Interview with the 2024 economic sciences laureate Simon Johnson, recorded on 6 December 2024 during Nobel Week in Stockholm, Sweden.

What was your childhood like and how did it shape you? 

Simon Johnson: I grew up in Sheffield in the north of England. I come from a family that has been in Sheffield for a long time. One side of my family made screws for a hundred years. We had a small family factory, and that was on my father’s side. On my mother’s side, my grandfather was a metallurgist and was running one of the largest steel mills in Sheffield. I grew up knowing about this industrial tradition and knowing about the sort of strength of industry in the UK. But of course, being born in 1963 and becoming aware of my surroundings more in the 1970s, these were years of crisis. There were power cuts, there were strikes, there was a big struggle over economic policy and how to shape the country. 

I went to university in 1981 when Mrs Thatcher was, I think, at the height of her powers. There was a lot of questioning of, is this the right way to approach economics? At that same time Sheffield fell into a very hard period, I would say. My family’s businesses, all of those activities ended up being more or less destroyed, in part by the macroeconomic approach of the country’s government. I think an experience like that taught me the importance of economics. It made me think about economic history, made me think a lot about policy, and it made me think a lot about alternatives and what you can build and then what you can destroy if you’re not too careful. 

What do you enjoy most about the field of economic sciences?

Simon Johnson: I’ve always thought that economics should be more like engineering. It hasn’t been like this historically, but I think maybe we’re heading in this direction now. By engineering I mean, how do you build a bridge? How do you prevent a bridge from falling down? How do you create infrastructure that is safe and useful for people? These are the questions that economics can and should confront. They’re difficult questions and when you’re talking about an entire economy and entire people, the scale is big. Of course there are different places and different perspectives and different cultures around the world. You have to take that into account. But I like economics as a practical approach to solving real world problems. I think to me, the goal of economics should be to deliver shared prosperity in a meaningful way to as many people on the planet as possible. 

How important is it to use scientific research to address some of our time’s greatest challenges? 

Simon Johnson: We obviously have a lot of problems in the world today, and global inequality, the difference between rich and poor countries is one of them. The gaps are immense in that they’re not really closing on average. If you don’t apply scientific approaches, if you don’t try to be careful with the data, if you don’t test hypotheses, these problems will still exist. Other solutions will come forward. Other people will step up and say, “oh, I know how to fix this. We’re going to do it this way or that way.” Perhaps they have some good ideas, but haven’t we learned that it’s generally better to approach all our social problems through the lens of data and being careful about how we measure things and trying to understand what the alternative hypotheses are? Economics is not a science in the laboratory sense of physics or chemistry or biology, but good economics, I think, applies the scientific method in a way that’s appropriate to the scale of the problems we’re trying to deal with. 

Since I started to study economics in the 1980s, and since I went to graduate school at MIT in the mid 1980s, I think the profession has changed dramatically and to my mind has moved in a really good direction.  

What are the most important qualities to be an economist or a researcher? 

Simon Johnson: There are many people who become very good economists and excellent researchers, and they’re obviously very different kinds of people. I do think that in general, it is very good to ask big questions and to seek out data and approaches that are meaningful and that can really deliver, if not complete answers, steps towards an answer for the big questions, confronting society such as inequality, global inequality, poverty. I think we should be respectful of the variety of methods and we should encourage each other and be positive, but also to be critical and be tough and be fair in those assessments. That’s to me what we’ve learned from science over 300 years and what economics is now applied.  

How did your collaboration with your co-laureates Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson develop? 

Simon Johnson: In the end of the 1990s, I got a job at MIT and I had worked at that point for quite a long time in eastern Europe in the former Soviet Union. I had a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard and then a faculty position at Duke University in the Fuqua School of Business. Getting a job at MIT was a big break for me in my career, because obviously MIT has long been a hub of really innovative research in, including but not limited to, economics. I was engaged in many conversations with people and I was trying to find ways to participate in different research projects. I was very interested in issues around corruption, the underground economy, things we now call institutions. From my experience in the former communist world, standard economic analysis and macroeconomic policy had not worked out as we expected because these other problems kept coming up. It didn’t feel like these were one-off or incidental problems, but I didn’t have a big picture and didn’t have a complete understanding. 

I was talking to plenty of people, and I got into conversation after one seminar with Daron Acemoglu, talking with him about ways to approach empirically some of the ideas that he’d been discussing in a seminar. I’m very interested in data and empirical methods and trying to make progress that way. Daron started to describe to me some of the thinking that he and Jim (James A. Robinson) had already had with regards to European empires and the history of those empires. He said that we need to figure out why exactly the Europeans made the choices they did, and whether there’s a sort of unified historical explanation that we could have some statistical representation of, that would be meaningful. Because if we can do that, then we can get to much more effective econometrics of understanding institutions historically and also institutions today and how those affect GDP per capita. 

