Thank you for this. It strikes me that the authors are conflating skill with power. Sales is a skill. Marketing is a skill. Innovation and entrepreneurship are skills. And if there's a few practices that Leftists absolutely detest and refuse to even acknowledge as disciplines that are worthy of study, it is sales, marketing, innovation, and entrepreneurship.
These, ironically, are the core functions of a business, and the essence of what makes capitalism work. Instead the usual focus is on investors, money, liquidity, and consumption which kind of misses the whole point of a business: to create a customer. These are practices that economists usually ignore in their models and writings because they assume rational actors and commodities. They ignore the lifecycle of products & services: from genesis/startup, custom builds, through productization, and eventual commoditization, as knowledge grows and costs & risk fall. These topics have mostly been focused on by a motley crew of writers that aren't exactly considered titans of economic theory: Schumpeter, Drucker, maybe a bit of Paul Romer in recent decades, and yeah, techbros. Though I don't think the techbros all have great insights here either as lately in particular they seem to have largely gone at least somewhat insane.
And so these skills become the equivalent of magical powers, rather than a means to wield meagre power effectively and thus gain more power. Anyone that's played a dungeon crawler knows this, or Sid Meier's Civilization and other empire building board games with tech trees like Twilight Imperium or Eclipse. "To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle" :-)
The tautological nature of the “power” concept is well known in antitrust. Oliver Williamson often critiqued arguments because they relied on vague, hand-wavy notions of “power.” You can actually see it enshrined in the legal doctrine. “Market power” is defined as the ability to price above marginal cost. But marginal cost can be very difficult to observe in the real world (and when marginal cost is zero like for software, p > mc suggests everyone has market power). So, market share is used as a proxy for market power. I think market share can be a decent screen, but it really isn’t that useful if we’re trying to think rigorously about whether a firm’s conduct is good or bad (pro or anticompetitive). As the delta between p and mc grows, we can draw a reasonable inference that the firm’s market power has increased. The same simply is not true for market share! A firm’s market share often grows precisely *because* it uses economies of scale to *reduce* price: share is increasing while the p/mc wedge is shrinking! This is another way of saying that Amazon and Apple’s market shares grew because they offered customers a good deal. And yet, this growth is treated by Neo-Brandeisians and tech skeptics as confirmation that their “power” is increasing. It’s just as consistent (in my view, *more* consistent) with the opposite view: the fact that market forces cause giants to innovate and improve product offerings is evidence of a *lack* of power!
I will confess I was entertained. As an aside this subject seems to parallel in part this subject at The Argument (https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/the-heresy-of-hank-green). [ETA oh and I agree overall, esp. on the closing paragraphs]
An add-on thought (as someone who once was in VC investment, not currently what I do tho), re "The left has always erred by discounting the abilities and importance of entrepreneurs; they imagine that if Jobs and Bezos had never existed, Apple and Amazon would have been built by gray men in flannel suits. They view the techbro class as parasites, draining unearned wealth from organizations that could run themselves just fine on their own." it seems to me there is a strong component in that Lefty-College Degreed class that equally over-indexed on the idea of inventor (particularly solo-inventor) as the "correct" and valid entrepreneur, generally blind or hand-waiving away the execution & engineering that is needed to make IP something actually real-world valuable. Having been on lots of selection committees for venture financing (not in hot-house Cali where crazy bets were (are) made in a lot of copy-catting), execution... As Noah's written, Musk is a nasty horrible person but I've been in enough early stage to know not to abstract away from execution & scaling*
This in my current role in RenEn I see quite a lot in the breathless 'takes' that one 'just' has to deploy X (where X is some latest tech or IP out of a Univ. or similar), completely blind to the engineering and industrial execution that is needed for these things to be truly industrial economical. Engineering and operations is damn hard in esp. physical asset industry.
(* it does remind me of a meeting I attended between a VC and an entrepeneur who didn't want to share his IP for examination on idea it could be easily stolen. VC rightly said "if it's that easy then it's not worth what you think [it is].") [edit to fix sloppy phone-typing...]
Your general idea can be generalized. Individualism and "non-correlated" experimentation are key to an innovation economy. Certainly, big tech is a key player, but I would argue that broad based experiments yielding productivity gains is also a key part.
I should be clearer I suppose as people tend to collapse innovation & entrepeneurship into IT-Tech - my own VC experience, background was not in Tech (not Cali, not IT), I've always been a hard asset guy. Innovation and entrepreneurship for me has always been an industrial flavor not Google - Facebook - Uber world (i.e. not big or middling tech as such).
So in short, I meant something quite in line with "broad based experiments yielding productivity gains is also a key part." and was not actually meaning Big or Medium Tech as such
Great piece. I think they need persuasion to count as "power" precisely so they can justify using the real thing — the coercive power of government, via antitrust — against it.
For the record, some of us do love the iPhone and canonize Steve Jobs because we subscribe to stories about how heroic engineers hold up the rest of society.
I agree. With the risk of pissing off Noah and others, I think economists too often think they are so much better at managing lives (probably true) that they should be allowed to use the coercive power of government to manage others' lives more often.
Leaving aside the empirically false yet oft-repeated assertion on the left that Silicon Valley is uniformly conservative when in fact it is very liberal, there is this unquenchable fetish within those same communities to pretend that media has some kind of magical transformative mind-control power (“power”) that functions a) independently of content and b) unilaterally, such that these magical powers cannot be deployed by the other side. All this despite the fact that c) by no means does outspending the other side guarantee election victory! This all of course nets out to a perfectly self-serving worldview in which “power” is by definition out of leftists’ hands by fiat at all times, conveniently and irreparably.
