Prof. Daron Acemoglu discusses how issues with AI and social media inform his new book, “What Happened to Liberal Democracy?” in an article by Fortune’s Nick Lichtenberg. “We live in an environment that’s been partly shaped by social media, and there is a tendency to escalate everything, because that gets attention,” says Acemoglu. “Politics is like that. The other topic like that, unfortunately, is AI.”
Financial Times reporter Martin Wolf spotlights Institute Prof. Daron Acemoglu’s latest book, “What Happened to Liberal Democracy?”, which he notes is "timely and thought-provoking,” and "an important call to arms.” In the book, Acemoglu explores his "grand idea of ‘working-class liberalism,’” writes Wolf. “This concept, he states, is built on experimentation and the freedoms of association and expression, is suspicious of excessive power, uses redistribution, allows the less fortunate to participate more fully, values growth, attempts to provide good jobs for everybody and values community, trust and the sharing of useful knowledge.”
Prof. Charles Stewart III speaks to NPR’s Bobby Allyn about concerns that election betting encourages those connected to campaigns or election administrators to manipulate votes. “If you are looking for a reason to be skeptical about election results, election officials trying to manipulate them for financial gain becomes another straw to grasp at,” says Stewart. "However, these people don't need prediction markets to concoct some conspiracy theory to explain away why their candidate lost.”
Prof. Daron Acemoglu notes that “the decline in popular support for democracy is greater in the United States than elsewhere, especially among the young,” reports Thomas B. Edsall for The New York Times. Acemoglu explains that “one way to address the discontent with contemporary democracy among so many voters on the right would be to implement traditional center-left economic policies, including many supported by the Biden administration,” writes Edsall.
Carol R. Saivetz, a senior advisor for MIT’s Security Studies Program, speaks with NBC Boston about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “The claims that this was all about NATO expansion are really false,” says Saivetz. “I think it’s much more about Putin’s imperial ambitions and this whole idea that unless he can put back together the Soviet Union that somehow Russia is not a great power.”
Writing for The New York Times, Steven Simon of the MIT Center for International Studies and Jonathan Stevenson of the International Institute for Strategic Studies underscore the need for extensive analysis of the growing dangers to American democracy. “The overarching idea is, publicly and thoroughly, to probe just how bad things could get precisely to ensure that they never do,” they write, “and that America’s abject political decay is averted.”
GBH’s Basic Black host Callie Crossley speaks with Lecturer Malia Lazu,about how issues surrounding Covid-19, voting rights, economic downturn, police brutality, education, climate change and politics will impact communities of color in the coming year. “What I see is a democracy fighting itself,” says Lazu. "People in power, republicans or democrats, being bought into the idea of democracy more than the people in the democracy.”
New York Times columnist Peter Coy spotlights a new working paper by Prof. Daron Acemoglu examining democracies. “Democracies breed their own support only when they are successful: all of the effects we estimate work through exposure to democracies that are successful in providing economic growth, peace and political stability, and public goods,” Acemoglu and his co-authors write.
The Economist highlights research by Prof. Daron Acemoglu that finds “networks of influential individuals seem also to have contributed to Italy’s descent into fascism” after WWI.
Prof. Charles Stewart III speaks with Steve Inskeep of NPR about early voting in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Stewart notes that, thus far, we’re seeing, “the sort of friction we get in a high-energy election on the first few days. Voters are eager to vote, and election officials are learning whether they have enough capacity at their early voting sites. And some places, it looks like they don't.”
MIT Prof. Charles Stewart III and Stanford Prof. Nathaniel Persily write for The Washington Post about a new survey they conducted that finds “registered voters harbor worries about voting in this election that diverge in predictable ways, given their partisan affiliations. Despite these worries, most are confident that their ballots will be counted accurately.”
Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Prof. Charles Stewart III argues that “those out to undermine Americans’ confidence in the mechanics of their democracy are depending on an information void following Nov. 3, which they will try to fill with a torrent of disinformation designed to foment potentially violent conflict. To protect the legitimacy of the outcome, election officials and journalists will need to fill that void with facts about the counting.”
In an article for The New York Times, Prof. Charles Stewart III examines how to ensure that voting is safe and accessible during this year’s presidential election. “We need the campaigns, the leaders with big followings and civil society to point voters to the correct information on all the different ways to vote this November and why each mode is safe and secure,” writes Stewart.
A new study by Prof. Charles Stewart III “predicts that the outcome of this year’s presidential election — and the problem known as the ‘lost vote,’ in which legitimate ballots go uncounted — could fuel postelection allegations of a rigged election,” reports The New York Times.
In an article for Bloomberg News, Prof. Daron Acemoglu writes about how countries that democratize tend to see faster rates of economic growth. Acemoglu notes that what tends to spur economic growth is how, “democracies increase taxes and spend more on education and health, preparing the economy to achieve greater productivity in the decades to come.”