Nobel Prize Conversations

“With the great power to invent technology comes a great responsibility.”

In this lively and energetic podcast conversation, economic sciences laureate Simon Johnson talks about how the past, future and present are interconnected, as well as how science fiction and history are intertwined. He comes to the conclusion that “science fiction is history in reverse or history is science fiction in reverse, whichever way you want to think about it.”

He also tells us about his family history and how his family was part of the steel industry in Sheffield, England. The industrial revolution is discussed as well as the responsibility that comes with inventing technology. 

This conversation was published on 3 July, 2025. Podcast host Adam Smith is joined by Karin Svensson.

Below you find a transcript of the podcast interview. The transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors.

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Simon Johnson: It’s not that history is predetermination or something that was done to you or your country 200 years ago, means you’ll always be rich or you’ll always be poor. But it does matter. It has had a long lasting effect. It’s pretty helpful to understand that context.

Adam Smith: Simon Johnson’s work points to the great importance of setting the correct foundations on which to build prosperity and such foundation to take great time and effort to put together, but they can be dismantled rather easily. In this conversation he goes on to talk about the real danger of that happening in especially his adopted country of the United States. He also talks about the way his background has shaped his approach to work and the importance of fantasy, how productive it can be to get out of your current way of thinking if you’re going to make progress. Please join me for this conversation with Simon Johnson. I hope you’ll enjoy it.

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Karin Svensson: This is Nobel Prize Conversations and our guest is Simon Johnson, recipient of the 2024 prize in economic sciences. He was awarded for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity. He shared the prize with Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. Your host is Adam Smith, Chief Scientific Officer at Nobel Prize Outreach. This podcast was produced in cooperation with Fundación Ramon Areces. Simon Johnson is the Ronald A Kurtz professor of entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He talks to Adam about why explaining science in simple terms doesn’t have to mean dumbing it down, why he’s turned to science fiction to solve the problems of tomorrow, and which fellow laureates he thinks will take home another three Nobel Prizes. But first they discuss what it’s like for Adam to share a name with a father of capitalism.

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Johnson: The first call I got from Stockholm that was conveying this official information was actually from you. When I tell my audiences that Adam Smith called me to tell me I’d won the Nobel Prize in economics, most of my economic audiences just go wild with appreciation of applause. So well done.

Smith: Well, this ridiculous name is good for something then.

Johnson: When I was in Stockholm I learned that the biology profession, the distinguished team for instance, prank each other routinely on Nobel Day. They call each other, they put on fake Swedish accents and they pretend that somebody’s won a prize. It’s a little bit out of control from what I hear, but economists don’t do that yet. Let’s hope we don’t start something.

Smith: It may come. But yes, there’s a lot of questions for validation reasons. Occasionally I have been in the situation of getting through to somebody and having to break the news that it has just been announced in Stockholm, that they’ve been awarded the Nobel Prize. That actually makes for an awfully boring interview because of course all that happens then is the person keeps saying, who are you again? And tell me again. Once again, who was that? So from that moment to now, quite a lot has happened. You’ve had the experience of being, I suppose, pushed more into the limelight by the announcement. Also you’ve been to Sweden. How has it all been?

Johnson: Being in Stockholm was amazing. It felt like being treated like minor European royalty 150 years ago. A little bit frozen in time, but with this celebration of science and the delightful idea that economics is a science which most people around the world would put up some resistance to, but not in Stockholm, not in Sweden. That week we were riding in the cavalcade with the biologists, the physicists, the chemists and of course the winner of the literature prize, it was just a fantastic honour. My wife, my two daughters came, my brother-in-law and his family, I’ve written a couple of books with my brother-in-law actually, and a number of work colleagues, including my boss’s boss, the president of MIT, very graciously agreed to come with me, which was really fun for me and my family. I think she enjoyed it too. I think it was a bit of a holiday and a sort of appropriate outing for the president of MIT. It’s a very joyous, celebratory moment, not just for the individuals, but also for science, the scientific agenda. The idea of progress can be made through research and through carefully studying things in engagement with the world. That’s a lot of what MIT stands for too.