I'd be interested in your post on digital surveillance. The horse seems so far out of the barn on this one - cell tower tracking and app tracking mean that essentially everyone is tracked 100% of the time, and even turning off your phone can be used as evidence against you (see: the Idaho stabbings). Because of this I have a hard time getting worked up about Flock cameras; yes it would be bad for law enforcement to have unrestricted access to track people, but it would be very useful to track someone that just sideswiped a car or ran over a bicyclist, so to me it seems the answer is to maintain a high bar on access controls.
Henry Ford raises many of the same issues; he was racist and antisemitic…and helped America win WW2 and defeat the Nazis by turning Ford into a vast assembly line for bombers, jeeps, and tanks for America and her allies. In a contest of industrial capacity, people like Musk and Ford are incredibly valuable. As Noah said, the key is to ensure they support national interests, not undermine them.
Noah, if I can make one pointed comment. People sometimes go overboard in criticising the "Great man theory" of history, which posits that "great" men are the ones that matter for shaping historical narrative. One can go way, way too far in that and utterly discount the effects of any single man; it's good to push back against this. But you sometimes do seem to fall for that theory in a way that's also unhealthy.
Let me put it like this.
Counterfactual history is an enormously difficult task to consider. Still. So many of the necessary ingredients for creating a Ford Motors, a Tesla, an iPhone, existed prior to and independently of those creations. The remaining necessary innovative steps, the needed entrepreneurship, the coming together of things to actually make these companies exist are obviously very significant effort.
But would they have happened in some way without Ford/Musk/Jobs? We can't say for sure, but we know of some examples where two people/companies came up with more or less the same product at basically the same time and more less independently. A quick search shows two fairly clear examples, the microprocessor and jet engines. If I searched more, I'm pretty sure I'd find plenty of other examples and that of others who were on the same path but gave up when the product came to be. And the same thing has happened frequently in science and maths, as you almost certainly know.
Hence my question: if so much of what's needed is there, is the "final leap" inevitable? Probably not. But is it likely, maybe even very likely? Probably yes. Particularly when you consider the culture/countries that allows for these leaps to happen are likely cultivating similar people.
(The great example I've heard is that without a Columbus, would the Americas have been found? Consider how many other sailors and captains existed in Latin countries at that time, it seems likely at least one would have been persuasive, no?)
In that sense, I always like to think of the Wins Above Replacement (WAR) of these "great" men. That is to say, it's always a good idea to ask how much better at creating these products and companies these men were... compared to similar others at the same time. I.e., not the "grey men in suits" you posit, but other potential entrepreneurs.
Does that make sense? If so, then I do think you go too far in your framing here, which gives a impression of an almost impossible-to-replicate talent from these men, which I don't believe is true. They probably have a significant positive WAR, but not necessarily an impossibly large one. And for each, a very careful case has to be made...
Ideas arise mostly from context, not people. This is why widespread independent invention is the norm, not the exception. What the Fords, Bezos, Musks, Jobs, etc. of the world have isn't so much good ideas -- those are a dime a dozen -- it's the ability to recognize the good ideas, separate them from the chaff of ideas that appear to be good but aren't, and then, even more importantly, to execute. Execution requires a broad variety of skills: raising capital, managing people (including hiring the right ones), finding the right balance between bold aggressiveness and financial conservatism, and much more.
Would the the things that Ford/Musk/Jobs did have come about without Ford/Musk/Jobs? Very likely, almost certainly. But their successes required someone *like* Ford/Musk/Jobs, and if it hadn't been those specific individuals it would have been someone with the same skills and similar mindset.
Elon Musk is, in my opinion, a bit of an outlier. He's the only one I can think of who has achieved multiple, independent world-beating successes. Nearly all entrepreneurs use the wealth generated from smaller successes to build larger ones, the way Musk did with 7Zip, then PayPal, then Tesla and SpaceX, but they normally build only one hugely-successful company, not two (or three; Starlink is part of SpaceX, but it could almost be a third enormous success). Terafab could be another, or and maybe even the orbital data center thing. It also wouldn't surprise me if Musk is too high on his own fumes to execute on anything else, though.
He thought he could make a third enormous impact in politics, but that's an entirely different set of skills, which he obviously doesn't have. It's possible that he could acquire a lot of them if he had the humility to admit that he needs to learn, but he has lost whatever humility he had.
I think we basically agree. These entrepreneurs *did* achieve some important with bringing about a varied skillset, something that I actually wrote above: "The remaining necessary innovative steps, the needed entrepreneurship, the coming together of things to actually make these companies exist are obviously very significant effort."
But, as you also seem to agree, as the needed ingredients were already there and the needed culture existed, it's likely that something akin to what they achieved would have come about in any case, even if it would have been achieved by a different individual at a different time and place.
Ergo, what's the WAR, specifically, that Jobs and co bring about? It's not clear, but assuming we're talking about a replacement from a similar set of individuals, although not zero, it's not the exaggerated WAR that Noah implicitly puts in his post.
I just get annoyed that we can't seem to have a reasonable middle ground in these discussions... acknowledging the effort and talented needed to create these companies and products, without it making it seem like these creators were "demi-Gods" amongst humans, uniquely able to achieve what they did.
Anyway... 100% agree with the issue of different skillsets too, that's very much the case.
The problem faced by opponents of the Great Man theory is that they still require Great Men. You may not require Napoleon Bonaparte, but you still need a Napoleon. So for everything to work out it requires that for every Napoleon there are thousands of would be Napoleons waiting in the wings to take over if the original gets hit by lightning as a child, or something.
Well are there thousands of would be Great Men ready to step up? I would say clearly not. Those would be Great Men who didn't quite make it would have been narrowly edged out by the Greatest Man who did. In a world like that I would expect to see presidential elections on the talent level of Caesar vs Pompey every 4 years. I would expect we would have 50 governors and 100 senators all like Cicero and Cato. I don't see that. What I see is a sea of mediocrity that are deer in the headlights when an actual Great Man level talent arises every decade or so.
