Labor and jobs

Four faculty members from across MIT - Professors Song Han, Simon Johnson, Yoon Kim and Rosalind Picard - speak with Curiosity Stream about the opportunities and risks posed by the rapid advancements in the field of AI. “We do want to think about which human capabilities we treasure,” says Picard. She adds that during the Covid-19 pandemic, “we saw a lot of loss of people's ability to communicate with one another face-to-face when their world moved online. I think we need to be thoughtful and intentional about what we're building with the technology and whether it's diminishing who we are or enhancing it.”

Financial Times reporter Andrew Hill highlights “The Geek Way,” a new book by Principal Research Scientist Andrew McAfee that explores the success behind “geek” culture in companies. Hill notes that McAfee has, “pinpointed some important norms sustaining the world’s most admired, and fastest growing, organizations.”

Principal Research Scientist Andrew McAfee speaks with Bloomberg hosts Carol Massar and Tim Steinbeck about his new book “The Geek Way” and the future of artificial intelligence. “I personally am not worried about the existential, the alignment risks of AI,” says McAfee. “All very powerful tools bring risks and harm with them, and they demand vigilance. We have got to be careful about it. I don’t think AI is any big exception to that trend or requires us to do radically different things, we just have to be vigilant and stop the bad uses.”

Principal Research Scientist Andrew McAfee speaks with CNBC about the contributing factors to a successful start-up company. “Incumbent industries and companies are so fond of really elaborate planning cycles and the geeks just build things, get feedback and do again on a fast cadence,” says McAfee.  

Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have found that “Black women who work in predominately white teams may have worse job outcomes,” reports Ruth Umoh for Fortune. The researchers, “studied 9,037 inexperienced new hires in a large, elite professional service firm from 2014 to 2020, focusing on retention and promotion rates,” explains Umoh. “Black women were the only demographic whose turnover and promotion rates were significantly affected by the racial identify of their coworkers.”

Writing for Fortune, Principal Research Scientist Andrew McAfee discusses his new book “The Geek Way,” and explains how the structure of Montessori schools are influencing modern day business and company culture. “A bunch of geeks are now doing for companies what Maria Montessori did for schools,” writes McAfee. “They’re reimagining them, improving them, and exposing false assumptions. A large and growing cohort of business leaders are now building very different companies — and, not coincidentally, very successful ones.”

Principal Research Scientist Andrew McAfee writes for Fast Company about the makings of a successful corporate culture. “I’ve come to believe that the most fundamental reason Silicon Valley companies are disrupting so many industries is that they’ve iterated and experimented their way into a corporate culture that supports high levels of agility, innovation, and execution simultaneously,” writes McAfee. “I call this culture the geek way. It’s based on four norms expected by those around you (and not just the bosses).”

Prof. Pierre Azoulay speaks with Wall Street Journal reporter Bob Fernandez about new research that highlights how immigrant workers, “account for nearly one-in-five of the top 1% wage earners in the U.S.” Azoulay notes that: “One reason that immigrants do better is that they locate in places that are growing fast and the earnings potential are high. They do not randomly locate around the United States.”

Prof. Daron Acemoglu and Prof. Simon Johnson write for Project Syndicate about how to structure U.S. international trade policies so that they benefit American workers and global stability. “Two new principles can form the basis of U.S. policy. First, international trade should be structured in a way to encourage a stable world order,” they write. “Second, appealing to abstract 'gains of trade' is no longer enough. American workers need to see the benefits. Any trade arrangement that significantly undermines the quality and quantity of middle-class American jobs is bad for the country and its people, and will likely incite a political backlash.”

A new study co-authored by Prof. Roberto Fernandez examines the obstacles facing women seeking to advance their careers in tech, reports Sarah Shemkus for The Boston Globe. The researchers found “recruiters were more likely to reach out to men and had longer conversations with male candidates,” writes Shemkus. “And women needed more impressive resumes to make the cut for recruiter outreach.”

A study co-authored by Prof. Anna Stansbury finds that “as the share of graduates in the UK workforce has expanded over the past 25 years, the wage premium they command relative to non-graduates has fallen,” reports John Burn-Murdoch for Financial Times. “We can thus infer that in the aggregate, Britain’s supply of skilled workers is outstripping demand in the form of skilled jobs,” writes Burn-Murdoch.

Researchers from MIT and elsewhere have found that “managers in a large retail chain saw women as having less leadership potential even though their performance reviews were better, on average, than those of their male peers,” reports Sarah Green Carmichael for The Washington Post. “Analyzing data on 30,000 employees, the researchers found that overperforming didn’t do much to improve women’s scores on leadership potential. Their bosses continued to underestimate them.”

A new study co-authored by Prof. Emilio Castilla finds that using stereotypically masculine or feminine adjectives to describe the qualities needed for a job opening has a negligible effect on who applies, reports Lisa Ward for The Wall Street Journal. “It’s a superficial intervention with little tangible effect,” says Castilla.

Writing for The Washington Post, Brian Deese, an MIT Innovation Fellow, explores the resilience of America’s post pandemic economic recovery and the strength of the labor market. “This economic recovery is defying expectations,” writes Deese. “Enabling more people to work can extend this improbable progress and lay the groundwork for long-term economic growth.”  

 Prof. Arnaud Costinot and Prof. Iván Werning speak with TechCrunch reporter Brian Heater about their research examining the potential impact of a robot tax on automation and jobs. “The potential wages people can earn may become more unequal with new technologies and the idea is that the tax can mitigate these effects,” Costinot and Werning explain. “In a sense, one can think of this as pre-distribution, affecting earnings before taxes, instead of redistribution.”