Smith: You like writing books, don’t you? I mean papers obviously as an academic. What is it about the book form that you particularly like?

Johnson: The book form allows you to tell a more complete story. Papers make you focus and drill down into a topic. But with a book you can be more expansive and the books that I’ve written with various coauthors, we really try very hard not to dumb it down. We are not taking anything out of the analysis and anything out of the economics, politics and other disciplines we’re drawing on. But we are taking it upon ourselves to communicate in language that everybody can understand, something everybody who reads a newspaper can potentially understand these books. I think more specialists should do that. I think when you only write for a technical audience and you only write for people who use the same language, all the same jargon that you do, it is too easy to fall into certain ways of thinking as well as speaking that don’t necessarily force you to confront all the realities that you face. My books, I take them on the road, I go talk to audiences, I talk to lots of different kinds of people and I’ve got to be ready to answer their questions. I think that’s an important thing for experts to do, experts of all kinds, not just in economics.

Smith: That’s very interesting, they famously quote Rutherford; “I think as saying that you didn’t really understand your work unless you could explain it to your tobacconist” as he put it back at the beginning of the 20th century. It’s an important test of your own understanding that you can tell it honestly to an audience who don’t know any of the jargon.

Johnson: While we’re quoting people who may or may not have actually said things, I think Einstein said, “If you can’t explain an idea in simple terms, either you don’t understand the idea or the idea is wrong” but perhaps he never met Rutherford’s tobacconist. So we could caveat that way.

Smith: Lovely picture of Einstein and Rutherford trying to explain things to each other in simple terms. Who knows how it would’ve gone?

Johnson: Probably a Tom Stoppard play in there somewhere.

Smith: One of the books you’ve written recently has been about technology and progress and how it connects with the fate of us all. AI was very much a theme in Stockholm this year. The physics prize, chemistry prize and to an extent your prize touched on it. There were wildly different views of AI expressed during Nobel week. Geoffrey Hinton was giving dire warnings about it, and the folks from Google DeepMind were giving a much more positive view of how AI would transform life. It’s a ridiculously big question, but do you have a position on what you think AI is going to do for us all?

Johnson: Yes, and actually I think the split that you’re picking up, the two sides of it are about right. The biology winners, by the way, who didn’t win it for AI, but I observed a conversation between them and John Jumper who won part of the chemistry prize, John Jumper being a co-inventor of AlphaFold 2, they were talking about how AlphaFold 2 will be used to transform biology research in profound ways. I understood nothing at all about the technicalities of that conversation, but I could see from the body language that this was an amazing connection. John Jumper is a physicist who just won the chemistry prize and is gonna transform biology. I told him, I’m looking for a bookie to take my bet that he’ll the first person ever to win three or maybe four Nobel Prizes because he’s only 38 years old. I think that the technological transformation piece that the DeepMind people, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper are all about that’s real and compelling and is actually happening for drug discovery. At the same time, there is a dark sided downside. Geoffrey Hinton laid out the pretty apocalyptic version, which may also be true with a version that concerns me and Daron Acemoglu. We wrote about this in our book, ‘Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity’. There we asked what happens to jobs, what happens to good paying jobs. In our read of history, there have been episodes in which automation has been super exciting for people. People with power have wanted to adopt machines. They wiped out a ton of jobs and hammered the working people for a long time. There’s progress of a kind, but you don’t really share prosperity. I think there’s a real risk that AI could go down that road, but it could also go down the Hassabis Jumper positive road. Which way are we gonna go? Who decides? How do we know which road we’re on? That’s actually our take of where we are at this moment.

Smith: As I understand it, the who decides is the absolute key piece that who decides has to be inclusive, has to involve as large a section of society as possible in order to really realise the benefits of any technology. But in particular this one.

