Power & Consequences: Gensler & Nobel Laureate Johnson Take MIT Policy Debates to Podcast Listeners

How do you define power and consequences? Power is the power of ideas, the power in politics, economic power, technological power. We look at history to see what lessons can be drawn for today. You know, every law was written by humans and those laws written by humans were in a context of a certain policy debate at that time and generally some economic debate at that time and in a technological context. So we do a lot of that on the podcast. As for consequences, it's what does it mean to our viewers. So we look at today and yesterday to see what does this mean for you the listener for tomorrow. How do you invest around it? How do you think about your economic well-being, your families or your businesses? And what are the consequences for tomorrow's power centers as well?

At the core of Simon's research over decades, I mean, he researches so many things. He's one of these multi-talented individuals. But that core research with Daron Acemoglu and Jim Robinson that was really recognized properly recognized with this Nobel Prize is about institutions and the rule of law both political institutions and economic institutions and how they can be tilted towards one group of the public rather than another group. It could be the elite or it could be the broad public. And every policy debate that we bring into the classroom for our students, we remind them that policy choices affect individuals, but they don't affect individuals uniformly. They tend to have some eb and flow or push. And so that also appealed to me that that's also the power and then the consequences of who are the winners, who are the losers in economic terms. Look at what are the economic rents, what's being extracted possibly from the system. And this of course is a matter of choice in these policy debates. Do you create something where one set of parties can extract rents or excess profits or do you do something that creates public goods? In capital markets we think of that around transparency, market integrity, access, competition in a market because of course in any policy debate there are winners and losers.