Fortunately, Professor Acemoglu and colleagues stand ready to administer the funds.
Daron Acemoglu is not an academic to be trifled with. An MIT Institute Professor and 2024 Nobel laureate in Economics, he wrote Why Nations Fail, the definitive account of how extractive elites capture institutions and impoverish everyone else. His follow-up, Power and Progress, applied this framework to Big Tech, arguing that a narrow elite has seized AI’s benefits while offloading its costs onto workers. The man has spent thirty years explaining exactly how elites like him ruin everything.
He has now proposed the solution. All it requires is lots more of your money.
In a February 2026 Hamilton Project paper, co-authored with MIT colleagues David Autor and Simon Johnson, Acemoglu identifies nine policy directions to redirect AI toward “pro-worker” ends. These include:
- Targeted government investment in education and healthcare (because such government “investments” have been so successful in the past)
- New federal grant programs to fund pro-worker AI development (because the public is thrilled with the idea of putting more scientists on the dole)
- Tax code reform (to punish companies that install automation, a great way to encourage reshoring)
- Antitrust enforcement (a valuable tool to reward friends and punish enemies), and
- Harnessing union “voice” in AI design (The longshoremen’s union is warming up its seasoned efficiency experts.)
The paper was funded by the Hewlett Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and — in an acknowledgment buried on page two — the Google Technology and Society Visiting Fellows Program. Because paying for the rope that socialist academics use to hang you is a time-honored capitalist tradition.
Professor Acemoglu is available for $50,000 keynotes through the Lavin Exclusive Speaker Bureau. (If that exceeds your budget, Grok will generate a video of him dispensing his wisdom for $20.)