Musk is a great example and we can actually be kind of objective about this. Would there be a SpaceX without Musk? There was one contender, actually. Jeff Bezos started Blue Origin before Musk started SpaceX, and was much better financed too (Elon Musk wasn't even a billionaire at the time). And where did that get them? Absolutely nowhere. Blue Origin has yet to put a payload in orbit more than 20 years later.
I think it's fine for us to disagree here, because it's a very hard question to answer, these types of counterfactual exercises, as I wrote above. I would disagree with you, I think there's always plenty of people who are trying to achieve these things and that they do have the baseline talent and drive, but they just get "unlucky" in some key way.
But to illustrate how hard this is to think about, take your example and think about this carefully. Here the counterfactual isn't what happened to Blue Origin in reality, but what would have happened sans SpaceX. Would some of the engineers and administrators at SpaceX have been at Blue Origin instead? Would another entrepreneur have been enticed to join the fray with less competition? And not just in the US, but in other countries too? It's a hard thing to figure out, that needs to be done with care and expertise on a case-by-case basis.
The timeline would be different, almost certainly, but would something akin to SpaceX eventually come about? I think that likely yes... eventually.
I think this misses the point, on multiple dimensions. For one thing, it conflates buying into Big Tech with the power that having monetized Big Tech affords its elites. The first dimension is a fairly linear story-- people bought into Big Tech because it delivered something useful-- Google delivered useful search results, Amazon delivered a broad variety of products cheaply and cost-competitively (albeit at least in part, initially, due to regulatory arbitrage), Facebook delivered a convenient way to connect people. Over time, their products turned to crap, and they kept people in due to network effects (when they could; everyone besides your racist uncle quit Facebook because its core product is, even by Silicon Valley standards, toxic waste). Google search is actively worse than it was 15 years ago, because it went away from pagerank and toward selling search priority to the highest bidder; Amazon is hard to navigate because you have to wade through sponsored crap to get to the product you want, etc. And people stay because there isn't an alternative, and if you try to come up with an alternative, they'll bury you.
But that's a different point from what Acemoglu/Johnson write about, which is that the tech overlords' money enables them to buy a megaphone. The megaphone doesn't tie you down to listen or force you to accept it. But it does make it far easier to access. Like Elon Musk spent 9 figures of his personal funds on largely dishonest ads designed to get people to believe things that weren't true about politics. His spending changed at least some number of votes, not because the crap he amplified was true or good or smart, but because it was loud.
Now, there are lots of ways to accumulate that manner of power. Musk did it by being rich. Someone like Paul Krugman did it by being smart. And part of that power was the power to amplify-- the way that I (and I suspect many) of your readers found you and amplified your voice was that, a decade and a half ago, you wrote smart things that people like Paul Krugman amplified. But that power is tenuous. If Paul Krugman stops writing smart things, his voice will go away-- he'll stop being booked on TV, people will quit reading his Substack, and he'll become a marginal figure. That won't happen to Elon Musk. Despite being endlessly less smart, thoughtful or insightful than Paul Krugman, Musk has a far louder voice and more power. Not because he's persuasive in the marketplace of ideas, but because he's got a platform which he owns, amplified by people who prostrate themselves in front of people with lots of money (as either Jacque Fresco or Larry Summers allegedly said, "if you're so rich, why aren't you smart?").
And that should worry us. Because many of these tech overlords aren't good or decent people; they're actively bad people. And they use their money to make society actively worse. That rightly worries Acemoglu and Johnson.
*The* defining feature of the left is people who lose their minds because hierarchies exist. At the end of the day, they will always end up opposed to anything other than "we get to chop down tall poppies and also we get to decide who they are." They are opposed to tall poppies as such and to any tools tall poppies have access to which they don't control. Originally, many believed they could co-opt control of the tools. When that consistently failed for decades and the hateful tall poppies remained anyway, they eventually just turned against the tools as such.
In many ways, both ends of the horseshoe are driven by status anxiety - just more traditionally the far right tends to despise the lumpenproletariat or people they think *should* be relegated to the lumpenproletariat but aren't. The far left hates tall poppies.
This is extremely tribal old-school izard brain stuff. Obsessions from the time of the literal hunter gather tribe when everyone was paranoid about both "big man bully" and "freeloader" and "outsider." Allowing other people to define what personal success means to you is never anything but a recipe for misery.
Normies anti-tech tendencies are really populism - which is mostly "anti-uncertainty." Being anti-uncertainty is even more inane than being anti-hierarchical. The only thing more certain than the fact that tall poppies aren't going anywhere is that uncertainty is forever. You can actually guillotine people more effectively than you can force the weather to cooperate with the wheat harvest or force the stock market to never crash. *You* will never, ever be in a permanent state of feeling completely safe or loved. You can either let this drive you mad or get zen about it.
*Edit* A lot of vanilla liberals are in fact driven by more or less "niceness" or "fairness." And while this is definitely the way to go on marketing grounds to convince people of why they should accept more or less neoliberalism with some social democracy - it does tend to avoid discussing/admitting some underlying Nietzschean truths about the structure of the world because it means the world is irreparably unfair and not particularly nice down to its bones in many ways. (Darwin's infamous parasitic wasps).
Nice liberalism might be able to answer the question about how/if we should have unemployment insurance, but it will never answer what to do with the fact that you will still sometimes (and perhaps often given quirks of your character) feel unwanted, unsafe, and low status. The far right/left are willing to address this "remainder" of anxiety by selling people on conspiracies - the system is rigged and "they" are who is rigging it. Liberals don't just have a confidence deficit at present. They also don't have much of anything to say about this anxiety - because the truth is something people mostly don't want to hear and most liberals at least aren't willing to flat out lie about it. That "remainder" anxiety - the part that is always left over no matter how robust the social safety net or the social support network has *always been* and *will always be* pure bootstrap grit up to you and no one else.
