on — which makes the claim in the abstract a lot less impressive than it sounds.5

Also, note that the more controls the authors add, the weaker the estimated effect becomes. That’s generally a red flag in empirical papers. No matter how smart and careful you are, there are always things you don’t control for, especially in a cross-country regression, since countries differ in so many ways. So if the things you do control for tend to weaken your headline result by a lot, you should be worried that the rest of your result can be explained by the controls you left out.

For example, what about institutions, which Acemoglu has spent much of his career telling us are the main determinants of development? If the legacy of colonialism can be canceled out by passing out free condoms, why did Acemoglu win a Nobel prize? The word “institutions” does not even appear once in this new paper!6

A more realistic possibility is that lower birth rates in 1940 were correlated with other things — maybe a lot of other things — and that it’s these other things, rather than birth rates, that give rise to the correlation in the paper.

Of course, what we ultimately care about isn’t GDP per working-age adult7 — it’s GDP per capita. The authors have data on GDP per capita, but they barely mention it in the analysis;8 I’m not sure why. They do look at total GDP, and here they find no correlation, but a big standard error:

We shouldn’t interpret absence of evidence as evidence of absence. Cross-country regressions have small samples and tons of heterogeneity, so their standard errors tend to be huge — they just have trouble explaining much about the world. But the authors sort of blur this line, saying things like “no negative impact on aggregate GDP or earnings”, when really they should say “we can’t find a negative impact.” There could be a positive relationship between birth rates and growth hiding in that cloud of data points. (Sadly, this is standard practice in economics, but it makes a difference in how results get sold.)

Anyway, the result for wages in U.S. commuting zones holds up somewhat better. It’s a bit more statistically significant, and it doesn’t get attenuated as much by adding controls. But here, I’m worried about different issues: sorting and clustering. Basically, the result shows that coastal cities — places like New York City, San Francisco, Boston, etc. — had both lower birth rates in 1940 and faster wage growth from 1970 to 2020. The authors’ interpretation is that businesses in NYC, SF, and Boston had fewer workers, and so were forced to embrace labor-saving automation, while businesses in places like Birmingham, Alabama or Gary, Indiana refused to automate because they were endowed with plentiful cheap labor thanks to the legacy of an extra-large Baby Boom.

I am suspicious of this result, because American cities are not independent of each other. People can pretty easily move from Gary, Indiana to Boston, and vice versa! Ideas and capital can move even more easily — it’s pretty trivial for a company that patents a robot in Boston to actually put that robot to work in Gary. In fact, things like this happen all the time in America. Acemoglu and Restrepo (2017) note that the commuting zones with the greatest exposure to robots include Detroit, Lansing, Saginaw, Defiance, OH, Lorain, OH, Muncie, IN, Racine, WI, and Wilmington, DE.

Just to take one example of how different regions in America are dependent on each other, suppose that over the period from 1970 to 2020, Americans with lots of talent tended to move from Gary to Boston in order to take advantage of the increasing number of knowledge-industry jobs there. And suppose that at the same time, less talented Americans moved from Boston to Gary, in order to take advantage of the cheap land there. And suppose that high-value industries, like biotech and robotics and software, simultaneously decided to put their research labs in Boston rather than Gary because that’s where the best workers were headed.

In this case, you’d see Boston grow more than Gary, for reasons that had nothing to do with birth-rate-driven labor supply. Other research — for example, by Enrico Moretti — has shown that the sorting of talent and knowledge industries was strongly correlated with income divergences between American regions after 1970. Now, Acemoglu et al. do control for initial local education levels, but if sorting really began after 1970 (as Moretti has shown), that doesn’t really help. They also use “composition-adjusted” wages that try to model what local wages would be if education levels were held constant. But even if that adjustment is valid,9 it’s likely that a lot of skills aren’t captured by simply measuring who has a college degree.10

So in Acemoglu et al.’s telling, a substantial part of the reason the San Francisco Bay Area became Silicon Valley is not because the tech industry naturally tends to cluster in certain locations and draw in talented engineers and entrepreneurs, but because people in the Bay Area in 1940 didn’t have many kids, which forced Bay Area businesses to embrace automation instead. I simply don’t buy that story. I might eventually be persuaded to buy that story, but I don’t think this paper has sufficient evidence to persuade me yet.

Anyway, I am not claiming that Acemoglu et al. (2026) is a crappy paper. It’s clearly an important addition to the literature, and it deals with a very hard area of research where definitive results are very scarce. The basic idea is worth taking seriously. Maybe in a world where AI is growing by leaps and bounds, a scarcity of human workers should be the last thing on our minds!

But we shouldn’t regard this paper as definitive. And it contradicts a bunch of other research:

Kremer (1993) finds evidence that regions with faster population growth had faster technological progress.
The endogenous growth literature argues that because ideas are nonrival, larger populations are able to sustain faster technological progress — this is a basic assumption in Romer (1990), Jones (2022), and many other models.
Maestas, Mullen, and Powell (2023) find that aging was negatively correlated with productivity growth among U.S. states from 1980 to 2010;11 Ozimek, DeAntonio, and Zandi (2018) find something similar.
Aksoy et al. (2019) do a panel time-series regression across OECD countries from 1970 to 2014, and find that low fertility and low population growth are correlated with slower economic growth.

