What Happened to Liberal Democracy? by Daron Acemoğlu review – how to fix the system

The Nobel-winning economist takes aim at elites for no longer meeting the needs of the massesIn 2009, the tech billionaire Peter Thiel published an essay with the portentous title The Education of a Libertarian, in which he announced: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Since the 1920s, he wrote, “the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women” had rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” an oxymoron. To be fair, Thiel still seems happy to exercise his freedom to extract money from democracies, via his co-founding of Palantir, which was lately given lots of money by the NHS.Thiel calls himself, as many such do, a “classical liberal”, but Daron Acemoğlu argues that his ilk still has much in common with left-liberals. All of them, he writes, agree on “the desirability of basic individual rights and freedoms (including the right not to be coerced and the freedoms of expression, reli