When he first explained the problem and what they were looking for, and I thought about what I could contribute, my first thought was, wow, this sounds really, really difficult. And my second thought right after that was absolutely, yes, let’s go. I think my claim to fame in this case, and perhaps more broadly, is that I know a good idea when it slaps me in the face. When Daron described the problem, I’m like, yes, this is a huge problem, and I see how it ties together all these pieces and I can see what I can bring to this partnership that Daron and Jim already had. I worked really hard on that, both for the initial breakthrough, which became our paper – it was known as colonial origins – and in the subsequent papers. I was getting up at six in the morning, before I met Daron and Jim, then I was working at five in the morning when the stuff got intense. I was getting up at four in the morning. I did that for years and years and years. I don’t regret a moment of it.  

How do you know when you’ve discovered a good idea? 

Simon Johnson: Some people learn by thinking by themselves. Some people learn by reading books. I learn by doing, by trying to do things by, by failing, by encountering problems. I think a lot of my learning is also interactions with people, like the conversations with students, with policymakers, with people going about their everyday lives. I think as I look back, what has happened to me during my career, is various key moments. I had this depth of perspectives and connections to people, but not a complete picture. When a complete picture is presented to me, for example, I was at a dinner a couple of years ago where a friend of mine who was a Senior Treasury official in the United States said, “you know, what we should really do is approach the Putin’s invasion of Russia with regard to economic sanctions in the following way.” I had been working on this problem for quite a few months. I’d been working on it very intensely with a lot of people. And I had not thought of the idea that she put forward at that moment. But as soon as she said it, it was immediately clear to me that yes, this was what we should do. I had tried all these other things and I’d thought them through and I’d written about them, and they were all not very satisfactory. They all ran into trouble. This proposal that Janet Yellen, the Treasury official, was putting forward, made absolute complete sense to me. I pivoted and I said, “yes, we will now do exactly that. I will do that. We should do that. Let me help, I’ll join the team. What do we do?” 

How do you continue moving forward when confronted with challenges? 

Simon Johnson: This may sound a little strange, because people who are not academics think that academics are rather full of themselves. My experience is that academics don’t take themselves seriously enough, because everything you write, everything you say, you should imagine that it will be heard by a million people and read by a hundred thousand and examined carefully by ten thousand. And a thousand young smart people will try and make their reputation disproving whatever result you put forward. If you approach life and public statements and the writing of research papers through that perspective, then everything you do will be of a much higher quality, and you’ll hold yourself to a much higher standard. You won’t be disappointed when people don’t notice the work, and you won’t be upset when people don’t find mistakes. But when people push back and when there is a counter narrative that someone tries develop, you’re ready for it. You are expecting it. You’re prepared.   

I’m not sure I would say that I’ve had failure so much. When you do empirical work in particular, sometimes the data don’t cooperate. Sometimes the results are not robust enough. I remember in my entire relationship with Daron Acemoglu, we’ve written more than 20 papers, I always remember, and I sometimes remind him of this, and it really annoys him, that there was one very good idea that I had, and I showed him the results and I said, “you know, the results are not that robust, I have to tell you.” And he’s like, “yeah, you’re right, Simon. We shouldn’t write this paper.” And then somebody else wrote the paper independently, and it’s quite a famous paper. I remind him from time to time that we should have written that paper. He says to me, “well, yes, Simon, but the results weren’t that robust.” So, you know, fair point, we move on.  

What advice would you give to an up-and-coming researcher or economist? 

Simon Johnson: I think asking big questions is important. When I was in graduate school in the 1980s, I think that was a little bit discouraged and I think economics became a little bit narrow. It is important to ground your work in what’s already established. When a brand new PhD says, “I’ve changed all of economics, everyone has to think about the world differently, here’s the result”, you do take that with a fair amount of skepticism. But I think asking big questions and trying to make progress, particularly through an empirical angle, show me the data, show me the evidence, show me the robustness on a really big question, I think that is a highly productive avenue for many people to listen.  

Can you tell us about the importance of being a teacher and mentor? 

Simon Johnson: I think when you’re a teacher, you have a responsibility to listen to people and to try to understand them and to try to help them basically. Now obviously, if you are a researcher, you have your own perspective, you put forward your own positions. But I’m always looking to engage. I’m always trying to think about other people’s perspectives and with regard to students of all kinds, I’m always trying to help them. I think it’s a wonderful experience being a teacher and a great responsibility. I’ve always tried to do my best.  

Has there been anyone in particular who has mentored or inspired you? 

