CONCEPT
The Thousand-Year Pattern
Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson’s empirical finding, drawn from a millennium of technological transitions, that powerful technologies consistently generate enormous aggregate gains while simultaneously concentrating those gains among a narrow set of beneficiaries—unless institutional countervailing forces exist to redirect the distribution.
The technology expands the pie. The institutions determine who eats. This is the thousand-year pattern that
Daron Acemoglu and
Simon Johnson documented in
Power and Progress—a pattern consistent enough across agricultural revolutions, the Industrial Revolution, the Green Revolution, and the digital economy that they treat it as the default expectation for any powerful technology introduced into an institutional environment that lacks adequate countervailing forces. The heavy plough in feudal England concentrated surplus in the manor house. The power loom concentrated the gains of mechanization among factory owners while the workers who operated the machines bore costs measured in child labor and sixteen-hour shifts. The Green Revolution concentrated its productivity gains disproportionately among those who already controlled land and capital. The digital economy produced forty years in which median wages grew at roughly one-sixth the rate of aggregate productivity. In each case, the correction—when it came—was not produced by the technology maturing into a