Simon Johnson
Bestselling Author, "Power and Progress" and "13 Bankers" | Professor of Entrepreneurship, MIT Sloan School of Management
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. In 2007-08 he was chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, and he currently co-chairs the CFA Institute Systemic Risk Council. In February 2021, Johnson joined the board of directors of Fannie Mae.
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. Johnson makes the case for a society that shares the prosperity of technological advances rather than one where a small group of elites benefit while the majority stagnates.
In 2024, Simon shared a Nobel Prize in Economics with his MIT colleague and co-author, Daron Acemoglu, and James Robinson of the University of Chicago, “for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.
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.
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.
“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.
Credentials
- Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship, MIT Sloan School of Management
- Former Senior Fellow, Peterson Institute for International Economics
- Cofounder, BaselineScenario.com
- Contributing Business Editor, The Huffington Post
- Economic Counsellor & Director of Research (Chief Economist), IMF (Mar-07 – Aug-08)
- Member, FDIC’s Systemic Resolution Advisory Committee
- Member, SEC Advisory Committee on Market Information
- Member, CBO's Panel of Economic Advisers
- Research Fellow, Centre for Economic Policy Research
- Research Associate, NBER
- BREAD affiliate
- Member, Advisory Group at the Center for Global Development
- Member, Advisory Board, CASE in Warsaw
- Non-resident Research Fellow, Asian Institute for Corporate Governance, Korea University
- Co-director of the NBER project on Africa
- Former Assistant Director, IMF's Research Dept
- President, Association for Comparative Economic Studies
- Ph.D. in economics; MIT; MA, University of Manchester; BA, University of Oxford
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