Simon Johnson: Oh, I’ve had many mentors and inspirations, but the person who really stands out is my undergraduate tutor at Corpus Christi College in Oxford. His name was Andrew Glynn. He sadly died quite young, otherwise he would’ve been here today and he would’ve absolutely enjoyed this week. He was a Marxist and he taught us neoclassical economics, and he did not try to impose his Marxist views on us. I’m certainly not a Marxist and never have been. But what I took from those conversations was, first of all, neoclassical economics is a useful set of analytical tools. But what you should really understand and care about is the power in society. Who has what power to do what, and where did that power come from, and how has that power shaped narratives, policy, the development of technology. I think looking back, that those conversations and those interactions with Andrew Glynn have absolutely shaped my career.  

How has being an avid reader been important to your work? 

Simon Johnson: What I really like to read is history. The reason I like to read history is I’m always interested in the backstory. How did we get here? Why do we think about things like this? Where did this technology come from? I’d like to go back and see what were the decisions, who was involved, what were the key moments when some people or the world went in this direction rather than in that direction? The more I read about history, the more I become fascinated. The more I read about technology, the more I want to understand the underlying science. So to me, it’s never ending. It is absolutely fascinating. But I also like to read science fiction, because I think science fiction is history in reverse. Good science fiction is people imagining entire societies that are on different paths with different technologies and different social structures. The best science fiction is absolutely just as compelling as the best history.  

Do you have a favourite book? 

Simon Johnson: I have a lot of favourite books, but I like to say to people, when I talk about the future of technology and policies and the choice facing us, the question of the future can be framed as which Neal Stephenson novel will we live in. So we have the Snow Crash, which is fairly dystopian. There’s The Diamond Age, which is actually a brilliant imagining of the potential for transforming education with AI. He has a number of other novels that are really entirely thought provoking. But I also need to call out to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy which many people have loved. I think the reason for that is he has this idea that once, if we ever get to the point where there are a lot more people and a lot more worlds and a lot more data, that we will be able to model and think about social interactions, like we think about physical world interactions and, and hard sciences today. That is a really intriguing notion. A seed from those novels were definitely planted in my mind when I was quite young.  

What other interests have shaped your career and outlook? 

Simon Johnson: I like to play games, board games, including the genre of war games. These are alternative histories and strategies, and you can see different worlds emerge when you follow different paths. I think playing those games, including with other people, including with my kids, has always been a great passion and a lot of fun. 

When and where do you get your best ideas? 

Simon Johnson: My best ideas come to me in moments when I meet people whom I respect and I listen to them make a proposal about something I’m quite well informed about, and they tell me something that I didn’t know. Those are my light bulb moments. 

I think Pasteur famously said something like, chance favours the prepared mind. My interpretation of that is exactly the preparation of your mind, is you’ve explored, you’ve tried these different avenues, you haven’t cracked a problem, and then somebody presents you with a solution or an idea or a key that unlocks the problem. But the only reason that key is valuable to me is because I’ve already explored as many aspects of that problem as possible.  

As a tennis player, do you see similarities between tennis and the scientific process? 

Simon Johnson: I think tennis is a great exercise. It’s a great combination of mental processing and physical activity. I have a great tennis coach, and he always says, “you’ve got to solve the problem. When you’re playing against someone – they have strengths, they have weaknesses – solve the problem, Simon. What is it that you need to do? Why did they just win those points and you didn’t?” And you know, it’s on you, it’s on the fly. You’re doing it by yourself. You’re not generally allowed to have coaching orders in real time, at the level of tennis that I play. It forces you to really think it through. Sometimes I walk away from the tennis court thinking, “oh, that was miserable. I used none of my knowledge. I learned nothing. I’m going give it up and go play pickleball or something else.“ Then, I always go back the next day and I find I’m playing a little bit better and the pieces have come together. I have not yet had a light bulb moment that will propel me onto the professional tour, but, you know, perhaps it could still happen.  

What motivation drives your tremendous sense of curiosity? 

Simon Johnson: I am, I think, a little bit restless in my understanding of the world, and I’m always trying to find a better solution for the problems in front of me. When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in the full scale invasion in February, 2022, I felt very personally connected to this because I used to work in Ukraine and I know some prominent Ukrainian economists quite well. My immediate reaction was, let’s figure out how to use our knowledge to stop this invasion and to roll it back, which you know, is a hard problem. Many people said, “no, this is just a war. Fight the war, and then you do the economics later.” Perhaps that’s right. Perhaps I’m wrong. But I think that the figuring out how to use my knowledge and my expertise and my connections and my ability to process and pull people together and come up with solutions and then persuade people to move in a certain direction – I want to use those skills. I feel I have a responsibility to use those skills in ways that are meaningful to me and to the people I care about. 

Watch the interview

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