Johnson: That’s our view and our position and that’s the link to the research that won that Nobel Prize because we argue that if you take long historical experiences and you look at what happened within European colonisation, specifically places that received for various reasons, more inclusive institutions, and by the way, wasn’t inclusive for everyone, but it was inclusive for quite a lot of people. When that inclusion expanded over time, they got better economic outcomes, they got more development technology and that technology was more likely to help more people. Places that got really extractive institutions, a few people are super rich and they can tell everyone else what to do and force other people to do what they want. Those places have actually done less well in terms of innovation and prosperity. That is exactly the sort of mapping or the relationship to AI. Is AI something that is going to the development? It is going to include a lot of people or is it gonna be a few people using this technology to tell you what to do? I like to tell my audiences, I like economics, but I love science fiction. I read a lot of science fiction and with a lot of science fiction it’s one way or the other, right? You’ve got your dystopia with a few people in charge, the technology driving things, and then you have more positive outcomes. I think that the jury is out on that, Adam, honestly, but it won’t stay out for long.

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Smith: You mentioned science fiction and your love of science fiction. That’s interesting. I suppose it raises the question of what part dreaming and imagination plays in your work. Are they connected? Is your love of science fiction part of what makes you good at doing your work?

Johnson: I like to think so. That would justify me reading a lot of science fiction novels. I think what I really like that’s linked to research is actually history. I love to read history and of course there’s a cliche, history is a different world, a different life because you go back and you look at what actually happened in the 1940s, the 1840s or the 1740s, and it’s absurd, right? From a modern perspective, how did they live like that? Those attitudes were unbelievable. When people look back at the 2020s from the future, they’re gonna say, well that was absurd. These people are absurd. If we can look forward into the future and imagine the future, that’s gonna be absurd to us too today, right? Where do we sit? How do we think about what’s gonna happen going forward? It’s not going to be like today, and this is actually why economists are so bad at forecasting the future because we’re extremely responsible, careful people. We don’t want our colleagues to think that we’re dilettantes. So we say, it will go a little bit this way, a little bit that way. History says it changes a lot, including profoundly at all kinds of levels of society and individuals and so on but which way is it going to go? Economics has no idea about that. Isaac Asimov on the other hand, he had some ideas.

Smith: If you are recommending science fiction to somebody, would you say read Asimov?

Johnson: I say to a lot of my audiences, if you’re only going to read one book after you’ve heard me speak, you should read my book ‘Power and Progress’ by me and Daron. But if you want to read a second book, you should read ‘Play a Piano’ by Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut’s first full length novel, which I think he wrote at the end of the 1940s, early 1950s, in which he imagined a world in where automation had taken over. There were two classes, the highly paid, highly educated engineer class and everybody else. Everybody else is, spoiler alert, but they’re not doing that well. What’s brilliant about it is Vonnegut basically took a theory of economics and a theory of technology and applied it to his read of modern American society and he rolled the clock forward, right? This is what people like Neil Stevenson or Kim Stanley Robinson do. They force themselves, or maybe they do it without any effort at all, they imagine an entire consistent world where the incentives match people’s actions, structures and institutions. That’s what the future will have. It may not be one of the futures that they imagine, but it’s the holistic interlocking piece, what economists will call general equilibrium. But we can’t even describe the modern economy in satisfactory general terms so we certainly can’t predict the future. But that’s what science fiction gives me. It’s history in reverse or history is science fiction in reverse, whichever way you want to think about it. I’m just fascinated by the profound changes that we live through and that we see around us and we never understand because every day is kind of like yesterday to us, but in fact we are wrapped up and participating in, I don’t think we’re participating in accelerating change. But since the 1750s, the rate of change has been very fast across a lot of societies. Since the industrial revolution hit us, we have continued to change our societies at a remarkable pace.

Smith: Absolutely. But the point you make that you don’t see the pace of change on a day-to-day basis, but if you stop and reflect and you’re of any certain age, you can see tremendous change has happened around you. I can absolutely see how it’s actually a good exercise to go into history or into the future and free your mind and allow yourself to think big about change before coming back to your own desk if you like, and trying to predict where we’re going.

