291 - Daron Acemoglu: AI Could Destroy American Democracy

Daron Acemoglu (0:01)

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Robinson Erhardt (0:29)

I am selling the building. The final season of FX is the Bear.

or not.

Daron Acemoglu (0:44)

We are outgunned and we are outmanned.

Robinson Erhardt (0:47)

We have each other. FX is the Bear. The final season. All episodes now streaming on Disney Plus.

We're here. I mean, we're talking mainly about your recent book that just came out, What Happened to Liberal Democracy? But before we talk about the 2026 elections, which are obviously looming very large and in front of us, and the state of democracy in the United States today, I wanted to start out just by asking, what is liberal democracy supposed to be at its best?

Daron Acemoglu (1:31)

Yeah, I think it's very important that we talk about it at its best because my efforts here are forward-looking, and the point is not to go back to the past or repeat the past mistakes, but learn from the past successes for building something else, something new. At its best, liberal democracy protects individual liberties and lays foundations for peaceful coexistence of people, where they can take part in public life, which I call self-government or voice, benefit from public services, roads, health care, education, etc.

And also take part in the economy in a way that bolsters shared prosperity, economic growth from which everybody benefits. I argue why liberal ideas were very important for these aspirations and for their realization and liberal democracy as the institutionalization of liberal ideas or the best liberal ideas has been essential for achieving some of these outcomes for a number of decades before plunging itself into crisis.

Robinson Erhardt (2:59)

I also want to ask just before we get started at the outset, because most of my interviews are with philosophers, with physicists. I do occasionally talk to economists, but I wanted to ask just what are the tools or data you use as an economist to make an objective evaluation of the state of liberal democracy at any given time?

Daron Acemoglu (3:27)

There isn't an objective set of measures. You know, when I say that liberal democracy is in crisis, it's based on a collage of evidence, and it's an impression.

So you may disagree. You may say, no, no.

This is not a crisis. It's just growing pains or something. But the aspects of crisis that I emphasize fall into two buckets. One, I highlight what I believe to be the fundamental pledges of liberal democracy on which it delivered for a while but hasn't done so over the last half century. Shared prosperity with inequality, increasing real wages for manual workers and lower education workers actually falling for about 35 years. Public services, which have become much worse and people are more dissatisfied with them, and people's ability to participate in politics at the local, national and associational level, which again, a lot of people complain about. That's one. And then the second is what's going on with the democratic practice. So in the United States and in many other Western nations, there's a very high degree of polarization. People continuously express their dissatisfaction with the process, with politicians. They say people like them are not represented. And support for democracies is an all-time low since we've started collecting data on this.

Robinson Erhardt (5:02)

And considering where we are right now, do you think that one of these buckets is in a more precarious position of shared prosperity or our faith or utility or successive democratic institutions?

Daron Acemoglu (5:19)

Well, shared prosperity, I think, is really, really axiomatic for liberal democracy. And yes, it is very precarious, especially in the United States, to some extent also in the rest of the Western world, but a little less so.

But also, at least in my reading and in the reading of many other economists, AI is going to put much, much more strain on this. So that's why that's one part of the foundations or the causes of the current crisis that really should get a lot of emphasis.

Robinson Erhardt (5:58)

Well, the current crisis, I mean, AI is more of a, I guess, a forward-looking question. And I know that you said that you're not as concerned with looking into the past.