The claims about power fit with the idea I often encounter on the educated left that while people on the educated left form opinions based on reason, facts and values, much of the public reaches its opinions based on what people tell them, often demagoguery. This has the advantage of explaining why the public takes positions that the educated left sees as going against their own interests. It also means that you can dismiss the concerns of the general public because those concerns were just put in their heads by some shady operator. That explanation has always struck me as implausible and leaning into conspiracy theory territory. And to be honest, the last 10 years have demonstrated that the educated left quite vulnerable to falling for false information and making irrational choices so it's not as if this is something that education protects you from.
I would like to see Noah grapple more with consumer choice as part of an emergent system where the individual's choice is strongly influenced by everyone else.
I personally would love to not be using certain technologies, but the cost of individual defection is too high.
Some of these political rebellions against data centers might be seen in that regard. Could some of the Data Center activism be from people who feel the only way to push back on the tech is to shut it down at the source (compute) vs sensible regulations that might reduce the costs of collective action so that individuals are actually more free to make a different choice? Not sure but worth exploring.
Just because individuals are choosing this or that technology doesn't mean they are happy about it; they might be trying to avoid that defection cost.
I'm confused -- what anti-tech movement are you talking about?
Have people stopped buying iPhones? Nope, Apple's iPhone revenues are up 22% last quarter compared to the year previous. Maybe they've abandoned Amazon because Bezos is an a-hole? Nope, Amazon's revenue last quarter is up 20% over the previous year's quarter.
Maybe they've abandoned streaming? Nope, Netflix is Up 13%. Given up on solar power? No, solar and battery power is 91% of new installed electrical generation, although uncertainty over relations with China have slowed this down some recently.
The only thing I see as anti-tech is distrust of AI, which is hardly irrational: Gemini tells me, perhaps ironically that "In Ohio, the rapid influx of massive AI data centers has triggered a sharp surge in consumer electric bills, placing intense strain on the power grid and igniting fierce regulatory and political pushback. According to U.S. Energy Information Administration data, average Ohio electricity bills spiked by 22% from early 2025 to early 2026, ranking the state second in the nation for energy cost increases, trailing only Virginia."
At the same time, both Open AI and Anthropic seem unable to prevent their models from actually committing cybercrime by breaking into other companies' computer networks. Not to mention the immense level of copyright infringement for training models that certainly has hurt the market for some of the IP the models were trained on.
People are concerned that their resumes are being read and discarded by AI agents with no human oversight. Use of AI for papers and take home tests at universities have resulted in rampant cheating by students, leaving honest students at a disadvantage. Calls to customer support at many companies are handled by AI agents that can't actually do anything, adding one more layer of frustration to interacting with those companies: I recently had to get an incorrect item removed from my T-mobile bill, and after wasting time describing my issue to their bot, it told me that as a bot, it couldn't access my account or change my bill, and I needed to talk to a human.
So, there's definite concern that AI is being deployed in ways that will hurt ordinary people.
And looming over all of this are ridiculous circular financing deals where hyperscalers like Microsoft, Google and Nvidia invest tens of billions in AI companies like Open AI, Anthropic and others so that latter have the money to buy products and services from the hyperscalers. Those revenues then boost the hyperscalers' stock price, giving them more access to cash to invest....
Compelling read. I didn't necessarily agree with all of it, but it was a halfway decent response to Farrell's piece.
But this part stuck out to me:
"But where we go from there is not obvious. We could emulate the New Deal, and incorporate both technology and technologists into a unified drive for national prosperity and security. Or we could collapse into zero-sum status battles and petty class resentments, such that nothing can get done and our nation continues to slip into decline. Unfortunately, the anti-tech movement, out of a poverty of ideas, is currently steering us in the latter direction."
I'm not exactly anti-AI (more ambivalent than anything else, really), but this strikes me as a total misreading of American political history. The New Deal was not a "unified drive for national prosperity and security"; it was a bitterly contested political struggle between different factions (industrial labor unions, left-wing intellectuals, Southern Dixiecrats, reactionary Taft Republicans, etc.) that very nearly failed. In no way was the New Deal a great moment of American unity: if anything, it was quite the opposite. Many Republicans accused FDR of setting up a presidential dictatorship and leading us down the road to Bolshevism, and it didn't help that many key figures behind the New Deal were or had ties to socialist and communist organizations (not necessarily a deal-breaker for me, but your mileage may vary). FDR openly challenged the Supreme Court (and paid dearly for it) in a way that no modern Democrat could ever imagine, and that includes AOC and the DSA'ers. This is true of virtually every progressive political movement in the nation's history, from the Sons of Liberty and the abolitionists to the New Deal and the Civil Rights movement.
Noah seems to have this halcyon idea of American liberalism (and liberal presidents) as a unifying and consolidating political force in American history, but as the magisterial historian Arthur Schlesinger observes, great presidents are usually divisive figures (Lincoln, Jackson, FDR, Reagan, etc.) who only appear as uniters with hindsight (and not a little bit of misbegotten nostalgia). Great social movements (and great presidents) are necessarily divisive amongst their contemporaries, and it is only after they triumph that their opponents and ambivalent moderates eventually fall in line (as Eisenhower did with the New Deal and Clinton with the Reagan Revolution).
I don't really see the point of this debate. I think it is a mistake to focus on the "tech" aspect of the new oligarchs. The fact is that a select group of people have accumulated astronomical wealth that has a negative impact on society. At the very least we should increase taxes on capital to restore the old capital/labor distribution of income. This did not prevent entrepreneurs from contribution their ingenuity to our productivity growth, nor will it prevent it now.