Johnson: Absolutely. When we researched and decided that we really wanted to dig into the European colonial strategies, a lot of that was what were they thinking? What was the decision making? What did they know? What data were they looking at? The attitudes of those European colonisers are very alien to any modern person, and actually pretty abhorrent in many ways, but you can’t shrink away from confronting that and understanding that if you want to understand history and our view and our contribution to economics. Some people ask me this now, I say we brought a bit of history in and that’s what we did. We said, look, the stuff that happened a long time ago was very consequential then and those consequences have lasted through to today. It’s not that history is predetermination or something that was done to you or your country 200 years ago means you’ll always be rich or poor, but it does matter. It has had a long lasting effect. At least in terms of thinking about context and what your options are today, it’s pretty helpful to understand that context.

Smith: Was it your own background that made you interested in that? Because you grew up in Sheffield and in Thatcherism came in, there were profound changes going on around you. Were you a precocious enough young man to sort of see that policy institutions made a tremendous difference to the world and you needed to understand what was going on?

Johnson: No honestly. Life is lived forwards and understood backwards. Sure, I could tell you a story in which that happened and it is true that part of my family lived and worked in Sheffield for a hundred years. We made screws and there was a screw manufacturing company called Henry Johnson. My father inherited that company and he ran it for a while. He sold it then things got rough. The economy didn’t do well. I think pretty much everybody in my generation, in my immediate family, ended up leaving Sheffield to pursue opportunities elsewhere.

Smith: That must have been sad because Sheffield has such an extraordinary connection with the steel industry and all steel products. It must have been difficult for people to say goodbye to such a heritage.

Johnson: Yes, there was a lot of discussion in my family about industrial decline and the loss of entrepreneurship. My parents impressed upon me that I should never ever consider becoming an entrepreneur. I should become an accountant, get a professional qualification, and I’m now a professor of entrepreneurship at MIT. The irony around, but I’m not an entrepreneur, so perhaps in the end I followed their advice. When you win a Nobel Prize, they ask you to donate one artefact to the Nobel Prize Museum in Stockholm, a fantastic museum I really enjoyed visiting, not only because they’re hanging my picture up now. I gave them my grandfather’s passport, a special passport, that was issued in 1942 with his visa issued in May, 1942 to visit the United States. In May, 1942, the Americans had just entered the war. In December, 1941 the Pearl Harbour was attacked. My grandfather was one of the countries, the British leading experts on metallurgy, and he helped to run a big steelworks integrated steelworks in Sheffield. He came to the United States on a technical mission as leader of what was called the British Armor Mission, to consult with the Americans about how to build tanks. Here’s the key point, my father knew my grandfather however my grandfather died very shortly after I was born. I’ve looked into the historical record, my father and I are quite convinced that Cyril Daswell was his name, did not come to the United States to learn from the Americans because he’d been building tanks for a while and they had not. He came to teach the Americans what he knew because the British needed the Americans to learn and to scale. If you think about the history of technology and when American scientific leadership emerged, it was during this World War II period. Before 1940 the Americans won almost no Nobel Prizes in science. After 1945 they dominate, by far the leader in terms of winning prizes. There’s a switch and there’s a change. America was a strong engineering country. It was a manufacturing powerhouse. It was not leading the scientific frontier, that was Western Europe. But it changed during the war and it changed because of what the Americans did in the war. Afterwards they said, if we own the science and we own the commercialisation of science, we not only will do well in terms of productivity in the civilian economy, we’ll do very well in terms of national security. They pushed that very hard for 40 years and we still have a lot of positives from that experience. But my grandfather came to the United States at that moment and he participated in the moment when technology leadership was transferred from Western Europe to the United States. I’m sure he didn’t see it like that. There’s no way you would’ve understood it or could’ve appreciated it. But he was there present at the creation. I say to all my audiences in the United States in particular, I think with the great power to invent technology comes a great responsibility. What are you inventing? For whom are you inventing? ChatGPT was the software heard around the world within 24 hours, right? The tools you create for yourself when you’re the leader are the tools that everybody else in the world is going to be using. What’s your goal? What are you trying to achieve here? How are you aiming to improve human society? It’s not just an interesting question, I think it’s the central question of the day.

