Simon Johnson

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Power and Consequences.

My name is Simon Johnson.

I'm Gary Gensler.

And we're talking today about the midterm elections in the United States.

It does.

Let me say that there's two core congressional functions.

It's oversight and It's written right into the constitution that you carry around in that pocket constitution of yours, Simon.

And that's oversight not only of the executive branch, Our founders thought that that was important to think about how spending goes and oversight of the executive, but also oversight for legislative purposes.

This is where the Zombie Town story connects to a much bigger argument in economics.

In 2024, the Nobel Prize in Economics went to three economists, Darren Achimoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson.

Their argument is that culture and institutions are what determine whether a country prospers or doesn't.

Not just capital, not just labor, not even just technology.

It's a chilling scene that captures the moment a man stops believing in the rule of law and starts believing in gangsterism.

When nations make the same choice, their economies stagnate, according to economists Doron Asimoglu and James Robinson, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize with Simon Johnson.

In their 2012 book, Why Nations Fail, Asimoglu and Robinson wrote, countries differ in their economic success because of their different institutions, the rules influencing how the economy works, and the incentives that motivate people.

Inclusive systems, they argue, protect property, enforce contracts, and allow everyone to compete.

That's a school up in Boston.

If you didn't know that on Simon Johnson says, shut up and read it in the giant one.

I dearly miss him every day.

Angus Deaton says a vitally important book.

good people for that?

They've got a Nobel Prize winner chairing the AI Economics Institute, Simon Johnson.

So there's got good people.

And the AI Security Institute is very heavily praised internationally, including by some of the frontier US labs.

It's a very nice way to think about it, right? Yeah, because I think we do, as faculty, you do feel a lot of pressure to, I mean, most faculty don't want to ruin their students' lives or whatever it is students feel like is happening when they get a bad grade, right? Some people don't have qualms about this, but...

So let's talk about their lives, because you quote in the report, your colleagues, Doron Ejemolu, David Otter, Simon Johnson, on this idea of pro-worker AI.

And it sort of leads us to this concept of pro-learner AI.

And I wonder, you've talked a little bit about the classroom structure and what that looks like from the faculty perspective, but maybe you can talk about the learner side of this.

Mr. Gensler's here, the former chairman of the Securities Exchange Commission.

The Nobel laureate Simon Johnson has the privilege of working with him up at MIT.

How's that going? How's this wonderful experiment of Gensler and Johnson, Johnson and Gensler going?

We're having a lot of fun.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Power and Consequences.

My name is Simon Johnson.

And I'm Gary Gensler.

And we're talking today about what will the Fed, the Federal Reserve, do next?

So if I were in those meetings, I would say, we can wait till December.

Will one be viewed as less political? And two, we might have a better sense of this.

Are we getting near the top of some of these issues on the artificial intelligence boom, the European debt challenges, energy shocks, and more? But what about you, Simon? Well, I'm not

very good at predictions, Gary.