Thank you for this. It strikes me that the authors are conflating skill with power. Sales is a skill. Marketing is a skill. Innovation and entrepreneurship are skills. And if there's a few practices that Leftists absolutely detest and refuse to even acknowledge as disciplines that are worthy of study, it is sales, marketing, innovation, and entrepreneurship.
These, ironically, are the core functions of a business, and the essence of what makes capitalism work. Instead the usual focus is on investors, money, liquidity, and consumption which kind of misses the whole point of a business: to create a customer. These are practices that economists usually ignore in their models and writings because they assume rational actors and commodities. They ignore the lifecycle of products & services: from genesis/startup, custom builds, through productization, and eventual commoditization, as knowledge grows and costs & risk fall. These topics have mostly been focused on by a motley crew of writers that aren't exactly considered titans of economic theory: Schumpeter, Drucker, maybe a bit of Paul Romer in recent decades, and yeah, techbros. Though I don't think the techbros all have great insights here either as lately in particular they seem to have largely gone at least somewhat insane.
And so these skills become the equivalent of magical powers, rather than a means to wield meagre power effectively and thus gain more power. Anyone that's played a dungeon crawler knows this, or Sid Meier's Civilization and other empire building board games with tech trees like Twilight Imperium or Eclipse. "To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle" :-)
FYI, I'm pretty sure Henry was writing about Rob Reich the Stanford political scientist, not Robert Reich the former labor secretary.
The tautological nature of the “power” concept is well known in antitrust. Oliver Williamson often critiqued arguments because they relied on vague, hand-wavy notions of “power.” You can actually see it enshrined in the legal doctrine. “Market power” is defined as the ability to price above marginal cost. But marginal cost can be very difficult to observe in the real world (and when marginal cost is zero like for software, p > mc suggests everyone has market power). So, market share is used as a proxy for market power. I think market share can be a decent screen, but it really isn’t that useful if we’re trying to think rigorously about whether a firm’s conduct is good or bad (pro or anticompetitive). As the delta between p and mc grows, we can draw a reasonable inference that the firm’s market power has increased. The same simply is not true for market share! A firm’s market share often grows precisely *because* it uses economies of scale to *reduce* price: share is increasing while the p/mc wedge is shrinking! This is another way of saying that Amazon and Apple’s market shares grew because they offered customers a good deal. And yet, this growth is treated by Neo-Brandeisians and tech skeptics as confirmation that their “power” is increasing. It’s just as consistent (in my view, *more* consistent) with the opposite view: the fact that market forces cause giants to innovate and improve product offerings is evidence of a *lack* of power!
I will confess I was entertained. As an aside this subject seems to parallel in part this subject at The Argument (https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/the-heresy-of-hank-green). [ETA oh and I agree overall, esp. on the closing paragraphs]
An add-on thought (as someone who once was in VC investment, not currently what I do tho), re "The left has always erred by discounting the abilities and importance of entrepreneurs; they imagine that if Jobs and Bezos had never existed, Apple and Amazon would have been built by gray men in flannel suits. They view the techbro class as parasites, draining unearned wealth from organizations that could run themselves just fine on their own." it seems to me there is a strong component in that Lefty-College Degreed class that equally over-indexed on the idea of inventor (particularly solo-inventor) as the "correct" and valid entrepreneur, generally blind or hand-waiving away the execution & engineering that is needed to make IP something actually real-world valuable. Having been on lots of selection committees for venture financing (not in hot-house Cali where crazy bets were (are) made in a lot of copy-catting), execution... As Noah's written, Musk is a nasty horrible person but I've been in enough early stage to know not to abstract away from execution & scaling*
This in my current role in RenEn I see quite a lot in the breathless 'takes' that one 'just' has to deploy X (where X is some latest tech or IP out of a Univ. or similar), completely blind to the engineering and industrial execution that is needed for these things to be truly industrial economical. Engineering and operations is damn hard in esp. physical asset industry.
(* it does remind me of a meeting I attended between a VC and an entrepeneur who didn't want to share his IP for examination on idea it could be easily stolen. VC rightly said "if it's that easy then it's not worth what you think [it is].") [edit to fix sloppy phone-typing...]
Your general idea can be generalized. Individualism and "non-correlated" experimentation are key to an innovation economy. Certainly, big tech is a key player, but I would argue that broad based experiments yielding productivity gains is also a key part.
I should be clearer I suppose as people tend to collapse innovation & entrepeneurship into IT-Tech - my own VC experience, background was not in Tech (not Cali, not IT), I've always been a hard asset guy. Innovation and entrepreneurship for me has always been an industrial flavor not Google - Facebook - Uber world (i.e. not big or middling tech as such).
So in short, I meant something quite in line with "broad based experiments yielding productivity gains is also a key part." and was not actually meaning Big or Medium Tech as such
Great piece. I think they need persuasion to count as "power" precisely so they can justify using the real thing — the coercive power of government, via antitrust — against it.
For the record, some of us do love the iPhone and canonize Steve Jobs because we subscribe to stories about how heroic engineers hold up the rest of society.
I agree. With the risk of pissing off Noah and others, I think economists too often think they are so much better at managing lives (probably true) that they should be allowed to use the coercive power of government to manage others' lives more often.
Leaving aside the empirically false yet oft-repeated assertion on the left that Silicon Valley is uniformly conservative when in fact it is very liberal, there is this unquenchable fetish within those same communities to pretend that media has some kind of magical transformative mind-control power (“power”) that functions a) independently of content and b) unilaterally, such that these magical powers cannot be deployed by the other side. All this despite the fact that c) by no means does outspending the other side guarantee election victory! This all of course nets out to a perfectly self-serving worldview in which “power” is by definition out of leftists’ hands by fiat at all times, conveniently and irreparably.
