In an article for Bloomberg Opinion, Noah Smith highlights Prof. David Autor’s recent lecture at the American Education Association. Autor shows that, “the urban-rural education gap has widened — in 1970, an American in a rural area was only 5 percent less likely to have a college degree as someone in an urban area, but by 2015 that gap had grown to 20 points.”
Quartz reporter Dan Kopf writes that a new study by MIT researchers demonstrates how the lack of jobs for workers without college degrees in American cities is contributing to income inequality. “Gentrification in some major cities may be as much a result of the decline in opportunities for people without college degrees as it is an influx of highly educated, highly paid workers,” writes Kopf.
An excerpt published in National Geographic from a book by Deborah Blum, director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT, examines how Henry Heinz’s push to improve the quality of his company’s ketchup helped usher in new food safety regulations. Blum writes that Heinz realized “consumer distrust of the food supply would be far more expensive to manufacturers like him than the cost of improving the food itself.”
Prof. David Autor speaks with Greg Rosalsky of NPR’s Planet Money about his new research on employment trends in the U.S. showing that cities are no longer meccas of opportunity for workers without college degrees. “We need to carefully examine our assumptions that superstar cities are the land of opportunity for everyone,” says Autor.
Writing for the Financial Times, graduate student Daniel Aronoff highlights Prof. David Autor’s research showing the bleak economic outlook for Americans without college degrees. Aronoff argues the most important less from this work is that, “the economic issue that matters most — maybe the only issue that really matters at all — is education.”
New York Times reporters Emily Badger and Quoctrung Bui highlight Prof. David Autor’s new research that shows cities do not offer workers without college educations the same economic opportunities that they did in the past. Autor found that the declining urban wage premium has been caused by the “disappearance of ‘middle-skill jobs’ in production but also in clerical, administrative and sales work.”
New York Times columnist David Leonhardt highlights Prof. Emeritus Olivier Blanchard’s address to the American Economic Association, in which he argued that governments are overly concerned with debt. “Blanchard’s case revolves around the fact that economic growth rates in modern times are usually higher than interest rates. This pattern means that governments can often repay their debts more easily than people expect,” Leonhardt explains.
Prof. Emeritus and Nobel laureate Peter Diamond speaks with Meghna Chakrabarti of On Point about U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal to increase the top marginal tax rate to 70 percent. “That will raise a lot of money that we could [use to] address some of our shortfalls and that will help us prepare for the large costs coming from climate change,” says Diamond of the proposal.
The Economist spotlights Prof. David Autor and graduate student Juliette Fournier’s research examining the economic prospects for Americans without college degrees. Autor and Fournier found that, “the earnings of workers without a college education have scarcely risen in 50 years, after adjusting for inflation; for men they have fallen. This stagnation coincided with tectonic changes in American employment.”
At the annual meeting of the American Economic Association, Prof. David Autor presented new research showing that middle-skill jobs for Americans without college degrees are becoming increasingly rare in dense areas, reports Jeanna Smialek and Peter Coy for Bloomberg News. “It’s not clear where the land of opportunity is for non-college adults,” says Autor.
The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Zweig examines the investment strategies of former Institute Prof. Paul Samuelson, including his purchases of Berkshire Hathaway stock in the early 1970s. Zweig notes, “In an interview this week, [Warren] Buffett says Prof. Samuelson believed the same thing he does: that markets are 'generally very efficient but not perfectly efficient.'”
Fortune cites the work of Prof. Esther Duflo in their special report on the shrinking middle class and what can be done to fix it. “Duflo has shaken up the economics world with a radical premise: Aid programs should be tested and evaluated with the same rigor as prescription drugs, through randomized controlled trials.”
Los Angeles Times reporter Melissa Healy writes that a study by Prof. Adam Berinksy examines how fact-checking impacts how voters view politicians who lie. Healy writes that in a study of Australian voters, Berinksy found that, “fact-checking changed subjects’ views about which politicians they supported, but only slightly.”
Prof. Brad Skow speaks with WCVB-TV’s Chronicle about the concept of time and the “block universe” theory of time, which states that time does not pass by but is instead part of the larger fabric of the universe. “The future is a place just like Australia,” says Skow. “Australia is far away spatially and the future is also far away temporally.”
In an article for The Boston Globe, Prof. Jonathan Gruber argues that a recent ruling by a federal judge in Texas that the Affordable Care Acts is unconstitutional puts the health of people around the country at risk and threatens our democracy. “If the courts overturn this outcome, it is an attack on the very process of representative government in the US,” writes Gruber.