School of Humanities Arts and Social Sciences

Writing for the Financial Times, Prof. Daron Acemoglu and his co-authors explore their research demonstrating that “the biggest shift when a chief executive with a business degree takes charge is a decline in wages and the share of revenues going to labor.” Acemoglu and his co-authors note that while many business schools have updated their offerings to include more ethics courses, they emphasize the importance of “being aware of what managers with business degrees used to do is an important step in reflecting on how we can build better programs.”

Prof. Emeritus Olivier Blanchard speaks with New York Times opinion writer Peter Coy about the U.S. policy towards federal debt. “Blanchard pointed out in the [his] book that if the interest rate the government pays on its debt is lower than the economy’s growth rate, the existing stock of debt will feel lighter over time because it will shrink as a share of gross domestic product even if the government isn’t running surpluses,” writes Coy.

President Sally Kornbluth, Provost Cynthia Barnhart, and Chancellor Melissa Nobles speak with Radio Boston host Tiziana Dearing about the importance of representation for women and underrepresented groups in STEM. “One of the most important pieces of having women in leadership is not just bringing a diverse perspective, but honestly being role models so that girls see that there is a possibility for them to be doing the kind of high-tech, heavy research that MIT does,” says Kornbluth. 

Kyle Greenberg PhD ’15, a professor at the United States Military Academy at West Point, and Nancy Qian PhD ’05, a professor at Northwestern University, speak with NPR hosts Jeff Guo and Amanda Aronczyk about the papers that helped them fall in love with economics. Greenberg notes his inspiration was a paper by Prof. Joshua Angrist examining how serving in the military impacts future earnings. 

Prof. Nick Montfort speaks with GBH All Things Considered host Arun Rath about ChatGPT, its potential impact on the future of academia and how instructors could adapt their courses in light of this new technology.

Researchers from MIT and Harvard have found that “Chinese companies lead the world in exporting face recognition,” potentially enabling other governments to perform more surveillance and harming citizens’ human rights, reports Will Knight for Wired. “The fact that China is exporting to these countries may kind of flip them to become more autocratic, when in fact they could become more democratic,” says Prof. Martin Beraja.

Writing for The Conversation, Prof. Heather Hendershot explores the growth of politically-biased news coverage, comparing Ted Baxter of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” - a fictional news anchor more interested in personal fame than journalistic standards - to today’s pundits. “Ted Baxter thus embodied the ego of the pundit, but without the opinions that often make such a person dangerous,” writes Hendershot. “For all his incompetence, it never occurred to him to air his own political views.”

New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall spotlights a new study by Prof. Charles Stewart III that makes the case that “among Republicans, conspiracism has a potent effect on embracing election denialism, followed by racial resentment.”

MIT researchers have found that “automation is the primary reason the income gap between more and less educated workers has continued to widen,” reports Ellen McGirt for Fortune. “This single one variable…explains 50 to 70% of the changes or variation between group inequality from 1980 to about 2016,” says Prof. Daron Acemoglu

Prof. Kieran Setiya reviews “And Finally: Matters of Life and Death” by Henry Marsh for The New York Times. “Many years ago, Marsh read philosophy at Oxford University, but he left for the more practical world of medicine after a year,” writes Setiya. “He finds himself returning in this book to philosophical questions about consciousness and fear of death, though he does so through narrative, not argument, his skills honed by years of storytelling as a clinician recounting case histories.”

MIT has been named the best university for social sciences degrees in the United States for 2023 in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. “All undergraduate students at MIT take classes in the arts and social sciences and many end up taking joint degrees between the sciences and the social sciences,” writes Times Higher Education.

The Economist highlights several studies by MIT researchers on income inequality and wages in the U.S., noting that “Clem Aeppli of Harvard and Nathan Wilmers of MIT found that earnings inequality basically reached a plateau after 2012.” Additionally, Prof. David Autor and his colleagues have found that wages for the bottom half of workers have been growing roughly two percentage points faster than for the upper half of workers.

Collage New Music, Boston’s longest-running contemporary music group, will be performing at MIT’s Killian Hall on March 12, 2023, reports Lloyd Schwartz for WBUR. Schwartz also notes that Professor Emerita Ellen Harris will be introducing the Boston Camerata production of “Dido and Aeneas” on March 18 at Pickman Hall.

Prof. Daron Acemoglu and his colleagues have found that “managers educated at business schools were more likely to favor shareholders over employees,” writes University of London Prof. André Spicer for the Financial Times. The researchers found that “employees working for companies run by a business school-educated manager earned, on average, 6 percent less in the US and 3 percent less in Denmark,” writes Spicer.

Prof. Alan Lightman hosts a new, three-part series titled “Searching, Our Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science,” reports Jane Levere for Forbes. Lightman “explores timeless and deep questions about man and the universe with ethicists, philosophers, faith leaders and Nobel Prize-winning scientists,” writes Levere.