I'd be interested in your post on digital surveillance. The horse seems so far out of the barn on this one - cell tower tracking and app tracking mean that essentially everyone is tracked 100% of the time, and even turning off your phone can be used as evidence against you (see: the Idaho stabbings). Because of this I have a hard time getting worked up about Flock cameras; yes it would be bad for law enforcement to have unrestricted access to track people, but it would be very useful to track someone that just sideswiped a car or ran over a bicyclist, so to me it seems the answer is to maintain a high bar on access controls.
Henry Ford raises many of the same issues; he was racist and antisemitic…and helped America win WW2 and defeat the Nazis by turning Ford into a vast assembly line for bombers, jeeps, and tanks for America and her allies. In a contest of industrial capacity, people like Musk and Ford are incredibly valuable. As Noah said, the key is to ensure they support national interests, not undermine them.
Noah, if I can make one pointed comment. People sometimes go overboard in criticising the "Great man theory" of history, which posits that "great" men are the ones that matter for shaping historical narrative. One can go way, way too far in that and utterly discount the effects of any single man; it's good to push back against this. But you sometimes do seem to fall for that theory in a way that's also unhealthy.
Let me put it like this.
Counterfactual history is an enormously difficult task to consider. Still. So many of the necessary ingredients for creating a Ford Motors, a Tesla, an iPhone, existed prior to and independently of those creations. The remaining necessary innovative steps, the needed entrepreneurship, the coming together of things to actually make these companies exist are obviously very significant effort.
But would they have happened in some way without Ford/Musk/Jobs? We can't say for sure, but we know of some examples where two people/companies came up with more or less the same product at basically the same time and more less independently. A quick search shows two fairly clear examples, the microprocessor and jet engines. If I searched more, I'm pretty sure I'd find plenty of other examples and that of others who were on the same path but gave up when the product came to be. And the same thing has happened frequently in science and maths, as you almost certainly know.
Hence my question: if so much of what's needed is there, is the "final leap" inevitable? Probably not. But is it likely, maybe even very likely? Probably yes. Particularly when you consider the culture/countries that allows for these leaps to happen are likely cultivating similar people.
(The great example I've heard is that without a Columbus, would the Americas have been found? Consider how many other sailors and captains existed in Latin countries at that time, it seems likely at least one would have been persuasive, no?)
In that sense, I always like to think of the Wins Above Replacement (WAR) of these "great" men. That is to say, it's always a good idea to ask how much better at creating these products and companies these men were... compared to similar others at the same time. I.e., not the "grey men in suits" you posit, but other potential entrepreneurs.
Does that make sense? If so, then I do think you go too far in your framing here, which gives a impression of an almost impossible-to-replicate talent from these men, which I don't believe is true. They probably have a significant positive WAR, but not necessarily an impossibly large one. And for each, a very careful case has to be made...
Ideas arise mostly from context, not people. This is why widespread independent invention is the norm, not the exception. What the Fords, Bezos, Musks, Jobs, etc. of the world have isn't so much good ideas -- those are a dime a dozen -- it's the ability to recognize the good ideas, separate them from the chaff of ideas that appear to be good but aren't, and then, even more importantly, to execute. Execution requires a broad variety of skills: raising capital, managing people (including hiring the right ones), finding the right balance between bold aggressiveness and financial conservatism, and much more.
Would the the things that Ford/Musk/Jobs did have come about without Ford/Musk/Jobs? Very likely, almost certainly. But their successes required someone *like* Ford/Musk/Jobs, and if it hadn't been those specific individuals it would have been someone with the same skills and similar mindset.
Elon Musk is, in my opinion, a bit of an outlier. He's the only one I can think of who has achieved multiple, independent world-beating successes. Nearly all entrepreneurs use the wealth generated from smaller successes to build larger ones, the way Musk did with 7Zip, then PayPal, then Tesla and SpaceX, but they normally build only one hugely-successful company, not two (or three; Starlink is part of SpaceX, but it could almost be a third enormous success). Terafab could be another, or and maybe even the orbital data center thing. It also wouldn't surprise me if Musk is too high on his own fumes to execute on anything else, though.
He thought he could make a third enormous impact in politics, but that's an entirely different set of skills, which he obviously doesn't have. It's possible that he could acquire a lot of them if he had the humility to admit that he needs to learn, but he has lost whatever humility he had.
I think we basically agree. These entrepreneurs *did* achieve some important with bringing about a varied skillset, something that I actually wrote above: "The remaining necessary innovative steps, the needed entrepreneurship, the coming together of things to actually make these companies exist are obviously very significant effort."
But, as you also seem to agree, as the needed ingredients were already there and the needed culture existed, it's likely that something akin to what they achieved would have come about in any case, even if it would have been achieved by a different individual at a different time and place.
Ergo, what's the WAR, specifically, that Jobs and co bring about? It's not clear, but assuming we're talking about a replacement from a similar set of individuals, although not zero, it's not the exaggerated WAR that Noah implicitly puts in his post.
I just get annoyed that we can't seem to have a reasonable middle ground in these discussions... acknowledging the effort and talented needed to create these companies and products, without it making it seem like these creators were "demi-Gods" amongst humans, uniquely able to achieve what they did.
Anyway... 100% agree with the issue of different skillsets too, that's very much the case.
The problem faced by opponents of the Great Man theory is that they still require Great Men. You may not require Napoleon Bonaparte, but you still need a Napoleon. So for everything to work out it requires that for every Napoleon there are thousands of would be Napoleons waiting in the wings to take over if the original gets hit by lightning as a child, or something.
Well are there thousands of would be Great Men ready to step up? I would say clearly not. Those would be Great Men who didn't quite make it would have been narrowly edged out by the Greatest Man who did. In a world like that I would expect to see presidential elections on the talent level of Caesar vs Pompey every 4 years. I would expect we would have 50 governors and 100 senators all like Cicero and Cato. I don't see that. What I see is a sea of mediocrity that are deer in the headlights when an actual Great Man level talent arises every decade or so.
