The 2024-25 Arnold C. Harberger Distinguished Lecture on Economic Development: "Technology and Global Inequality in the Age of AI"

Simon Johnson, 2024 Nobel Prize Laureate in Economics & Professor at MIT Sloan

Wednesday, April 2, 2025
5:00 PM
UCLA Royce Hall, Room 314
10745 Dickson Ct.
Los Angeles, CA 90095

ABOUT THE EVENT

According to leaders of the tech sector, the arrival of Artificial Intelligence will “change everything” – about productivity growth, jobs, and shared prosperity. In their recent book, Power and Progress: Our Thousand Year Struggle Over Power and Prosperity, Simon Johnson and Daron Acemoglu take the long view – putting the latest (and likely future) AI developments into historical context. AI could help boost the wages and living standards of everyone, but there is a very real danger that it will primarily bring a lot more automation and further widening of income inequality both within industrial economies and across countries.

In this lecture, Simon Johnson will discuss the intellectual and policy debates swirling around AI both in the US and around the world. Can we really create “Pro-Worker AI”? What would that take?

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Simon Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he is head of the Global Economics and Management group. At MIT, he is also co-director of the Shaping the Future of Work Initiative and a Research Affiliate at Blueprint Labs.

In December 2024, Johnson received the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel, joint with Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, “for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.”

In 2007-08, Johnson was chief economist and director of the Research Department at the International Monetary Fund. He currently co-chairs the CFA Institute Systemic Risk Council with Erkki Liikanen.

Johnson’s most recent book, with Daron Acemoglu, Power and Progress: Our 1000-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, explores the history and economics of major technological transformations up to and including the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence.

ABOUT THE MODERATOR

Sebastian Edwards is the Henry Ford II Chair in International Management at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. From 1993 until April 1996, he was the chief economist for the Latin America and Caribbean region of the World Bank. He is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a member of the advisory board of Transnational Research Corporation and co-chairman of the Inter-American Seminar on Economics (IASE). He is also a member of the Burkle Center faculty advisory board. Edwards is the past president of the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association (LACEA), an international professional association of economists with academic interests in Latin America and the Caribbean region. He is a member of the Scientific Advisory Council of the Kiel Institute of World Economics, Kiel, Germany. In September 2004, Edwards was appointed to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's Council of Economic Advisors.

ABOUT THE ARNOLD C. HARBERGER DISTINGUISHED LECTURE SERIES

Established in 1997, the Arnold C. Harberger Distinguished Lecture on Economic Development celebrates Arnold Harberger as an eminent scholar and teacher. The lectures provide a special forum for outstanding students of international economics and policy to present their views and research to the UCLA community and the public.