WIDER Annual Lecture: In the name of progress: Will technology solve inequality? by Daron Acemoğlu

Описание: The 2022 WIDER Annual Lecture by Daron Acemoğlu occurs on Friday 7 October 2022 at the Universidad de los Andes (UNIANDES) in Bogotá, Colombia. The livestreamed event is organized in collaboration with UNIANDES, and closes the three-day 2022 WIDER Development Conference Reducing inequality – the great challenge of our time.

The WIDER Annual Lecture continues in its tradition of presenting groundbreaking research with renowned economist Daron Acemoğlu. Based on his newest book, In the Name of Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle over Technology and Prosperity (co-authored with Simon Johnson), this presentation will challenge the techno-optimism of our age, and of our academic profession, which maintains that technological advances will ultimately benefit society at large.

He explores how and why this idea has taken root in economics, and how it has influenced current policies and regulations. Using historical and contemporary examples, he explains that broadly-shared prosperity results from technological advances only when new technologies do not just automate work but also create new tasks for workers, and when institutions empower workers, so that productivity gains are shared between capital and labor. Using this framework, he provides a reinterpretation of the era of shared prosperity following World War II, why most growth episodes of the last thousand years have not brought anything like this type of shared prosperity, why this episode of shared prosperity came to an end, and what the path of digital technologies and artificial intelligence imply for our future.

Daron Acemoğlu addresses these questions in the 2022 WIDER Annual Lecture, drawing on his research on the topic of automation and its impact on workers. He is joined by Marcela Eslava, Professor of Economics at Universidad de Los Andes, in Bogotá, Colombia, as discussant.

More information at https://go.unu.edu/1VJcy