Power and Progress
Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity
By Daron Acemoglu
Category: Technology & the Future | Reading Duration: 19 min | Rating: 4.0/5 (44 ratings)
About the Book
Power and Progress (2023) examines how technological advancements have shaped economic outcomes over the past millennium, often benefiting elites while leaving many behind. It argues that the distribution of power determines whether innovation leads to shared prosperity or deepening inequality. By analyzing both historical and modern examples, it highlights the need for deliberate choices to ensure technology serves the broader public good.
Who Should Read This?
- History buffs interested in economic power
- Critical policymakers focused on technology’s social impact
- Anyone seeking insight into inequality
What’s in it for me? Learn how to make technology work for you, not just elites.
Every day, you’re told that technology is making the world better. Smarter phones, faster apps, cleaner energy – each innovation promises progress. But look closer, and the picture becomes less clear. While productivity climbs, wages for many workers stagnate.
Surveillance grows, public trust shrinks, and power concentrates in fewer hands. So what does this dynamic look like in practice, and how can we steer it toward a better future? In this Blink, you’ll learn how new technologies have often deepened inequality instead of reducing it, why elite visions – not neutral science – determine the path of innovation, and what it takes to push technology toward the public good. From medieval agriculture to artificial intelligence, the patterns are familiar – and the stakes are rising.
Chapter 1: Technology doesn’t guarantee progress
In the 1800s, textile factories transformed Britain’s economy. Productivity soared, machines replaced skilled weavers, and factory owners grew rich. But for the workers, especially women and children, this new system meant long hours, low pay, and strict discipline. This pattern – where innovation boosts output but leaves most people worse off – is a recurring theme throughout history.
And it raises a central question: who actually benefits when technology advances? The conventional answer to this question paints a simple, optimistic picture. The story many of us are used to hearing goes like this: better tools make us more productive, productivity lifts wages, and everyone ends up better off. It sounds logical, but it doesn’t hold up. In fact, for most of the past thousand years, major innovations have often benefited a small elite. Improved medieval farming tools, for instance, boosted landlords’ profits while increasing burdens on serfs.
The cotton gin accelerated cotton production and, in turn, deepened the exploitation of enslaved labor. It’s not that the inventions were bad. The problem lies in how they were used. In many cases, technology was deployed to increase control over workers, not to improve their lives. During industrialization, for example, factory systems were deliberately designed to monitor workers more closely and break tasks into repetitive routines that required little skill or autonomy. These choices were a reflection of the priorities of those in charge.
Even the digital age shows the same pattern. Despite enormous breakthroughs in computing and connectivity, many workers have seen their real wages stagnate or fall since the 1980s. Productivity is up, profits are up, but the benefits have flowed mostly to executives, investors, and a narrow band of technical professionals. Meanwhile, a growing number of people without college degrees have dropped out of the workforce entirely. The key takeaway is that technology doesn’t shape society on its own. Decisions about how to use it – and who gets to make those decisions – determine whether the results are widely shared or highly concentrated.
And those decisions are often influenced by powerful narratives about progress. Understanding how those narratives are built, and who gets to define them, is the next step in seeing how technology shapes economic outcomes. Let’s now turn to how this works in practice.
Chapter 2: Visions of progress are shaped by power
In 1879, a French diplomat named Ferdinand de Lesseps stood before an international conference in Paris, confidently pitching a grand idea: a sea-level canal through Panama. He had recently overseen the successful construction of the Suez Canal and believed that past success gave him the authority to repeat it. He dismissed engineering concerns, ignored local conditions, and shut down alternatives. The project collapsed in disaster – tens of thousands died from disease and accidents, and the effort was abandoned.
The failure followed a pattern seen throughout history: a powerful figure with a persuasive vision pushed forward despite warnings, and the costs were borne by others. This wasn’t an isolated case. Across time, major decisions about innovation have reflected the ambitions of the influential more than the needs of the broader public. Instead of objective reasoning or broad consultation, developments have often been shaped by those with the authority to define what progress looks like. These visions become the story we tell ourselves about what technology should do and who it should serve. Once a particular vision takes hold – like building artificial intelligence to replace workers or optimizing platforms to maximize ad revenue – it becomes hard to question, even when it produces harmful results.
The power to define those visions often rests with a small, well-connected group. Whether it’s engineers, business leaders, or political elites, the ability to frame the future is a form of control. It influences which technologies get developed, how resources are allocated, and which outcomes are considered acceptable. Persuasion plays a key role here. The most influential actors aren’t necessarily the most technically accurate – they’re the ones who can convince others that their preferred direction is the right one. Even today, a handful of tech companies and their executives shape global debates about AI, automation, and digital platforms.
