Here is the piece. It is not praise for wealth taxes or redistribution. Rather it is praise for another newer part of Warren's agenda.
Forget the stock market and the low unemployment rate: the US economy isn’t working. Productivity growth, a key gauge of economic health, remains historically low. Median wages, an indicator of middle-class living standards, have barely grown in four decades. Inequality is high, and market power is increasingly concentrated in the hands of just a few companies. Americans used to dismiss Europe as the land of government-protected, noncompetitive firms. Now, European markets in most industries appear more competitive than those in the United States.
The complacency of America’s political class has exacerbated these problems. For years, two trite approaches have dominated economic-policy debates. The right has clung to a belief in “trickle-down” growth, which translates into doing whatever is good for business, because corporate profitability will boost investment, employment, and wages. But it turns out that serving established corporations’ interests and eschewing regulation does not encourage competition or spur the kind of innovation needed to boost productivity growth. Siding with bosses at the expense of workers and consumers may be good for shareholders, but it doesn’t deliver healthy wage growth for average Americans.The left, meanwhile, has focused primarily on redistribution, most recently seizing on proposals for a wealth tax with which to finance more generous transfers or even a universal basic income. There is little doubt that the US economy needs more infrastructure investment, a better social safety net, and stronger anti-poverty measures. Taxes on the rich have reached record lows at a time when the US is in dire need of more federal-government revenue and spending. Yet, historically, no society has achieved broadly shared prosperity from redistribution alone.
Rather, shared prosperity has typically rested on three pillars. The first is fiscal redistribution, whereby taxes on the rich are used to provide public services and transfers to the needy. The second is a plentiful supply of jobs with relatively high pay and some degree of stability, which in turn depends on the presence of laws protecting workers (otherwise employers will shift toward lower-quality, lower-pay jobs). The third pillar is steady productivity growth, which is necessary for bolstering wage growth across the population. Wage-boosting productivity growth requires a specific form of technological change: the kind that is not narrowly aimed at eliminating workers from the production process. But it also requires regulations to prevent one or a few firms from achieving excessive dominance in an industry or over the whole economy.
Until now, a “good jobs” agenda has been largely absent from political debates. But in a recent campaign speech, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, one of the leading contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, checked all the right boxes. Departing somewhat from her previous focus on taxing the super-rich and redistribution, Warren emphasized the importance of broad-based growth, and even identified some of the structural problems underlying stagnant US productivity.
Acemoglu goes on to discuss how Warren doesn't go far enough. He, together with James Robinson has written seminal books and articles including "Why Nations Fail" and "The Narrow Corridor". The later is about how it is very difficult to sustain democracy between the poles of communism and fascism.The complacency of America’s political class has exacerbated these problems. For years, two trite approaches have dominated economic-policy debates. The right has clung to a belief in “trickle-down” growth, which translates into doing whatever is good for business, because corporate profitability will boost investment, employment, and wages. But it turns out that serving established corporations’ interests and eschewing regulation does not encourage competition or spur the kind of innovation needed to boost productivity growth. Siding with bosses at the expense of workers and consumers may be good for shareholders, but it doesn’t deliver healthy wage growth for average Americans.The left, meanwhile, has focused primarily on redistribution, most recently seizing on proposals for a wealth tax with which to finance more generous transfers or even a universal basic income. There is little doubt that the US economy needs more infrastructure investment, a better social safety net, and stronger anti-poverty measures. Taxes on the rich have reached record lows at a time when the US is in dire need of more federal-government revenue and spending. Yet, historically, no society has achieved broadly shared prosperity from redistribution alone.
Rather, shared prosperity has typically rested on three pillars. The first is fiscal redistribution, whereby taxes on the rich are used to provide public services and transfers to the needy. The second is a plentiful supply of jobs with relatively high pay and some degree of stability, which in turn depends on the presence of laws protecting workers (otherwise employers will shift toward lower-quality, lower-pay jobs). The third pillar is steady productivity growth, which is necessary for bolstering wage growth across the population. Wage-boosting productivity growth requires a specific form of technological change: the kind that is not narrowly aimed at eliminating workers from the production process. But it also requires regulations to prevent one or a few firms from achieving excessive dominance in an industry or over the whole economy.
Until now, a “good jobs” agenda has been largely absent from political debates. But in a recent campaign speech, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, one of the leading contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, checked all the right boxes. Departing somewhat from her previous focus on taxing the super-rich and redistribution, Warren emphasized the importance of broad-based growth, and even identified some of the structural problems underlying stagnant US productivity.
