Power and Progress review – why the tech-equals-progress narrative must be challenged

In an important new book, US economists Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson propose ways in which digital technology can be repurposed for human flourishing as well as private profit “Those who cannot remember the past,” wrote the American philosopher George Santayana in 1905, “are condemned to repeat it.” And now, 118 years later, here come two American economists with the same message, only with added salience, for they are addressing a world in which a small number of gia