Faculty
SIMON JOHNSON is the Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he is head of the Global Economics and Management group. At MIT, he is also co-director of the Shaping the Future of Work Initiative and a Research Affiliate at Blueprint Labs.
In 2024, Johnson received the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel, joint with Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, “for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.”
In 2007-08, Johnson was chief economist and director of the Research Department at the International Monetary Fund. He currently co-chairs the CFA Institute Systemic Risk Council with Erkki Liikanen. He is a Research Associate at the NBER and a Fellow at CEPR.
Johnson’s most recent book, with Daron Acemoglu, Power and Progress: Our 1000-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, explores the history and economics of major technological transformations up to and including the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence. Power and Progress is currently scheduled for publication in about 20 languages around the world. It was long listed for the 2023 Financial Times and Schroders Book of the Year and for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, and it was shortlisted for the 2024 Lionel Gelber Prize.
His previous book, with Jonathan Gruber, Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream, explained how to create millions of good new jobs around the U.S., through renewed public investment in research and development. This proposal attracted bipartisan support, as reflected in the 2022 Chips and Science Act.
Johnson was previously a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C., a cofounder of BaselineScenario.com, a member of the Congressional Budget Office’s Panel of Economic Advisors, and a member of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s Systemic Resolution Advisory Committee. From July 2014 to early 2017, Johnson was a member of the Financial Research Advisory Committee of the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Financial Research (OFR), within which he chaired the Global Vulnerabilities Working Group. From February 2021 to March 2025, Johnson was a member of the board of directors of Fannie Mae, where he was vice chair of the audit committee, vice chair of the compensation committee, and a member of the risk and capital committee.
“The Quiet Coup” received over a million views when it appeared in The Atlantic in early 2009. His book 13 Bankers: the Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown (with James Kwak), was an immediate bestseller and has become one of the mostly highly regarded books on the financial crisis. Their follow-up book on U.S. fiscal policy, White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt, and Why It Matters for You, won praise across the political spectrum. Johnson’s academic research papers on long-term economic development, corporate finance, political economy, and public health are widely cited.
“For his articulate and outspoken support for public policies to end too-big-to-fail,” Johnson was named a Main Street Hero by the Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA) in 2013.
Important: For all media inquires, please make sure you copy Michelle Fiorenza, fiorenza@mit.edu
Acemoglu, Daron and Simon Johnson. Annual Review of Economics Vol. 16, No. 597-621 (2024).
Johnson, Simon and Catherine Wolfram. Brookings Institution Working Paper (2024). Appendix.
Johnson, Simon and Daron Acemoglu. Project Syndicate, January 2, 2024.
Acemoglu, Daron and Simon Johnson. Project Syndicate, December 15, 2023.
Capraro, Valerio, Austin Lentsch, and Daron Acemoglu et al., Working Paper. December 2023.
Johnson, Simon, Yuriy Gorodnichenko, and Ilona Sologoub. Project Syndicate, December 4, 2023.
Sometimes, an MIT Sloan Action Learning team is so successful that it calls for an encore. That’s what happened for MBA ’25 students Shawn George, Neha Golakia, Trung Nguyen, and Nisha Patel when they teamed up again for a Global Entrepreneurship Lab (G-Lab) project in Brazil after a successful ASEAN Lab project in Malaysia last year.
Nobel laureate Simon Johnson says that AI can be an equalizing force, but warns that new technology does not automatically benefit everyone.
"There've been lots of episodes of productivity increase. Most instances in world history when productivity has gone up only a few people have benefited, so it didn't filter down," said professor Simon Johnson. Innovations are more likely to spread prosperity when they create new, specialized tasks for humans or when they assist workers but don't replace them, he said.
Some companies are hiring "AI architects" to help oversee agentic systems and cut down on gaffes. The question is who will occupy those roles in the future if early-career workers are cut off from opportunities today. Professor Simon Johnson doesn't expect companies to take into account the social cost of career disruption in making their decisions. He suggests governments lower payroll taxes for entry-level roles to encourage hiring. "The right lever to pull is one that reduces costs to employers," Johnson said.
"Improving technology and expanding the capabilities of some people may not necessarily translate into improved living standards for everyone," professor Simon Johnson said. "A lot of Big Tech bosses are more intensely focused on improving the capabilities of people like themselves."
In an open letter, Institute Professor Daron Acemoglu, professor Simon Johnson, and co-authors said a massive budget bill passed by House lawmakers last month would weaken key safety-net programs while greatly lifting the federal debt. "The combination of cuts to key safety net programs like Medicaid and SNAP and tax cuts disproportionately benefiting higher-income households means that the House budget constitutes an extremely large upward redistribution of income," they wrote.
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Over six weeks, you’ll explore the technical and strategic considerations for robust, beneficial, and responsible AI deployment. You’ll examine the various stages of a proprietary ML Deployment Framework and unlock new opportunities by investigating the key challenges and their related impact. Guided by leading experts and MIT academics, you’ll build a toolkit for addressing these challenges within your own organization and context.