Smith: That passport, that symbol of exchange and what a family history you have of being involved in exchange of knowledge between the UK, Europe, and the US. How do you feel currently about the approach being taken in the US, your adopted country in particular, but I suppose around the world about retrenching and becoming more isolationist?

Johnson: I do think a lot of damage is being done to the scientific enterprise. We’ve have young scientists with promising careers being fired randomly, and they’re not going to be picked up by some private firm because they’re also worried about what’s going to happen to the economy. You’re destroying human capital and you’re handing a massive advantage to your geopolitical competitors. The Chinese in particular must be loving this. It’s a self-defeating foolish action by the Trump administration, the way they’re going about treating the scientific enterprise. We should be turning more science into technology, generating more good jobs and stronger national security. Instead, you can look at health, drones and at all manner of other technologies. That’s part of what my group does at MIT actually. The measures that have been taken so far in the first month, it’s first month by the Trump administration, are massively damaging to American national interests.

Smith: Do you see an end to it? Do you see just this continuing or do you see some kind of backlash, some sort of stopping of this?

Johnson: “Everything comes to an end” that’s what Voltaire said about the Roman Empire. It comes to an end no idea when. By the way, I was the chief of economy of the IMF and one of the first things they tell you there is never predict a date and a specific action or event in the same speech. It will end, but I won’t tell you when.

Smith: Okay, we’ll do another podcast. I get the “when” then.

Johnson: Exactly. Will there be a backlash though? I think is an interesting question. If you’d asked me a couple of years ago, I’d have said, sure, there’s a pendulum swings. People are more inclined to invest in science, less inclined. But I fear that we’ve run into this counter enlightenment retreat to medieval beliefs, which has been funnily enough, funny in a sad sense, compounded by the latest of technology, social media. That instead of reasoned debate and looking at the facts and trying to figure stuff out, people just shout at each other on the internet or over social media. The basis of democracy has to be deliberation and deliberation only makes sense if there’s a process through which you discover facts and sometimes the facts are wrong and sometimes the facts have to be revised and sometimes new facts arrive. We understand that’s part of the scientific process, but that entire process has become undermined and delegitimised in various ways in the United States. I don’t know if the pendulum swings back or when it swings back at the level of governmental action. I do think the private sector can do a lot by itself. I do think places like MIT need to step up and demonstrate more leadership and find partners to help us build better technologies for more people. But whether the federal government will come and join us in that enterprise in the future on the same scale as in the past, honestly, I don’t know.

Smith: I mean you have at MIT this shaping the future of work institute, which you could direct. That must surely be exactly the sort of institution that federal government should be interested in as you try to improve a lot of people throughout the country.

Johnson: That’s very nice you say so. I think that’s the case. I do have this very nice baseball cap that I’m trying on now, and I’ll send you one. It says pro worker AI because we’re all about pro worker AI. You’ll get one of those in the mail. But in terms of the government priorities and government support, no, in the technology sector, the big tech companies want to be left alone. This administration doesn’t wanna do anything at all that rhymes with regulation or anything. You’re going to get what the big technology companies want to give you and what comes out of this massive expensive race to build more powerful artificial intelligence. Whether or not that’s pro worker is not something that interests the tech companies or the federal government today.

Smith: It’s good that it interests somebody, good that it interests you. Drawing together two things – you talked about the big question. This is the big question about basically how the technologies we develop, the progress we make benefits humanity, which is pretty much what the Nobel Prize seeks to reward. Then back to that question of how you saw your life as you were growing up in Sheffield. Please talk more about the big question. What you think you are trying to do and what economics should be trying to do?

Johnson: Since you put it like that, I think that what we should focus on within economics and at places like MIT is how to deliver on shared prosperity. That’s something that industrial companies like the US did quite well and without too much special thought in the post 1945 period, but after the 1980s, you mentioned Mrs. Thatcher, of course in America we match her up with Ronald Reagan. The shift that took place in part due to their policies and in part due to some other factors, that shift moved us towards much more unequal outcomes in terms of economics, politics and the quality of people’s lives. That has, I think, undermined the legitimacy of democracy in places like the United States. People can reasonably say, look, you claim that you’re running policy for the interests of all of us, but me, my friends and my town have been left behind and we were crushed by automation or we were crushed by some version of globalisation and you did nothing to help us so why should we support the existing form of democratic institutions when it manifestly and for many decades has not actually done anything for us. I think trying to tilt ourselves back towards a more inclusive path for technology and all of economic policy is an important goal. But as you can see from the last round of elections in the United States and the current actions of the government, that there are alternative narratives put forward by various people that I think will not help the less well-off and less educated and they’ll only exacerbate the inequalities. But if you exacerbate the inequalities, you make people more angry and then you’re more likely to elect populace. There’s a potentially self-reinforcing loop that you can find yourself on and, don’t want to pick anyone in particular but Argentina for example, was a rich country in 1900, but it got itself into this populist loop and has never again been able to regain its previous level of relative prosperity after 120 years.

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Svensson: Adam, Simon Johnson’s research seemed to be focused on the past, the present, and the future. That’s a pretty massive undertaking.

Smith: I suppose it is. I suppose it’s needed in his case to make sense of everything. I guess he’s trying to address fundamental question economics of how come things are as they are. In order to find that out, you have to go back into history. Also as he points out, he likes to, if you like, separate himself from the current situation to try and clear his mind and get a different perspective. He finds going into the future a good way of doing that.

Svensson: But why was he awarded the Nobel Prize?

Smith: He, James Robinson and Daron Acemoglu used the experience of colonialism as a natural experiment in economics and investigated what effect different ways that colonial powers handled countries had on their eventual outcomes in terms of their prosperity. Broadly they found that if the colonising paths had been more inclusive in the way they treated those countries and put a bit more into building the institutions of the country and I suppose caring for them, the outcome in the end was better.

Svensson: As in quite a lot of conversations that you have with economics prize winners, the other Adam Smith sort of looms over the conversation, despite having been dead for 235 years, why is he so omnipresent still?

Smith: He might have questioned whether he should be referred to as the other Adam Smith. But it’s fun because people seem to react to the name.

Svensson: Why is he important?

Smith: He’s taken by so many people to be the founding father of economics and the study of political economy. I suppose his belief in the power of the free market, in the power of assembly lines, this mix of choice and the support of self-interest and if you like, freedom very much mirror the way we think about society today, that wealth is built on the supply of goods and services to consumers. The more we consume the wealthier we are, it’s the model accepted in much of the world now, perhaps most of the world.

Svensson: Is it annoying to share a name like that with someone well known in this sphere?

Smith: What would I rather have been called Karl Marx? Honestly yes.

Svensson: Another thing that seems to entertain people is one of my favourite Nobel related phenomena, which is the IgNobel Prize. Is that something you enjoy as well?

Smith: Very much so. Aren’t they fun?

Svensson: We should explain to the listener what they are if they’ve managed to miss them.

Smith: Yes, it’s an award given annually for research that makes you laugh, which is a beautiful idea. It’s supposed to make you laugh and also make you think. They’re given in Cambridge, Massachusetts every year. Generally it’s prizes given for published research that’s entertaining. It’s experiments like watching the most viscous liquid in the world drip through a funnel. I think the prize was given after the seventh drop fell and after 30 years or something. They gave them a prize in fluid mechanics or a piece of research that showed that ostriches get more sexually aroused when humans are around. This is all published stuff.

Svensson: Is there a connection between the IgNobel Prize and the Nobel Prize?

Smith: Yes, for a start they often get Nobel Prize laureates to hand out the prizes at the ceremony. There has been one occasion when a Nobel Prize laureate has also been an IgNobel laureate. They were an IgNobel laureate first. It was Andre Geim who got the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 for the discovery of graphene, which is this thinnest form of carbon with amazing properties. 10 years before that he was awarded an IgNobel Prize for levitating a frog.

Svensson: It’s a good stepping stone then?

Smith: In his case, yes.

Svensson: But it says something about daring to be a bit ridiculous as well in terms of what kind of science you want to do.

Smith: That’s such an interesting point because I think that daring comes into a lot of exciting scientific thinking, and I’m sure in Andre Geim’s case that that playfulness and also bravery are important for being able to break barriers. You don’t sort of think of academic thinking as being daring, but if you can actually be brave enough to suggest doing things that everybody just says, oh, for goodness sake, no way. That’s daring. Just in the way that explorers are daring.

Svensson: You can’t be afraid to be awarded an IgNobel Prize then.

Smith: No. I bet secretly many Nobel Prize laureates would love to be awarded IgNobel Prize. But obviously it’s a high standard they have to achieve to get it because there’s a lot of fun stuff out there it turns out.

Svensson: Talking about entertaining, I’ve heard that Simon Johnson has a new sorter book in the works.

Smith: That’s right, yes. He’s working on a science fiction novel being a devotee of the genre. Indeed I asked him about it and this is what he told me.

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Johnson: I am working on a science fiction novel, yes. Thank you for bringing that up. It’s great fun. It’s a science fiction thriller about history. I’m marrying my two major interests here and we’ll see how it goes. We’ll see if anybody can bring themselves to read it but I’m in great fun writing it.

Smith: Does it come naturally to write something that is entirely imaginative?

Johnson: I can write better when I’m in certain frames of mind. I find riding on planes to be quite easy. I have to step back from the responsibilities and let my mind float a little bit. I think reading all that history is helpful because I think I can find myself in a different world in a different moment. It is true. I sit in my MIT office where I am today, and there’s these pressing administrative, teaching and research tasks around me. I can’t think about the novel.

Smith: What inspired you to go down that path? Because it’s not as if you haven’t presumably got enough to be doing and to entertain you.

Johnson: It really came about when I was writing the last book ‘Power and Progress’. We were trying to document and write down what we thought AI was. I also teach a couple of courses at MIT that touch on AI. We have a lot of open-ended discussions with students. I just started to imagine what could happen if you take two or three more steps down the corridor that we’re sort of explaining to people. I found myself taking notes on my phone, standing waiting to board planes. There’s this liminal time when you’re waiting to be told you can board and just sort of standing there staring blankly at the countdown till boarding time. Then I started to feel a couple of characters emerging and voices, and they started to say things to me. I thought, that’s interesting, where did that come from? And then they started to talk to each other and I thought, well, I’ve never had that experience. Then I sat down on a plane that was taking off from San Francisco one day I was on the book tour presenting the nonfiction book. I thought I just open my laptop and work on the novel for a few minutes and then I’ll do some real work. Next thing I knew I was landing in Charlotte on the other coast of the United States. I’ve solved the problem of long distance air travel. I’m never bored on a plane again. Flight delay? Excellent. Let me open a laptop.

Smith: It seems to be connected with travel and airplanes, but how clever of you to find a way of using the interstices in your life.

Johnson: It wasn’t a deliberate strategy, Adam. It’s not that I thought, oh my goodness, I’m being unproductive. It was where the mind wanders at that time. I did think about writing the entire novel on my phone, which I believe some people have done, but I don’t think my couple tunnels would survive that. At some point I had to transfer it. But something liberating about just to write five words. What are those five words or ten words and I think that frees you a little bit when you’re thinking about the fiction side of things.

Smith: It reminds me of, there was a Nobel Prize laureate in medicine called Oliver Smithies, who was a kind of mad professor originally from Oxford.

Johnson: We’re all mad, Adam! Let’s be clear about that.

Smith: Okay, so very similar past you, started in Oxford, ended up in the east coast of the US and he did pretty sensible experiments five or six days a week. But he used to like to talk about Saturday afternoon experiments when you just let things rip and you just went mad. You’ve chucked a bit of this in there and a bit of that in there and just saw what happened. All sorts of interesting things came out of that, perhaps everyone could think about your novel writing as your Saturday afternoon experiments, just playing with ideas.

Johnson: Can you also win an IgNobel Prize? Because that could be, I need to readjust my career goals. It could be an IgNobel Prize. We do have a graphic novel underway based on ‘Power and Progress’. We think we might be the first Noble Prize winners to have produced a graphic novel. Not absolutely sure about that.

Smith: What’s the idea?

Johnson: It’s a version of ‘Power and Progress’, which is a 500 page heavyweight tome that is told in a lightweight, fun way with pictures. It’s not 500 pages, it’s 20 or 30 pages, but it’s just supposed to get the main messages across, to communicate it to outreach. We’re not planning to make money on it, we just want to reach more people. We’ll find a way to give it away free electronically. That’s the goal.

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Johnson: I tell my audiences, the ones who are a bit more up on science fiction, that the question is which Neil Stevenson novel are we gonna live in? He wrote a famous book called ‘Snow Crash’, which is fairly dystopian on average. He wrote another book called ‘The Diamond Age’, in which he imagined that AI could be massively empowering to people and help elevate the education of relatively oppressed, underprivileged people. They could teach themselves using interactive software on a personal device. He wrote this before we had cell phones, before we had AI. We’re in the middle of it. It’s happening around us.

Smith: You’ve given tons of worrying food for thought there.

Johnson: I’m sure that if the other Adam Smith, the one who came before you, your namesake, was here and we’re writing as he wrote, I think his famous book was written in the 1770s. He would be absolutely fascinated and probably quite brilliant on the interplay of economics, politics and technology. The original Adam Smith launched economics. We are living in the world that he didn’t create it, but he imagined it and he described it and we’re all following in his footsteps. From my perspective, always a pleasure to talk with any Adam Smith.

Smith: He was quite optimistic about things, so he probably would’ve felt that this was a way to help humans flourish.

Johnson: Fair. Behind Adam Smith, when we look back, was Medievalism, a lot of restrictions, a lot of power of established interests, and the market was liberating. The market was allowing people to have transactions and to exchange ideas and to move goods in ways that are not previously been anticipated. He also began to see, although I don’t think he saw it that much, because it hadn’t happened that much, but the economies of scale could change everything. The cost of something that was good and you liked could be quite high to start with, but it would come down very fast when you built a bigger factory or a massive supply chain. On the one hand, we’ve achieved a lot more than Adam Smith could reasonably have imagined that we would achieve. On the other hand, it’s not worked out quite so well for everyone as he might have hoped or as he did hope I think. 250 years later we’re still trying to understand exactly what went right and why things continue to go wrong.

Smith: Thank you very much indeed. It’s been a huge pleasure.

Johnson: Very nice to speak with you, Adam, and I’m so glad that it was you who reached out to me and connected with me on Nobel Prize day. I will always remember that moment with great appreciation. Also your kindness when I questioned whether your name was really Adam Smith, you were very kind about that, I’m not sure I was entirely polite because I was still a bit in shock. Thank you very much for that. Thank you.

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Svensson: You just heard Nobel Prize Conversations. If you’d like to learn more about Simon Johnson, you can go to nobelprize.org where you’ll find a wealth of information about the prizes and the people behind the discoveries. Nobel Prize Conversations is a podcast series with Adam Smith, a co-production of Filt and Nobel Prize Outreach. The producer for this episode was me, Karin Svensson. The editorial team also includes Andrew Hart and Olivia Lundqvist. Music by Epidemic Sound. If you’d like to hear from another laureate with a passion for creative writing, listen to our earlier episode with chemistry laureate, poet and author Joachim Frank. You can find previous seasons and conversations on Acast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening.

Nobel Prize Conversations is produced in cooperation with Fundación Ramón Areces.