For The Economist, Mentioning Workers' Interests Is Heresy - Jacobin

TEXT START: Daron Acemoglu, who won the Nobel Prize in 2024, is no heterodox economist.

The Dissection

This is a defense brief for Acemoglu and an indictment of mainstream economics. It rehabilitates historical warnings about automation, portrays The Economist’s attack as ideological boundary-policing, and presents unions, democracy, regulation, and “directed” technology as the counterprogram.

Its strongest point is that technology distributes power, not merely productivity. Its weakness is fatal: it treats redistribution and institutional counterpower as if they can preserve workers’ structural necessity.

The Core Fallacy

The article commits historical substitution. It uses nineteenth-century mechanization—where displaced labor could eventually enter new labor-intensive sectors—as the template for AI. Under P1, AI can automate cognitive tasks across sectors simultaneously. There is no guarantee of a new sector large enough to reconstitute mass employment.

“Directing” technology also fails against competitive mechanics. Firms that preserve costly human labor can be defeated by firms that automate. National regulation can be bypassed through global competition, making P2 decisive. Stronger unions and transfers may delay disruption, improve distribution, or preserve consumption, but they do not restore the wage-to-consumption circuit after productive participation collapses.

The article identifies the mechanism but refuses its endpoint: the worker may be politically defended after becoming economically unnecessary.

Hidden Assumptions

• AI remains a tool whose direction can be democratically selected rather than capital that compounds and displaces labor.
• New tasks and sectors will scale enough to absorb displaced workers.
• National regulation can bind globally mobile firms and prevent competitive arbitrage.
• Unions can retain bargaining power after human labor loses scarcity.
• Shared prosperity means restoring workers’ productive centrality rather than distributing ownership claims on AI capital.
• Productivity gains can be redirected without changing who owns and controls the systems producing them.
• The Economist’s political motive is established; the article largely asserts the motive it attributes to the magazine.
• Energy, infrastructure, logistics, and maintenance constraints are peripheral. In DT terms, they create temporary Servitor niches, not a mass labor reset.

Social Function

Partial truth functioning as transition management and reformist ideological anesthesia. The article correctly exposes elite capture, surveillance, unequal gains, and the fiction that markets automatically create shared prosperity. But its solution—worker-centered policy and directed technology—makes a terminal participation crisis appear governable through institutional steering.

It converts an ownership and obsolescence crisis into a policy dispute over how to operate the machine. That can mobilize resistance and manage the transition. It cannot guarantee survival for the displaced majority.

The Verdict

The article is right that AI is political and that automation can transfer income and control upward. It is wrong about the endpoint. Under P1–P3, pro-worker technology, unions, and social protection may delay mechanical death, redistribute the carcass, and preserve consumption; they cannot by themselves preserve mass productive participation.

The decisive question is not whether workers’ interests may be mentioned. It is whether workers retain ownership, control, or indispensable scarcity. Without Sovereign ownership or Servitor indispensability, “shared prosperity” is a managed-decline slogan.