Avete presente -- i vecchietti... -- l'immagine di quel cane vicino a un
grammofono con la scritta (marca di dischi, mi pare) "La Voce del
Padrone"?
Beh, quelle poche volte che ho letto l'Economist l'ho visto
"dannatamente schierato a tappetino" verso il pensiero unico
capitalistico-anglosassone...
Che qualcuno me lo venga a segnalare 20-30 anni dopo, ...mi lascia
freddo: l'hanno capito solo adesso?
Il 2026-08-23 08:05 Juan Carlos De Martin via nexa ha scritto:
https://x.com/zingales/status/2091283802291089686?s=20
Everybody has heard of the Luddites, but few know Sir Thomas
Maitland, the man who defeated them. Rather than using brute force to
take them all out, Maitland simply identified the men he took to be
ringleaders, had them arrested on evidence that was often thin, and
executed them. Hit one, educate a hundred.
This is the strategy that the British magazine The Economist seems to
have adopted toward the new version of the Luddites: AI critics.
Rather than the public execution, they use the public humiliation of
the anti-AI ringleaders, with equally scant evidence. Whatever its
editors intended, the critical piece against @DAcemogluMIT
, published by the magazine on August 17th, functions less like a
conventional assessment of scholarship than like an act of
intellectual discipline.
I have long criticized important parts of Daron’s work, and I am
not afraid to expose weaknesses in his reasoning, as I have in the
latest episode of my Capitalisn’t podcast:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=rOnrvB
zJ5D4&t=432s
. But I would never have written that piece.
If The Economist had objections to his Nobel Prize, it should have
raised them when it was awarded. But it did not. If it had objections
to his paper on demography, it should have raised them when the paper
came out. But it did not.
Why does the British magazine raise these questions only now? Why
does it do a review of a book that is not about AI, but only reviews
the half-chapter he wrote about AI? I have read The Economist for more
than thirty years. I cannot remember it ever attacking a living
economist in this ad hominem way, let alone one of Daron's caliber.
The piece is not really about Daron. It is a warning shot. If the
Economist can humiliate the leading economist of my generation,
imagine what it can do to anybody else who criticizes AI. Criticize
the new incarnation of the latest technological wonder, and your
weakest paper becomes your body of work. Praise it, and your weakest
paper is never mentioned at all or even celebrated like a great piece
of scholarship.
If AI delivers even half of its promises, it will be transformative,
ushering in a new era of productivity and growth, as the first
industrial revolution was and possibly even more. Many professional
economists only see these long-run benefits. Yet, the path to Nirvana
is littered with the bodies of the people hurt during the transition.
It took between 50 and 70 years after the start of the First
Industrial Revolution for workers' wages to begin rising. In the
meantime, life expectancy stagnated, and average height declined, a
clear sign that the Dickensian stories of squalor and misery were not
the product of their author’s imagination but a real account of what
the country went through.
Criticizing AI is not necessarily resisting progress; it is pointing
out the costs it entails. Unlike 19th-century Great Britain, today,
the democratic West is not forced to maximize the speed of innovation
at all costs. We need a serious public debate on the costs and
benefits of acceleration, with concrete proposals for minimizing
transition costs. This debate needs critical voices like Daron’s.
In the undemocratic Great Britain of the early 19th century, Lord
Maitland was not serving the British people, but the British merchant
elite, who had only to gain by putting the innovation pedal to the
metal, since the costs were borne by others. In the interest of whom
is The Economist publicly humiliating Daron?
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