Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity
Decide its fate
Elon Musk tried running a car factory with almost no people, failed, and admitted "Humans are underrated." One reader pairs that story with Germany, where union bargaining pushed carmakers toward machines that raise pay along with output. The thousand-year version runs from medieval landlords pouring grain surpluses into cathedrals to the AI build-out: "'countervailing forces' such as protective legislation, organised labour and government intervention have balanced technological progress with societal well being," one admirer writes. The coinage readers keep citing, so-so automation, means "all the displacement and little of the promised productivity gains." A reader who opened it only because her book club assigned it found it "actively influencing the way I think at the world around me" a week after finishing.
Chapter one states the thesis; five hundred more pages replay it against a fresh historical episode each time, which is why one reader quit a third in, borrowing a line from another review: "economists discover social power." What fills them is "essentially a long procession of anecdotal evidence," and the anecdotes get shaped to fit. The Panama Canal chapter reads forced labor and investor fraud as proof the canal failed Panama, a country now richer than its neighbors because of it. The prologue files Haber-Bosch chemistry, which feeds roughly half the world, under the disappointments: "The idea that the Haber-Bosch process has 'brought nothing like shared prosperity' is an absolutely wild claim," one reviewer writes. Another reader: "You'd only be persuaded of the thesis if you already agreed."