They present their goals as inevitable and beneficial, while downplaying downsides like labor displacement, misinformation, or surveillance. But history shows that these choices are neither neutral nor unavoidable. They reflect concentrated influence and limited input from the broader public. Understanding how visions take hold and who promotes them explains why innovation so often favors the powerful. It also opens the door to rethinking how we got here. Next, we’ll go further back in time to see how early technological advances in agriculture and empire laid the groundwork for centuries of inequality.
Chapter 3: Innovation without inclusion leads to inequality
History demonstrates a clear and repeating lesson: innovation without inclusion leads to inequality. For much of history, technological advancement has served to widen the gap between the powerful and the powerless. Centuries before factories and smartphones, agricultural societies were already experimenting with tools to raise output – better plows, improved crop rotations, and more efficient milling. But for the vast majority of people, these changes brought little relief.
In medieval Europe, for example, nearly 90 percent of the population were peasants. As farming methods advanced, they were expected to work harder and produce more, yet they saw almost none of the resulting gains. What should have been a period of progress instead reinforced the power of landowners and the church. This pattern wasn’t limited to farming, though. Advances in shipbuilding helped launch transoceanic empires and fueled global trade, but they also enabled centuries of colonial conquest and the mass enslavement of Africans. The same ships that opened markets for some devastated entire regions for others.
In both cases, the benefits of innovation were tightly controlled, and the harm was widely distributed. Later, during the early phases of the Industrial Revolution, the same basic structure held. British factory owners used new machines to break down skilled labor into simple, repetitive tasks that could be done cheaply by women and children. Conditions were harsh, workdays were long, and wages barely supported survival. Technology expanded production, but almost none of the wealth reached the workers who made it possible. Instead, it concentrated in the hands of industrialists who designed the systems to maximize efficiency and control.
What connects these eras is a consistent imbalance in power. Innovation was directed by elites and used to strengthen their position. Workers, peasants, and colonized populations had little say in how new technologies were applied. Without institutions to demand better wages or fairer treatment, most people were treated as inputs to be managed, not as participants to be rewarded.
Understanding this long history of exclusion explains why progress often fails to reach the majority. It also sets the stage for a key shift: when ordinary people began organizing to challenge that control. In the next section, you’ll see how workers and reformers pushed back, gradually changing the rules around who benefits from technological change.
Chapter 4: Shared prosperity requires organized power
By the mid-1800s, life inside Britain’s factories had become a symbol of industrial misery. Long hours, dangerous machinery, and meager wages defined daily existence for much of the working class. But slowly, something began to change. As workers clustered in industrial towns and began forming unions, they gained the leverage to push back.
Labor protests, strikes, and demands for political inclusion started reshaping both the economy and the use of technology itself. This economic change didn’t unfold on its own. It moved because people organized to demand a fairer share of the wealth their labor created. In Britain, wage stagnation finally gave way to rising incomes only after decades of pressure for better conditions and a voice in decision-making. The political environment changed too – unions gained legal recognition, voting rights expanded, and reformers pushed for limits on child labor and excessive working hours. These social and political changes helped redirect innovation.
Instead of focusing solely on replacing workers or extracting more effort, firms increasingly invested in technologies that complemented labor and raised productivity. In the United States, this approach shaped car manufacturing in the early 20th century. While automation played a role, companies also created new kinds of jobs, from technical specialists to clerical roles, which allowed many workers to benefit from the industry’s growth. Wages rose, job stability improved, and workers began to build economic security. What made this period different was the presence of countervailing power. When employers and capital owners had to negotiate with organized labor or face political consequences, technology was more likely to be used in ways that supported shared prosperity.
And when governments invested in education and infrastructure, they helped prepare workers to take advantage of new opportunities. This model held through much of the 20th century. In the decades following World War II, productivity gains were widely shared. Wages rose alongside output, and many economies reduced inequality while expanding access to healthcare, education, and housing.
This shared prosperity was achieved through sustained pressure, smart policy, and a social contract that linked technological change to broad-based progress. The next chapter in this story looks at how and why that model broke down. As new digital technologies emerged, the balance of power shifted again – this time away from workers and toward a small group of platform owners and investors.
Chapter 5: Digital innovation rebuilt the divide
The arrival of the digital revolution repeated a familiar historical pattern, reversing the previous era of shared prosperity. Just as with the agricultural and industrial innovations of the past, the benefits of this new wave of technology accumulated at the top. As computers and digital tools spread from the 1980s onward, the link between rising productivity and better wages began to break. For many workers without a college degree, this meant their earnings stagnated or declined.
