Annual Report 2025 - Report - Page 78
Personal Impressions From #LINOecon
Celebrate Science – Ethics and
Social Impact in Focus
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 (see next page, below on the right). 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
76 | Different Generations – Shared Experiences
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.
