Simon Johnson

Simon Johnson was born and raised in Sheffield, England, a prominent steel manufacturing city, where his family had lived and worked for over a century. His father’s family owned a factory that made screws, and his maternal grandfather was a metallurgist in charge of a large steel mill. During the 1980s, when Johnson was in college, Sheffield’s economy declined, and his family’s businesses failed. The experience “taught me the importance of economics,” he said in his Nobel Prize interview.

Johnson studied economics and politics at the University of Oxford and then earned a master’s degree in economics from Manchester University. After receiving a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he became a professor of economics at Duke University. From 2007 to 2008, Johnson was chief economist and director of the research department at the International Monetary Fund. He is currently Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

With Acemoglu, he coauthored Power and Progress: Our 1000-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity and in 2019 wrote Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream with Jonathan Gruber. As he noted to Big Think in 2010, “I’m an immigrant. . . I became an American citizen. I believe in this American project.”