Jobs that once offered security were replaced with contract work, low-paid service roles, or were eliminated entirely. This shift wasn’t inevitable. It followed a change in how innovation was used. Earlier generations of technological development had been shaped, at least in part, by organized labor, public investment, and a political consensus that valued broad-based growth. That balance began to collapse in the late 20th century. As unions lost power and regulation loosened, firms were freer to focus on cost-cutting.
Technology became a tool for automation and outsourcing, rather than for supporting workers or expanding opportunity. One of the clearest examples is artificial intelligence. Despite its hype, most current AI systems are designed to monitor, replace, or direct human labor – not to assist or elevate it. Algorithms decide hiring outcomes, track productivity, and guide warehouse tasks with minimal input from those being managed. These systems often reduce autonomy and increase pressure without significantly improving overall productivity. In many cases, the goal is to extract more work for less pay.
At the same time, massive profits have flowed to a small group of companies that own the platforms, data, and infrastructure behind digital tools. The structure of the internet has encouraged consolidation, turning firms like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft into global power centers with control over everything from search and social media to cloud services and digital advertising. These companies collect enormous amounts of user data, refine algorithms to maximize engagement and profit, and shape the rules of online interaction. Their priorities – surveillance, scale, and market dominance – are embedded in the design of the technologies they develop, reinforcing their position and limiting alternatives that might better serve workers or the public.
These trends help explain why inequality has surged in the digital age, even as innovation has accelerated. It’s not a failure of the technology itself, but of the choices made about how to apply it and who it should serve. With the tools of the future increasingly shaped by private interests, the consequences reach far beyond economics. In the final section, we’ll look at how these dynamics are now threatening democratic institutions – and what it would take to turn things around.
Chapter 6: Technology must be directed by democracy
In 2018, a change to Facebook’s algorithm dramatically altered what appeared in users’ feeds. The stated goal was to promote “Meaningful Social Interactions” by pushing posts from friends forward and news back. While engagement soared, the algorithm discovered that the most potent interactions were driven by outrage and division. As a result, the effect was toxic.
The system amplified the most emotionally charged content, causing misinformation to spread faster and deepening political polarization. The decision was made by a handful of executives, not governments or voters. The broader public had no say – despite being the ones most affected. This example points to a deeper issue. As digital systems grow more powerful, the decisions about how they are built and used increasingly shape public life. From credit scores determining who can take out a mortgage to the algorithmic sorting of job candidates or medical access, technological choices now influence everything from civic freedoms to economic opportunity.
These systems reflect the priorities of those who control them – typically private firms or political elites. What’s missing is democratic input. In earlier periods of reform, public institutions helped steer innovation toward goals like education, health, and equality. Today, those institutions have lost ground to corporate platforms that operate without meaningful oversight. At the same time, technology is being used to weaken democratic processes themselves, through mass data collection, targeted disinformation, and opaque decision-making. These dynamics reinforce existing inequalities and make them harder to challenge.
The alternative is not a rejection of innovation, but a redirection of its purpose. That means prioritizing technologies that expand human capabilities, rather than replacing them. It means creating systems that support worker input, citizen accountability, and broader participation. And it means investing in counterweights – like independent research, strong regulation, and collective bargaining – that can check concentrated power and shape better outcomes. History shows that progress depends on pressure. Shared prosperity has always required organization, debate, and conflict.
The future of technology will be no different. If we want it to serve society as a whole, we’ll need to make that a deliberate choice – and build the institutions to support it. The tools are there. What matters now is how we decide to use them.
Final summary
The main takeaway of this Blink to Power and Progress by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson is that the distribution of power determines whether technological progress creates broad-based prosperity or deepens inequality. Throughout history, innovation has often been steered by elite interests and used to control labor, consolidate wealth, and sideline the majority. But when people have organized, demanded a voice, and influenced the direction of development, the results have been more equitable. Today’s challenges – from AI to platform monopolies – can still be met with democratic pressure, smart policy, and renewed public involvement.
Achieving a better future is possible through the deliberate choice to build it together. Okay, that’s it for this Blink. We hope you enjoyed it. If you can, please take the time to leave us a rating – we always appreciate your feedback. See you in the next Blink.
About the Author
Daron Acemoglu is an Institute Professor of Economics at MIT, known for his influential work on political economy, development, and institutions. He is the co-author of the bestsellers Why Nations Fail and The Narrow Corridor, and received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2024.
Simon Johnson is a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and a former Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund. He is best known for 13 Bankers, a critical look at the financial crisis, and shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics for research on institutional impact on development.