Imagining himself as a historian looking back on the US in 2050, Acemoglu writes:
Historians and journalists have been debating what happened ever since. Some focused on the economic policies of Donald Trump’s second term: tariffs on allies that, after some back-and-forth, started a global trade war that damaged rather than helped US manufacturing and caused a spike in inflation; and further tax cuts for corporations and high-income Americans that increased the federal debt from an already massive $36tn to more than $50tn.
Others saw the “government-tech complex” that emerged in Trump’s second term as the real culprit. With all AI and cryptocurrency regulations lifted and the Trump Department of Justice declaring that it would not apply any antitrust pressure, the tech industry consolidated further and a few mega-corporations came to dominate the entire sector. This not only slowed down new useful innovations, but laid the seeds of the big tech crash of 2030, when trillions of dollars were wiped off the economy as it became clear that most of the huge investment in AI wasn’t paying off.