And even if Acemoglu et al. (2026) is right about the past, that doesn’t mean we can extrapolate it to the future. Jesús Fernández-Villaverde points out that you can’t necessarily do a linear extrapolation of effects at above-replacement fertility to effects at below-replacement fertility:

The fertility collapse now underway has no historical precedent. The seven decades of data the [Acemoglu et al. (2026)] paper analyzes, however carefully, contain nothing remotely comparable to the ultra-low fertility rates we observe today…
[T]he birth and fertility rates of 1950 provide little information about the consequences of the ultra-low birth and fertility rates we are experiencing today. Observations from a very different range of values are unlikely to capture the nonlinear cumulative effects of ultra-low birth and fertility rates…[E]ven in 1980, birth and fertility rates were not as low as they are today…A TFR of 1.56 means each generation is 76% the size of the last: the population declines about 0.9% per year, so after 100 years you retain roughly 40% of the initial population. A TFR of 0.75 means each generation is 37% of the last: about a 3.35% decline per year, leaving roughly 3.5% after a century. Hence, we are dealing with a factor of about 11. A TFR of 1.56 and a TFR of 0.75 both count as “low fertility” in a regression, but they are qualitatively different regimes. The 1980 variation the paper identifies lives in the gentle-decline world; nothing in their data resembles the second…
[W]e should not fool ourselves: we are sailing into demographic terra incognita, and in these waters, the pretense of knowledge is the most dangerous temptation.

In fact, Hayashi (2025) documents just such a nonlinear relationship between aging and growth, where countries with above-replacement fertility seem to benefit from lower birth rates, but countries with below-replacement fertility seem to do worse when their birth rates fall even further.12

External validity and nonlinearity are big problems in much of growth economics, development economics, economic history, and so on (and often in other fields too). But it means that there’s a danger, when the world’s top economist writes a paper making big bold claims, that we end up deferring to that individual’s intellectual authority instead of recognizing the true uncertainty of the unprecedented changes our world is facing. I’m still very worried about the shrinkage of the human race, and I think you should probably still be worried too.

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Because I’m being critical of these works, I’m violating a standard rule of etiquette, which is to always list co-authors equally. Acemoglu’s co-authors have mostly chosen to eschew the role of outspoken public intellectual, and most are not as untouchably famous as he is, so I don’t want to put them “on blast” on a popular blog. But for the sake of completeness, Acemoglu’s 2012 paper on “cuddly capitalism” is with James Robinson and Thierry Verdier, Why Nations Fail is written with Robinson, Power and Progress is written with Simon Johnson, and Acemoglu’s 2017 paper on robots and jobs is with Pascual Restrepo. My apologies for not including these co-authors in the main text.

See also Acemoglu (2009), which theorizes that labor scarcity discourages the creation of technology that complements human labor:

The main result of the paper shows that labor scarcity will encourage technological advances if technology is strongly labor saving. In contrast, labor scarcity will discourage technological advances if technology is strongly labor complementary.

Acemoglu and Restrepo (2017) find that robots depress wages, whereas the entire mechanism in Acemoglu et al. (2026) relies on automation raising wages. Of course, Acemoglu might claim that robots are special, and not representative of automation technologies in general. But that would make the 2017 result a lot less important and generalizable than it was sold as being, back in 2017!

Also note that Acemoglu et al. (2026) can be read as an anti-immigration result. If young population growth stifles automation, doesn’t that mean we should restrict immigration in order to raise wages? That doesn’t mean the result is wrong, and it will certainly make MAGA types happy, but it does mean that it stands in conflict with the existing empirical literature on immigration and wages.

The “stacked differences” model does retain statistical significance after the inclusion of controls, but just barely. I wouldn’t put much faith in a borderline result like that.

The word “institutional” does appear once, but not as an explanatory variable for past patterns of growth:

At the same time, the demographic changes currently underway are accompanied by increased life expectancy (Scott, 2021, 2024), which may spur institutional changes, policies, and additional human capital investments that complement longer lifespans. These forces may counteract any negative effects of aging[.]

Actually, this is a bit beside the point, but I wish economists would stop using GDP per working-age adult as a measure of anything. Working-age adults are not some magical resource that creates GDP just by eating and breathing; they must actually work. Data on output per hour of work is readily available, and if it’s not available, output per employed person is usually a good proxy. I don’t see any good reason to use output per working-age adult. And you should NEVER mislabel output per working-age adult “output per worker”, as Acemoglu et al. (2026) do throughout their paper. Bad!!

Except in one section later in the paper, about WW2.

Post-1970 clustering effects could change the relationship between education and wages, in which case the adjustment wouldn’t hold.

In fact, the authors note the greater accumulation of college degrees in the coastal metros with low 1940 birth rates after 1970, but they attribute this — without justification, as far as I can tell — to deliberate local choices and policies rather than geographic sorting.

Acemoglu et al. (2026) have an appendix arguing that the Maestas et al. (2023) result is not robust.

Acemoglu et al. (2026) have an appendix arguing that the Hayashi (2025) result is not robust.

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