Research and publications
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. [10] 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. [11] 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. [12]
An institution is a humanly devised structure of rules and norms that shape and constrain individual behavior. All definitions of institutions generally entail that there is a level of persistence and continuity. Laws, rules, social conventions and norms are all examples of institutions. Institutions vary in their level of formality and informality.
Modernization theory holds that as societies become more economically modernized, wealthier and more educated, their political institutions become increasingly liberal democratic. The "classical" theories of modernization of the 1950s and 1960s, most influentially articulated by Seymour Lipset, drew on sociological analyses of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Talcott Parsons. Modernization theory was a dominant paradigm in the social sciences in the 1950s and 1960s, and saw a resurgence after 1991, when Francis Fukuyama wrote about the end of the Cold War as confirmation on modernization theory.
Kamer Daron Acemoğlu is a Turkish-born American economist who has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1993, where he is currently the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics. He received the John Bates Clark Medal in 2005, and was named an Institute Professor at MIT in 2019.
Erik Brynjolfsson is an American academic, author and inventor. He is the Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Professor and a Senior Fellow at Stanford University where he directs the Digital Economy Lab at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, with appointments at SIEPR, the Stanford Department of Economics and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a best-selling author of several books. From 1990 to 2020, he was a professor at MIT.
Robert L. Kuttner is an American journalist and writer whose works present a liberal and progressive point of view. Kuttner is the co-founder and current co-editor of The American Prospect, which was created in 1990 as an "authoritative magazine of liberal ideas," according to its mission statement. He was a columnist for Business Week and The Boston Globe for 20 years.
The Barcelona School of Economics (BSE) is an institution for research and graduate education in economics, finance, data science, and the social sciences located in Barcelona, Spain.
Financialization is a term sometimes used to describe the development of financial capitalism during the period from 1980 to present, in which debt-to-equity ratios increased and financial services accounted for an increasing share of national income relative to other sectors.
Jordi Galí is a Spanish macroeconomist who is regarded as one of the main figures in New Keynesian macroeconomics today. He is currently the director of the Centre de Recerca en Economia Internacional at Universitat Pompeu Fabra and a Research Professor at the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics. After obtaining his doctorate from MIT in 1989 under the supervision of Olivier Blanchard, he held faculty positions at Columbia University and New York University before moving to Barcelona.
James Kwak is a Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut School of Law, best known as co-founder, with Simon Johnson, in September 2008, of the economics blog "The Baseline Scenario", a commentary on developments in the global economy, law, and public policy, mostly focused on the situation in the USA. Kwak received his A.B. magna cum laude in 1990 from Harvard University and his Ph.D. on French intellectual history in 1997 from the University of California, Berkeley (1997). While he frequently writes about the subject, Kwak holds no degrees in economics. He justifies this by stating that economics education below the PhD level is misleading.
The Yrjö Jahnsson Foundation is a charitable foundation whose aims are to promote Finnish research in economics and medicine and to maintain and support educational and research facilities in Finland. It was established in 1954 by the wife of Yrjö Jahnsson, Hilma Jahnsson. It supports the award of the Yrjö Jahnsson Award and Yrjö Jahnsson Lecture series. These lectures have been delivered by noteworthy economists since 1963. 10 of the Yrjö Jahnsson Lecture series scholars have gone on to win the Nobel prize in economics, making it a top predictor for future recipients.
Konstantin Sonin is a Russian economist. He is a professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), London, and an associate research fellow at the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics. In recognition for his outstanding research in the field of political economy, in December 2015, he was named the John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor of the University of Chicago.
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, first published in 2012, is a book by economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. The book applies insights from institutional economics, development economics and economic history to understand why nations develop differently, with some succeeding in the accumulation of power and prosperity and others failing, via a wide range of historical case studies.
James Alan Robinson is a British economist and political scientist. He is currently the Reverend Dr. Richard L. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies and University Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago. He also serves as the Institute Director of The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts at the Harris School. Robinson has previously taught at Harvard University between 2004 and 2015 and also at the University of California, Berkeley, University of Southern California and the University of Melbourne.
William R. Kerr is the Dimitri V. D'Arbeloff – MBA Class of 1955 Professor of Business Administration professor at Harvard Business School, where he is a co-director of Harvard's Managing the Future of Work project and faculty chair of the Launching New Ventures program for executive education.
Mark Armando Aguiar is an American economist who has served as the Walker Professor of Economics and International Finance at Princeton University since 2015.
Asu Ozdaglar is a Turkish academic.
Melissa Dell is the Andrew E. Furer Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Her research interests include development economics, political economy, and economic history.
The Armenian Economic Association is a professional association that promotes Armenian scholarship in economics. It was formed in 2006 and is a registered NGO in Armenia. Gurgen Aslanyan is its current president. The association works to further economics research in Armenia, to improve economics education within Armenian institutions, to support research-based policy advising, and to develop the interest of research economists to Armenia related issues.
Critical juncture theory focuses on critical junctures, i.e., large, rapid, discontinuous changes, and the long-term causal effect or historical legacy of these changes. Critical junctures are turning points that alter the course of evolution of some entity. Critical juncture theory seeks to explain both (1) the historical origin and maintenance of social order, and (2) the occurrence of social change through sudden, big leaps.
Ufuk Akcigit is a Turkish economist. He is the Arnold C. Harberger Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics since 2019. The same year, he also received the Max Planck-Humboldt Research Award for his achievements in the field of macroeconomics. In 2021, he was named John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and Econometric Society fellow for his work in Economics. In 2022, he received the Global Economy Prize in Economics from the Kiel Institute in Germany and the Sakıp Sabancı International Research Award.
