This felt like a hit piece and ended up making me more sympathetic to Acemoglu (about whom I previously had no strong opinion). The critique of his paper on different forms of imperialism (extractive, constructive) was quite weak for work that has been cited 20,000+ times, and seems to have been deftly refuted by the author himself. Complaints in the latter half of the article - that his take on Trump is correct but unoriginal, and his early comments on AI did not reflect the emergence of agents - are hardly damning. If anything, I began to suspect that he must have triggered some ideological tripwire that spurred the likes of Larry Summers and Tyler Cowen to sound off.