Economist Simon Johnson

Johnson (born January 16, 1963) is a British American economist. He is the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He has held a wide variety of academic and policy-related positions, including professor of economics at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. From March 2007 through the end of August 2008, he was Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund.

Johnson's first degree was a BA from the University of Oxford, which was followed by an MA from the University of Manchester, and finally in 1989 he earned a Ph.D. in economics from MIT, with a dissertation entitled Inflation, intermediation, and economic activity.

In November 2020, Johnson was named a volunteer member of the Joe Biden presidential transition Agency Review Team to support transition efforts related to the United States Department of Treasury and the Federal Reserve.

Among other positions he is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, and a member of the International Advisory Council at the Center for Social and Economic Research (CASE). He is also a member of the Congressional Budget Office's Panel of Economic Advisers. From 2006 to 2007 he was a visiting fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, where he is currently a senior fellow. He is on the editorial board of four academic economics journals. He has contributed to Project Syndicate since 2007.

Simon Johnson is the author of the 2010 book 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown (ISBN 978-0307379054), along with James Kwak, with whom he has also co-founded and regularly contributes to the economics blog The Baseline Scenario. He is also author of White House Burning: Our National Debt and Why It Matters to You (2013); Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream (2019), with Jonathan Gruber; and Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity (2023), with Daron Acemoglu.

Power and Progress

Published in 2023, Power and Progress is a book on the historical development of technology and the social and political consequences of technology. The book addresses three questions, on the relationship between new machines and production techniques and wages, on the way in which technology could be harnessed for social goods, and on the reason for the enthusiasm around artificial intelligence.

Power and Progress argues that technologies do not automatically yield social goods, their benefits going to a narrow elite. It offers a rather critical view of artificial intelligence (AI), stressing its largely negative impact on jobs and wages and on democracy.

Acemoglu and Johnson also provide a vision about how new technologies could be harnesses for social good. They see the Progressive Era as offering a model. And they discuss a list of policy proposals for the redirection of technology that includes: (1) market incentives, (2) the break up of big tech, (3) tax reform, (4) investing in workers, (5) privacy protection and data ownership, and (6) a digital advertising tax.

• Brown–Kaufman amendment