Musk is a great example and we can actually be kind of objective about this. Would there be a SpaceX without Musk? There was one contender, actually. Jeff Bezos started Blue Origin before Musk started SpaceX, and was much better financed too (Elon Musk wasn't even a billionaire at the time). And where did that get them? Absolutely nowhere. Blue Origin has yet to put a payload in orbit more than 20 years later.
I think it's fine for us to disagree here, because it's a very hard question to answer, these types of counterfactual exercises, as I wrote above. I would disagree with you, I think there's always plenty of people who are trying to achieve these things and that they do have the baseline talent and drive, but they just get "unlucky" in some key way.
But to illustrate how hard this is to think about, take your example and think about this carefully. Here the counterfactual isn't what happened to Blue Origin in reality, but what would have happened sans SpaceX. Would some of the engineers and administrators at SpaceX have been at Blue Origin instead? Would another entrepreneur have been enticed to join the fray with less competition? And not just in the US, but in other countries too? It's a hard thing to figure out, that needs to be done with care and expertise on a case-by-case basis.
The timeline would be different, almost certainly, but would something akin to SpaceX eventually come about? I think that likely yes... eventually.
Anyway and again, it's fine to disagree here.
I think this misses the point, on multiple dimensions. For one thing, it conflates buying into Big Tech with the power that having monetized Big Tech affords its elites. The first dimension is a fairly linear story-- people bought into Big Tech because it delivered something useful-- Google delivered useful search results, Amazon delivered a broad variety of products cheaply and cost-competitively (albeit at least in part, initially, due to regulatory arbitrage), Facebook delivered a convenient way to connect people. Over time, their products turned to crap, and they kept people in due to network effects (when they could; everyone besides your racist uncle quit Facebook because its core product is, even by Silicon Valley standards, toxic waste). Google search is actively worse than it was 15 years ago, because it went away from pagerank and toward selling search priority to the highest bidder; Amazon is hard to navigate because you have to wade through sponsored crap to get to the product you want, etc. And people stay because there isn't an alternative, and if you try to come up with an alternative, they'll bury you.
But that's a different point from what Acemoglu/Johnson write about, which is that the tech overlords' money enables them to buy a megaphone. The megaphone doesn't tie you down to listen or force you to accept it. But it does make it far easier to access. Like Elon Musk spent 9 figures of his personal funds on largely dishonest ads designed to get people to believe things that weren't true about politics. His spending changed at least some number of votes, not because the crap he amplified was true or good or smart, but because it was loud.
Now, there are lots of ways to accumulate that manner of power. Musk did it by being rich. Someone like Paul Krugman did it by being smart. And part of that power was the power to amplify-- the way that I (and I suspect many) of your readers found you and amplified your voice was that, a decade and a half ago, you wrote smart things that people like Paul Krugman amplified. But that power is tenuous. If Paul Krugman stops writing smart things, his voice will go away-- he'll stop being booked on TV, people will quit reading his Substack, and he'll become a marginal figure. That won't happen to Elon Musk. Despite being endlessly less smart, thoughtful or insightful than Paul Krugman, Musk has a far louder voice and more power. Not because he's persuasive in the marketplace of ideas, but because he's got a platform which he owns, amplified by people who prostrate themselves in front of people with lots of money (as either Jacque Fresco or Larry Summers allegedly said, "if you're so rich, why aren't you smart?").
And that should worry us. Because many of these tech overlords aren't good or decent people; they're actively bad people. And they use their money to make society actively worse. That rightly worries Acemoglu and Johnson.
This is importantly insight.
*The* defining feature of the left is people who lose their minds because hierarchies exist. At the end of the day, they will always end up opposed to anything other than "we get to chop down tall poppies and also we get to decide who they are." They are opposed to tall poppies as such and to any tools tall poppies have access to which they don't control. Originally, many believed they could co-opt control of the tools. When that consistently failed for decades and the hateful tall poppies remained anyway, they eventually just turned against the tools as such.
In many ways, both ends of the horseshoe are driven by status anxiety - just more traditionally the far right tends to despise the lumpenproletariat or people they think *should* be relegated to the lumpenproletariat but aren't. The far left hates tall poppies.
This is extremely tribal old-school izard brain stuff. Obsessions from the time of the literal hunter gather tribe when everyone was paranoid about both "big man bully" and "freeloader" and "outsider." Allowing other people to define what personal success means to you is never anything but a recipe for misery.
Normies anti-tech tendencies are really populism - which is mostly "anti-uncertainty." Being anti-uncertainty is even more inane than being anti-hierarchical. The only thing more certain than the fact that tall poppies aren't going anywhere is that uncertainty is forever. You can actually guillotine people more effectively than you can force the weather to cooperate with the wheat harvest or force the stock market to never crash. *You* will never, ever be in a permanent state of feeling completely safe or loved. You can either let this drive you mad or get zen about it.
*Edit* A lot of vanilla liberals are in fact driven by more or less "niceness" or "fairness." And while this is definitely the way to go on marketing grounds to convince people of why they should accept more or less neoliberalism with some social democracy - it does tend to avoid discussing/admitting some underlying Nietzschean truths about the structure of the world because it means the world is irreparably unfair and not particularly nice down to its bones in many ways. (Darwin's infamous parasitic wasps).
Nice liberalism might be able to answer the question about how/if we should have unemployment insurance, but it will never answer what to do with the fact that you will still sometimes (and perhaps often given quirks of your character) feel unwanted, unsafe, and low status. The far right/left are willing to address this "remainder" of anxiety by selling people on conspiracies - the system is rigged and "they" are who is rigging it. Liberals don't just have a confidence deficit at present. They also don't have much of anything to say about this anxiety - because the truth is something people mostly don't want to hear and most liberals at least aren't willing to flat out lie about it. That "remainder" anxiety - the part that is always left over no matter how robust the social safety net or the social support network has *always been* and *will always be* pure bootstrap grit up to you and no one else.
