Nobel Prize winner of 2024 Simon Johnson interviewed:
Johnson told the AP that economic pressures were alienating many Americans.
“A lot of people who were previously in the middle class were hit very hard by the combination of globalization, automation, the decline of trade unions, and a sort of shift more broadly in corporate philosophy,” Johnson said. “So instead of workers being a resource to be developed, which they were in the 19th and early 20th century, they became a cost to be minimized … Now, that squeezed the middle class.’’
“We have, as a country, failed to deliver in recent decades on what we were previously very good at, which was sharing prosperity,” Johnson said.
One key for the future, Johnson said, is how societies manage new technologies such as artificial intelligence.
“AI could go either way,” he said. “AI could either empower people with a lot of education, make them more highly skilled, enable them to do more tasks and get more pay. Or it could be another massive wave of automation that pushes the remnants of the middle down to the bottom. And then, yes, you’re not going to like the political outcomes.’’