The faculty of Social Sciences have the honour to present Professor Daron Acemoglu, MIT, as this year's speaker for the Myrdal lecture at Stockholm university. The theme of his lecture will be "the future of work".
This talk will show that history is full of examples where new technologies have automated work, and as a result, have increased productivity but not employment and wages. This has been the pattern in the last several decades as well. What has ensured a steadily increasing demand for labor throughout history has been the simultaneous creation of new tasks where labor can be productively employed, which have counterbalanced the negative effects of automation of labor demand. The recent past is unusual in our inability to generate sufficient new tasks, which accounts both for slow growth of productivity and lack of shared prosperity.
Daron Acemoglu currently holds the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics at MIT. He has published the acclaimed book "Why nations fail. The origins of power, prosperity and poverty."
After the lecture there will be a mingle with coffee and cake.