It has come to my attention that the noted political scientist Henry Farrell has been writing some very testy responses to me. The first two, in 2024, totally slipped by unnoticed:
So Noah Smith has a quite negative review of Acemoglu and Johnson’s recent book, Power and Progress, a book that I myself liked very much. Before letting rip, Noah says nice things about Acemoglu and Johnson, and I’ll do the same here for him. There are a lot of people on the left who detest Noah, but I know him to be a genuinely decent person. What he…
2 years ago · 42 likes · 6 comments · Henry Farrell
Attention Conservation Notice: Much of what is said in this post was said already in an earlier one. So if you’ve read that, you may not want to read this. On the other hand, this is blunter and slightly shorter…
2 years ago · 35 likes · 13 comments · Henry Farrell
Thanks to the rise of Substack Notes, however, I was able to see the most recent installment in the sequence, which is mostly a repost of the first installment:
I didn’t expect to have more uncomplimentary things to say about the unfortunate intellectual relationship between (a few) economists and (a few) Silicon Valley billionaires right away. But Noah Smith republished his review of Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson’s…
25 days ago · 233 likes · 57 comments · Henry Farrell
I apologize for missing the first two when they came out, and I’ll try to respond to these as well. But first let me note that all three of Henry’s blog posts are responses to my review of the book Power and Progress, by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, which I first wrote in 2024 and then republished recently:
