Celebrate Science: Ethics and Social Impact in Focus – Simon H. Johnson’s Personal Lindau Impressions

Simon H. Johnson shared the 2024 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics with Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson – and promptly made his way to Lindau at the earliest opportunity. Here, he looks back on some of his highlights from the recent Meeting on economics and shares his advice to budding economists.

I think that is the most unusual and exciting aspect of Lindau: the ability to meet so many different kinds of students with different perspectives from all different parts of the world. While I was expecting it, I was still surprised and impressed by the scale of it and the extent of the interactions.

One way to think about what Lindau can achieve is both to celebrate science, encourage more science and to bring ethical and social dimensions to the fore and have scientists engage with them. Many people have lost confidence in the idea that scientific advances are good for most people. There was a presumption after World War II, in part because of the history of science, and the history of industry and the war, that science was very important for human progress. And I think that proved to be true to a large extent, but there also turned out to be unintended consequences, for the environment, for people being left behind, and more recently in the form of social media polarizing peoples’ attitudes.

At MIT we are doing a lot of work on AI and the future of work, which permeates everything from what economists do to how the world will affect our work. It was fun to see people’s engagement with and reaction to that topic. I view the rise of AI as a fork in the road: you can go down a better path or a worse path. And that point resonated with the students at Lindau.

I was also very heartened to see in the talks that nearly all Laureates were engaged with questions related to how the economy operates, the lack of voice for ordinary people, and the disappearance of jobs.

Of course, they all have a different lens on this, but nobody that I heard speak came across as out of touch with pressing social problems. And none of them were just rehashing the work for which they won the prize. They were all pushing the frontier on some dimension that they felt was important around these issues.

There was also a lot of interest in Lindau in what has happened to institutions in Europe and the United States. Is democracy under threat? How do we get back to a better level of support for democracy and greater belief in the political and economic system? These questions are not specific to Lindau, but the fact that they came up further confirmed what I’m working on. Another aspect was my efforts in alternative ways of communicating our research and our findings. We discussed a science fiction novel which I’m writing, and it was helpful to me to get feedback from the students about what kind of fiction they find interesting.

Overall, I really enjoyed the whole meeting. It was a nice mixture, so it didn’t feel repetitive. One particular highlight was the Open Exchange session on the Friday evening with 20 students. They could ask me anything, and the session was scheduled for about an hour. After more than two hours they kicked us out of the room and told us we had to go home. That really was a lot of fun.