Annual Report 2025 - Report - Page 97
#LINOecon’s final Panel Discussion: Simon H. Johnson, Paul M. Romer, Hugo Reichardt, Guido W. Imbens, and moderator Torsten Persson
Simon H. Johnson explaining the #LINOecon Key Visual
Room for discussion, as throughout the entire Meeting week
contrast, material goods create scarcity as they are consumed. For ideas to foster broad growth, Romer stressed,
they must be shared – and “your ability to share depends
on institutions, social arrangements that determine who
you can interact with and who you can trust.”
Romer also reflected on lessons learned over his career.
Long a proponent of deregulated markets, he has since reconsidered the role of governments in guiding innovation.
“I think I made a really serious error for most of my career
by endorsing the idea that it would be good to have firms
driving innovation,” he admitted. After decades of market liberalization, the network effects that once fostered
progress have also enabled a handful of corporations to
dominate digital markets and influence politics. “We’ve
got to figure out how to craft governments and organizations, like universities and open-source projects, to get the
technologies we want and distribute them adequately.”
Artificial intelligence added another dimension to
the discussion: “The anxiety many people feel about AI is
that it will be very good for the most talented people, but
might leave others behind,” Romer observed. He emphasized the need for education and upskilling: “Code is going to be like maths. You could be an economist without
knowing maths 200 years ago, but you can’t now.” Johnson added that AI’s future will depend on who shapes it:
“If you take this technology and shape it to purposes that
make sense in your society and your community, we will
get a very different world than if we rely on a few people
sitting in their high castles in California.”
Guido W. Imbens, who shared the 2021 Economics
Prize for methodological contributions to the analysis of
causal relationships, noted that AI is already transforming labour markets. Entry-level coding positions once
in high demand have sharply declined due to tools like
Microsoft Copilot and other AI agents. “Governments are
struggling to figure out how to regulate these things,” he
added. Yet this uncertainty also offers opportunities for
economists: “Studying institutions and thinking hard
about which are effective in the modern world will be
very interesting in the next few years.”
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