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In a letter to the Financial Times, graduate student Daniel Aronoff makes the case that banks should not serve as the gatekeepers of digital currencies. Aronoff writes that anointing “banks as the gatekeepers would keep the current oligopoly in place and jeopardise many of the possible benefits of digital currency.”
Prof. David Autor speaks with New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall about education and income inequality. “If the citizens of a democracy think that ‘progress’ simply means more inequality and stratification, and rising economic insecurity stemming from technology and globalization, they’re eventually going to ‘cancel’ that plan and demand something else,” says Autor.
Greg Rosalsky of NPR’s Planet Money spotlights Prof. Daron Acemoglu’s research exploring how automation is driving inequality in America. Rosalsky notes that Acemoglu hopes his research “will get policymakers to take a new, smarter approach to technological change.”
Prof. Esther Duflo has been named to India’s new economic advisory panel, reports Ganesh Nagarajan for Bloomberg.
Profs. Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee speak with Financial Times reporter Martin Sandbu about the need for better economic “plumbing,” the shortcomings of policy to address climate change and the state of the profession of economics. Duflo notes that before the pandemic there had been improvement in quality of life around the world, "in part because of more focus on these quality of life issues and, I would argue, a little bit more attention given to plumbing and setting pragmatic objectives and programs as opposed to aiming for some more elusive growth.”
A new working paper by MIT researchers finds that automation is replacing more workers than outsourcing, reports Scott Tong for Marketplace. Prof. Daron Acemoglu notes that workers displaced by machines won’t be able to find better quality jobs unless “we invest in new technologies that create new tasks and new opportunities for workers.”
Institute Professor Suzanne Berger speaks with Boston Globe reporter Jonathan Schlefer about how to ensure the new Senate bill that invests in research and development helps strength small and medium-sized companies. “The focus can’t just be on large firms at the top of the manufacturing chain because their ability to produce a range of advanced goods depends on their base of suppliers,” says Berger. “And today those suppliers lack the technology and skills to make the parts that would allow the top of the chain to take off.”
Prof. Jonathan Gruber speaks with New York Times reporter David Leonhardt about the importance of the U.S. Senate passing a new bill that will increase funding for research and development, and establish a program aimed at making American innovation more geographically diverse. “We are too big a nation to have all of our innovation concentrated on the coasts,” Gruber said.
Researchers from MIT and Harvard have “re-evaluated a 2017 review that warned of a growing global sperm-count crisis and associated decline in male fertility and concluded the review vastly overstated the situation,” reports Robert Preidt for U.S. News & World Report.
In an article for The Guardian, graduate student Marion Boulicault details her new findings that suggest recent studies showing declining male fertility are overstated. “The lesson from the research on sperm decline is not that we are facing imminent human extinction (at least not for sperm-related reasons),” writes Boulicault. “Rather, it’s the more banal but accurate fact that there’s much we don’t know about the relationship between men’s reproductive health and environmental pollution.”
Writing for The Guardian, Profs. Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo underscore the importance of a worldwide Covid-19 vaccination campaign. “Vaccinating the world will be crucial if countries are going to act together to confront the climate crisis,” they write, “which will require many of the same things as delivering vaccines: resources, innovation, ingenuity and a true partnership between rich and developing countries.”
In an article for Wired, Prof. Amy Moran-Thomas writes about racial bias in pulse oximeters, noting that oximeters designed to work equitably existed in the 70s. “As part of AI’s growing role in health care, a wide range of noninvasive sensors are being developed with the pulse oximeter as their model,” writes Moran-Thomas. “Without care, a coming generation of optical color sensors could easily reproduce the unequal errors for which pulse oximetry is now known across many other areas of medicine.”
Prof. Christopher Capozzola speaks with Bob DeCastro of Good Day LA about the campaign to name a U.S. Navy Warship after Fireman 2nd Class Telesforo Trinidad, the only American national of Asian and Filipino descent to have received a Congressional Medal of Honor. “I think in some ways, there’s no better tribute to the century of work that Filipinos sailors did to keep the ship going than to name one of our ships after one of the most heroic Filipino sailors that we know,” says Capozzola.
In a letter to the Financial Times, graduate student Daniel Aronoff explores the effectiveness Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s regional policies. “If Israel severely cripples Hamas and Fatah emerges the winner of that contest, it will be an improvement from the standpoint of Israeli security, since Fatah is not committed to the goal of destroying Israel,” writes Aronoff.
Forbes contributor Peter Greene spotlights a new study co-authored by MIT researchers that examines the long-term effects of universal preschool in Boston. The researchers found, “preschool reduced the likelihood that a student would get in trouble in high school or ever be jailed. And preschool increased the likelihood that students would graduate from high school and that they would go on to attend college.”