Support our work: http://novara.media/support In the West, liberal democracy, or social democracy, has over the past century become the dominant political system: the water we swim in. But in an age of climate change, runaway inequality, big tech oligopolies, and rising fascism, the system that once promised so much to so many is breaking under the strain. On Downstream this week is Daron Acemoglu, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics. His 2012 book ‘Why Nations Fail’ sold over a million copies. This week, he’s here to discuss his latest work, ‘What Happened to Liberal Democracy?’ - a data-packed book that seeks to diagnose and remedy democracy before it’s too late. When and why did liberal democracy stop working for the many? What happened during the transition from an industrial to a post-industrial economy? How important has the loss of community been? When did progressive politics become overrun by middle-class interests? How does AI further threaten our capacity to self-govern and lead flourishing lives? What could a pro-worker AI look like, and how can we achieve it? 00:00 Intro 03:52 Why Liberal Democracy Is Broken 07:49 What Liberalism Got Wrong About Community 11:24 Universalism, Open Borders, and the Limits of Liberal Ideals 17:49 Self-Government: Why We Need Democracy From the Bottom Up 21:09 Responding to The Economist’s Hit Piece 23:06 AI as an Ideological Litmus Test 26:13 Big Tech, Elon Musk, and AI as a Centralising Technology 30:08 Fixing Social Democracy: Antitrust, Progressive Taxation and Wealth Taxes 33:24 How the Working Class Became Rightwing 36:00 The Post-Industrial Break: How Wage Growth and Shared Prosperity Collapsed 42:02 The Managerial Class and the Death of Mixed Communities 47:00 Left-Behind Towns: Deindustrialisation and Urban Inequality 55:06 Social Engineering, Orwell, and the Top-Down Imposition of Values 1:01:59 China’s Counterpoint to Western Liberal Democracy 1:04:40 Technological Leadership, and Why the West Is Losing Ground 1:09:25 China’s Engineering: DeepSeek, BYD, and the Limits of State-Led Innovation 1:11:26 – Is Britain and Europe’s Economic Decline Overstated? 1:14:03 – A Pro-Worker AI Agenda for the UK 1:15:24 – Closing Thoughts: Escaping the AGI Agenda Buy Novara Media merch: https://shop.novaramedia.com/

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