Simon Johnson

speaker

239 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 19 Jul

Simon Johnson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The Rest Is Money · 297. How do we reshape our workforce in the AI era? · 19 Jul 2026 podcast

That conversation with trade unions is incredibly important and not easy.

I absolutely agree.

I hope so, and I think I'm allowed to tell you, not the name of the person, but the fact that I believe we do have one of the co-judges of the AI adoption prize, the pro-worker prize, is a union person, a prominent union person, because that makes sense, right?

Why rely on me, who lives in America and has been out in the UK for 40 years, to tell you what's pro-worker for the British workers?

Let's have a representative of the British workers at the table.

I mean, the whole thing's going to be transparent as well, so everyone can kick the tires and complain as much as they want or admire it.

But I think having unions at the table, Steph, is incredibly important and not something the US is very good at.

So if the UK can use the fact that you've got more legitimacy around union voices, that could be a plus.

Yes, I think you put that very well.

Look, the automation of spinning in Lancashire, cotton spinning, at the end of the 1700s did create opportunities for weavers because it drove down the price of spun cotton.

When weaving was automated,

it didn't create similar kinds of opportunities upstream or downstream of weaving.

And it wasn't until the arrival, I would argue, of the railways in the late 1830s into the 1840s that you really got this spreading of opportunity and a restructuring of the economy, and everything started to change.

And that's where your new task came from.

And my colleague David Autor at MIT has absolutely established two things.

One is that something like 60% or 70% of the jobs we have today in the United States didn't exist in 1940.

Secondly, and we created actually a particular wave of those jobs in the 1940s with a lot of new science and new industries coming out of World War II.

But the other thing he's established is that from the 1980s, the rate of new task creation did not keep up with the pace of automation.

So it's true, we didn't have massive unemployment, partly because we don't pay generous unemployment benefits in the US.

But what you did have was a hollowing out of the middle and a pushing down of the middle to the lower end of the labor market.

Showing 81–100 of 239 · page 5 of 12