Prof. Paul Osterman speaks to Fortune’s Nick Lichtenberg about how his new book “Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment” explores how a perceived lack of ambition among Gen Z reflects the decreased amount of job security and opportunity available to young workers. “No one has job security anymore, but these folks [disposable workers] are hired with that expectation and are not going to be around for long,” says Osterman.
Prof. David Autor speaks to Financial Times reporter Christian Davies about the increased use of physical AI systems at U.S. manufacturing companies. “[Autor says] that while individual companies might increase headcount as they grow more productive, it is a fallacy to assume this will be replicated across the manufacturing sector as a whole, noting that previous waves of automation in the US have all driven large-scale declines in blue-collar employment,” writes Davies.
Prof. Anna Stansbury speaks to the Financial Times’ Myles McCormick about a new study that found that chief executives at America’s largest low-wage employers had seen their pay rise 41 percent between 2019 and 2025, while the median worker earned 21 percent more income. “There’s been for several decades a shift in the balance of power from labor to capital in the US,” says Stansbury. “It seems unlikely that what’s happening now...can be used to infer a big secular shift in power beyond the ongoing steady trend that we’ve been seeing for a long time.”
Prof. Daniela Rus, Director of MIT CSAIL, and Prof. David Autor, department head of Economics, are featured on Time’s “TIME100 AI 2026” list of 100 innovators, leaders, and thinkers reshaping the world through their advances in AI. “Over three decades, [Rus] has conducted pioneering work in robotics, extending the understanding of what form robots can take,” writes Tharin Pillay, while Steven Freiss describes Autor as “one of the nation’s most vocal and prominent economists aiming to ascertain AI’s potential impacts on labor.”
The Financial Times’ Anjana Ahuja spotlights research led by Prof. Dennis Whyte on the economics of fusion energy. “Economic Q, the metric devised by Whyte and others and which must exceed one to represent net economic gain, compares the capital gained over a fusion energy plant’s lifetime to that expended,” writes Ahuja. “Factors reflect the extreme engineering involved and include construction costs, component durability and the efficiency of converting fusion power into a commodity.”
Assil Halimi PhD ‘25 speaks to TechCrunch’s Tim De Chant about his company Apollo Atomics, which is shrinking the steam generator component of a reactor to streamline nuclear power. “We don’t want to be incremental in nuclear and just improve a small thing,” says Halimi. “Our target is to beat natural gas.”
MIT researchers have found that lower birth rates are associated with higher growth in Gross Domestic Product globally, writes The Atlantic’s Idrees Kahloon. “[P]erhaps more important than the observed correlation is the authors’ proposed explanation: that when prime-age workers become scarce, companies adapt by developing productivity-boosting technology,” notes Kahloon.
Writing for WBUR, Prof. Christopher Knittel and Visiting Prof. Gilbert Metcalf discuss implementing a vehicle miles traveled (VMT) tax for electric vehicles, instead of the flat annual fee of $130 recently proposed by Congress. “A flat EV tax does not differentiate between high-mileage and low-mileage drivers — a VMT tax does,” write Knittel and Metcalf. “It links payments to actual road use, which is precisely what proponents of EV fees, including the Bipartisan Policy Center and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, say they want.”
Prof. Kristin Forbes speaks to Bloomberg’s Daniel Moss about how governments can prepare to restore inflation targets in the event of a prolonged miss and highlights the value of providing a clear timeline. “You don’t want to be responsible for hitting a target each month when a global shock will veer you off course,” says Forbes. “It’s about the direction of inflation, the path.”
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.”
MIT researchers found that contrary to popular assumptions, lower birth rates have raised rather than lowered the Gross Domestic Product globally, writes The Dispatch’s Eli Kronenberg. “Across the board, we found that these lower birth rates were leading to a faster pace of technological adoption and progress,” says graduate student Keelan Beirne, a co-author on the paper.
MIT researchers have developed a framework to determine what is needed to make fusion energy commercially viable, writes World Nuclear News (WNN). “The parameters in the framework describe engineering features of the fusion power plant such as power density, the efficiency of converting fusion power into an economic product, and the durability of components used in the energy conversion, in addition to costing and market parameters that assess the expenses and returns from invested capital,” explains WNN.
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.”
In an article by The Minnesota Star Tribune’s Emma Nelson, Prof. David Autor discusses low sentiment among middle-class Americans regarding the U.S. economy. “There’s a belief that if you follow the rules, if you go to school and pay your taxes and pay your bills and send your kids to college and whatever, that you’re supposed to do better than the generation before you,” says Autor. “When that does not happen is “part of when [people] feel like society’s not functioning well.”
Prof. Dennis Whyte and Prof. Andrew Lo have built a framework to mitigate the economic challenges of fusion power, writes Interesting Engineering’s Ameya Paleja. “While there are multiple approaches to building a nuclear fusion facility, Whyte and colleagues believe that at the end of the day, the facility should be in a position to generate more money that has gone in to building and operating it, otherwise it won’t last for long,” writes Paleja.