Welcome to significant others. I'm Liza Powell O'Brien, and in yesterday's episode, we heard all about how

Carl Marx advocated for the emancipation of the

participation of the proletariat, while creating some highly unequal living conditions in his own home.

To talk a little bit more about the world that Carl Marx helped make,

I'm very excited to welcome MIT Institute Professor Darren Asamaglu to the

podcast. Professor Asamaglu, it is an incredible honor to have you here today.

You've authored many books and we could spend an

entire episode just listing your accolades but to start you are a professor of

economics is that correct? Correct. And most recently you have published a book that you

co-wrote called Power and Progress. That's right, Lisa, thank you. The subtitle is

Our 1,000- year struggle over technology and prosperity and

we're going to begin by covering each of those years in real time right now.

Thank you, Liza. It reason that I thought it would be interesting to have this conversation in the wake of the episode that we just

released on Carl Marx is probably fairly obvious which is that you know Marx's name is

so closely linked to the idea of revolution. He wrote a lot about economic and

social revolution and it's been said a lot recently and that doesn't always mean it's true but it does feel like it is true

right now that we are living through quite a revolution in terms of what

artificial intelligence is doing to every aspect of our lives.

Absolutely, yeah, well great and I think it is a really insightful step back to go to Marx because I am not a Marxist and I don't think he got everything right,

but he did get a few things right and chief among them is the importance of

conflict in economic relations, that there is going to be a process that benefits some people and not others.

He emphasized the control over means of ownership of means of production.

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