How Liberal Democracy Can Survive an Age of Spiraling Crises

如何让自由民主在危机迭起的时代中生存下去

The Foreign Affairs Interview

2025-12-18

58 分钟
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The world has reached various inflection points, or so we are often told. Advanced technology, such as artificial intelligence, promises to transform our way of life. In geopolitics, the growing competition between China and the United States heralds an uncertain new era. And within many democracies, the old assumptions that undergirded politics are in doubt; liberalism appears to be in disarray and illiberal forces on the rise.  Few scholars are grappling with the many dimensions of the current moment quite like Daron Acemoglu is. “The world is in the throes of a pervasive crisis,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2023, a crisis characterized by widening economic inequalities and a breakdown in public trust. Acemoglu is a Nobel Prize–winning economist, but his research and writing has long strayed beyond the conventional bounds of his discipline. He has written famously, in the bestselling book Why Nations Fail, about how institutions determine the success of countries. He has explored how technological advances have transformed—or indeed failed to transform—societies. And more recently he has turned his attention to the crisis facing liberal democracy, one accentuated by economic alienation and the threat of technological change. Deputy Editor Kanishk Tharoor spoke with Acemoglu about a stormy world of overlapping crises and about how the ship of liberal democracy might be steered back on course. You can find sources, transcripts, and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.
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  • I'm Dan Kurtz-Valen, and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview.

  • Once you start thinking of new technology, just like a gale or a storm that is out of our control,

  • then the best thing we can do is we can try to adapt to it.

  • We build better skills, we build better protection mechanisms, etc.

  • But if we are choosing the direction of AI, Then an obvious question is why not meet halfway?

  • Why not rather than just like push AI in some crazy direction and have humans adjust to it when it's not really that easy?

  • Why don't we try to steer AI in a direction that's actually quite useful for humans?

  • I'm Deputy Editor Kanush Tharoor.

  • Dan is away this week.

  • The world has reached various inflection points, or so we're often told.

  • Advanced technology such as artificial intelligence promises to transform our way of life.

  • In geopolitics,

  • the growing competition between China and the United States heralds an uncertain new era.

  • And within many democracies, the old assumptions that undergirded politics are in doubt.

  • Liberalism appears to be in disarray and illiberal forces on the rise.

  • Few scholars are grappling with the many dimensions of the current moment quite like Darren Asimoglu is.

  • The world is in the throes of a pervasive crisis, he wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2023,

  • a crisis characterized by widening economic inequalities and a breakdown in public trust.

  • Asimoglu is a Nobel Prize-winning economist,

  • but his research and writing has long strayed beyond the conventional bounds of his discipline.