An example discussed in the paper — and an issue on which Dr. Acemoglu changed his own mind in the course of writing it — is the role of trade unions.

“My view for a long time was that labor organizations had become rent-seeking,” the economics term for groups that specialize in getting a bigger share of the pie, rather than making it grow over all, he said. “Now, my view is that even though we are not transitioning from dictatorship to democracy, you need some labor organizations as a counterweight to business lobbying.”

They make the argument at greater length in the paper: “Faced with a trade union exercising monopoly power and raising the wages of its members, most economists would advocate removing or limiting the union’s ability to exercise this monopoly power, and that is certainly the right policy in some circumstances. But unions do not just influence the way the labor market functions; they also have important implications for the political system. Historically, unions have played a key role in the creation of democracy in many parts of the world, particularly in Western Europe.”

Two other important examples the study dissects are financial deregulation in the United States and privatization in post-Soviet Russia. In both cases, economic reforms that made a lot of sense in the abstract and in terms of economic efficiency had the unintended consequence of strengthening already powerful political interests.

As the powerful often do, they overplayed their hand. The result was a political spiral which in the United States helped set off the 2008 financial crisis and in Russia led to the rise of President Vladimir V. Putin and his authoritarian regime.

This paper reminds us of something important, which critics of the elite often don’t understand, or don’t want to understand. In both the United States and in Russia, the reforms which strengthened powerful vested interests didn’t begin as a cunning plot by a wealthy cabal, intent on further enriching itself. Instead, they were endorsed and advocated by today’s high priests, the technocrats, who sincerely believed they were acting in the common good.

“What our paper is targeted at is, there is a certain hubristic attitude among economists — we are the queen of the social sciences because we use numbers and data,” said Dr. Acemoglu, who is a professor in M.I.T.’s department of economics. “But that can ignore the implications of political power.”