The claims about power fit with the idea I often encounter on the educated left that while people on the educated left form opinions based on reason, facts and values, much of the public reaches its opinions based on what people tell them, often demagoguery. This has the advantage of explaining why the public takes positions that the educated left sees as going against their own interests. It also means that you can dismiss the concerns of the general public because those concerns were just put in their heads by some shady operator. That explanation has always struck me as implausible and leaning into conspiracy theory territory. And to be honest, the last 10 years have demonstrated that the educated left quite vulnerable to falling for false information and making irrational choices so it's not as if this is something that education protects you from.
I would like to see Noah grapple more with consumer choice as part of an emergent system where the individual's choice is strongly influenced by everyone else.
I personally would love to not be using certain technologies, but the cost of individual defection is too high.
Some of these political rebellions against data centers might be seen in that regard. Could some of the Data Center activism be from people who feel the only way to push back on the tech is to shut it down at the source (compute) vs sensible regulations that might reduce the costs of collective action so that individuals are actually more free to make a different choice? Not sure but worth exploring.
Just because individuals are choosing this or that technology doesn't mean they are happy about it; they might be trying to avoid that defection cost.
I'm confused -- what anti-tech movement are you talking about?
Have people stopped buying iPhones? Nope, Apple's iPhone revenues are up 22% last quarter compared to the year previous. Maybe they've abandoned Amazon because Bezos is an a-hole? Nope, Amazon's revenue last quarter is up 20% over the previous year's quarter.
Maybe they've abandoned streaming? Nope, Netflix is Up 13%. Given up on solar power? No, solar and battery power is 91% of new installed electrical generation, although uncertainty over relations with China have slowed this down some recently.
The only thing I see as anti-tech is distrust of AI, which is hardly irrational: Gemini tells me, perhaps ironically that "In Ohio, the rapid influx of massive AI data centers has triggered a sharp surge in consumer electric bills, placing intense strain on the power grid and igniting fierce regulatory and political pushback. According to U.S. Energy Information Administration data, average Ohio electricity bills spiked by 22% from early 2025 to early 2026, ranking the state second in the nation for energy cost increases, trailing only Virginia."
At the same time, both Open AI and Anthropic seem unable to prevent their models from actually committing cybercrime by breaking into other companies' computer networks. Not to mention the immense level of copyright infringement for training models that certainly has hurt the market for some of the IP the models were trained on.
People are concerned that their resumes are being read and discarded by AI agents with no human oversight. Use of AI for papers and take home tests at universities have resulted in rampant cheating by students, leaving honest students at a disadvantage. Calls to customer support at many companies are handled by AI agents that can't actually do anything, adding one more layer of frustration to interacting with those companies: I recently had to get an incorrect item removed from my T-mobile bill, and after wasting time describing my issue to their bot, it told me that as a bot, it couldn't access my account or change my bill, and I needed to talk to a human.
So, there's definite concern that AI is being deployed in ways that will hurt ordinary people.
And looming over all of this are ridiculous circular financing deals where hyperscalers like Microsoft, Google and Nvidia invest tens of billions in AI companies like Open AI, Anthropic and others so that latter have the money to buy products and services from the hyperscalers. Those revenues then boost the hyperscalers' stock price, giving them more access to cash to invest....
Compelling read. I didn't necessarily agree with all of it, but it was a halfway decent response to Farrell's piece.
But this part stuck out to me:
"But where we go from there is not obvious. We could emulate the New Deal, and incorporate both technology and technologists into a unified drive for national prosperity and security. Or we could collapse into zero-sum status battles and petty class resentments, such that nothing can get done and our nation continues to slip into decline. Unfortunately, the anti-tech movement, out of a poverty of ideas, is currently steering us in the latter direction."
I'm not exactly anti-AI (more ambivalent than anything else, really), but this strikes me as a total misreading of American political history. The New Deal was not a "unified drive for national prosperity and security"; it was a bitterly contested political struggle between different factions (industrial labor unions, left-wing intellectuals, Southern Dixiecrats, reactionary Taft Republicans, etc.) that very nearly failed. In no way was the New Deal a great moment of American unity: if anything, it was quite the opposite. Many Republicans accused FDR of setting up a presidential dictatorship and leading us down the road to Bolshevism, and it didn't help that many key figures behind the New Deal were or had ties to socialist and communist organizations (not necessarily a deal-breaker for me, but your mileage may vary). FDR openly challenged the Supreme Court (and paid dearly for it) in a way that no modern Democrat could ever imagine, and that includes AOC and the DSA'ers. This is true of virtually every progressive political movement in the nation's history, from the Sons of Liberty and the abolitionists to the New Deal and the Civil Rights movement.
Noah seems to have this halcyon idea of American liberalism (and liberal presidents) as a unifying and consolidating political force in American history, but as the magisterial historian Arthur Schlesinger observes, great presidents are usually divisive figures (Lincoln, Jackson, FDR, Reagan, etc.) who only appear as uniters with hindsight (and not a little bit of misbegotten nostalgia). Great social movements (and great presidents) are necessarily divisive amongst their contemporaries, and it is only after they triumph that their opponents and ambivalent moderates eventually fall in line (as Eisenhower did with the New Deal and Clinton with the Reagan Revolution).
> Many Republicans accused FDR of setting up a presidential dictatorship
And now Trump is showing us just how right they were
I don't really see the point of this debate. I think it is a mistake to focus on the "tech" aspect of the new oligarchs. The fact is that a select group of people have accumulated astronomical wealth that has a negative impact on society. At the very least we should increase taxes on capital to restore the old capital/labor distribution of income. This did not prevent entrepreneurs from contribution their ingenuity to our productivity growth, nor will it prevent it now.