School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

In a piece for The Financial Times about the Eurozone economies, John Plender writes about Professor Barry Posen’s argument in his new book “Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy” for cutting U.S. defense spending. 

Kara Miller and Genevieve Gilson of WGBH’s Innovation Hub interview Professor Natasha Dow Schull about the engineering behind gambling and her book, “Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Vegas.” “There can be a net loss, but it feels like you’re constantly winning and you can play for much longer,” says Schull of slot machines. 

In a segment about America’s renewed involvement in Iraq on NPR’s On Point, Professor Barry Posen speaks about his new book “Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy.” Posen argues that the United States should rethink its foreign policy and exercise a more conservative military approach in Iraq.  

In a piece for Forbes about U.S. foreign policy, Stephen Harner highlights Professor Barry Posen’s new book “Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy.” Harner outlines Posen’s argument that current U.S. policy should be replaced with a more restrained military approach.  

Forbes reporter Naomi Shavin writes about the new MIT study that found that municipal governments accurately represent their residents’ political beliefs. The study also showed that “the most conservative cities are skewed toward being more liberal than one might expect,” Shavin writes. 

“In a recent study, Boston was ranked the fifth most liberal city in the United States,” writes Megan Turchi for Boston.com about new research conducted by Professor Chris Warshaw. Warshaw’s study examined how closely aligned urban governments are with their constituents’ viewpoints and ranked the most liberal and conservative cities.

WBUR’s Benjamin Swasey reports on Professor Chris Warshaw’s new study examining how reflective governments are of their constituents’ views. “When you put all this stuff together, it turns out that cities are quite responsive to how liberal their publics are,” explains Warshaw. 

Krissy Clark of NPR reports on Professor Amy Glasmeier’s work developing the MIT Living Wage Calculator. Clark reports that through examining the cost of living, Glasmeier found that areas with higher poverty rates tended to have higher amounts of minimum wage jobs where the minimum wage, “absolutely was not paying people enough to live on.”

“Nancy L. Rose PhD ‘85, a professor of applied economics at MIT, has been named Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Economic Analysis by the U.S. Department of Justice,” writes Katherine Nazemi for The Tech. Rose will head the DOJ’s anti-trust division.

Writing for The Washington Post, Hunter Schwartz reports on new findings concerning municipal governments from Professor Chris Warshaw. Schwartz writes that the study found, “Even cities with governments designed to be less partisan, with institutions like nonpartisan elections and professional managers instead of elected mayors, are in line with residents’ political beliefs.”

In a piece for USA Today, Mark Olalde reports on a new study of municipal politics co-written by MIT Professor Chris Warshaw. Through the study, which examined the political preferences of U.S. residents in specific cities, Warshaw found that Mesa, Arizona was the most conservative city and San Francisco, California the most liberal. 

Professor Noam Chomsky reflects in The Huffington Post on the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and the age of nuclear weapons. Chomsky argues that, considering their tremendous capacity for destruction, it is only by luck that we have survived with nuclear weapons for so long.

In a piece for The New York Times, Prof. Michel DeGraff and Molly Ruggles write of the need for Haitian students to learn in their native Creole, as opposed to French. “Creole holds the potential to democratize knowledge, and thus liberate the masses from extreme poverty,” DeGraff and Ruggles explain. 

The Economist highlights a new study by Prof. Chris Warshaw that analyzed how accurately the policies of local leaders reflect their constituents’ views. “They found that the most ideologically liberal cities end up spending twice per capita as much as the most conservative cities, have higher taxes and less regressive tax systems,” The Economist reports. 

Sam Sturgis of CityLab examines a new study by MIT Professor Chris Warshaw that shows that municipal governments, regardless of their structure, tend to mirror the ideological preferences of their electorate. The researchers, “aggregated a collection of nationwide survey results to determine the political leanings of 1,600 U.S. cities and towns,” Sturgis writes.