Policy

Prof. Daron Acemoglu joins NPR’s Scott Simon to discuss Congress tackling affordability in the age of AI by increasing wages. Paying higher prices for goods “is much less of a burden when you see your own salary increase at the same rate or at a higher rate,” says Acemoglu. “When we need to create more jobs for people, create more wage growth opportunities for people, technology is going to make that harder. We have to create an agenda of steering AI in a more pro-worker direction so that rather than automate work, we get AI to actually help employers to find ways of using workers more productively, and that will be a pathway for encouraging firms to create more jobs.” 

William D. Nordhaus PhD ’67, a “Yale economist and Nobel laureate who tabulated the economic wreckage of carbon emissions and influenced climate policy across several presidential administrations,” has died at 85, reports The New York Times’ Lydia DePillis. Nordhaus developed a model over decades, “to balance climate change’s long-term damage with the costs required to contain it,” that has “underpinned dozens of regulations around the world aimed at limiting fossil fuels and seeded the ground for a new field of research that bridges the gap between economics and earth science,” writes DePillis.  

MIT researchers have “examined how improvements to existing transmission infrastructure could increase electricity delivery without relying entirely on expensive and time-consuming construction of new lines,” reports The Daily Tribune’s Carl Magadia. The researchers “examined three technologies: dynamic line ratings, which adjust power-line capacity based on real-time weather; advanced power flow controls, which redirect electricity away from congested lines; and topology optimization, which improves electricity distribution by reconfiguring grid connections,” notes Magadia.  

Prof. Christopher Knittel joins the Climate One podcast to discuss energy policy and his research on the costs associated with homeowners implementing rooftop solar. “Rooftop solar is raising people's rates,” says Knittel. We should continue to “subsidize rooftop solar in a way that's not regressive, that is not leaning harder on those homes that cannot install solar.” Thinking about: “what is the best, most efficient, and [the] fairest way to make that [equity] happen.”  

Prof. Catherine Tucker and her colleagues published a report that reveals neighborhood disparities in access to and use of digital government services, writes Kaitlyn Levinson for Route Fifty. “Higher-income neighborhoods are more likely to submit multiple enforcement requests simultaneously via the app, leading to faster resolution when complaints are geographically concentrated and, consequently, to unequal neighborhood outcomes,” the report reads. “This underscores the need for policymakers to consider the broader social effects of digital civic tools and ensure they do not exacerbate existing inequalities.”  

Prof. Daron Acemoglu joins Bloomberg’s “Mishal Husain Show” to discuss his latest book, “What Happened to Liberal Democracy: Remaking a Politics of Shared Prosperity,” as it relates to democracy in the age of AI and social media. “The thing that gives me hope is that humans are very adaptable,” says Acemoglu. “People, even in this polarized world, have a deep sense of fairness, around [which] we can come together. There are so many shared moral values between the different sides of the aisle in the U.K., [and] the U.S. Polarization, bad leadership [and] social media have obscured them.” 

NPR’s Greg Rosalsky explains how Robert Hall PhD ’67 and Michael Woodford PhD ’83, winners of the 2026 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, were honored for their work helping to lay the groundwork for New Keynesian economics, taking a fresh scoop of the field. “Hall and Woodford helped rebuild macroeconomics around the decisions of individual people and businesses. Hall broke new ground in understanding how people's expectations about the future shape their spending today. Woodford built on that work, developing a framework that combined forward-looking spending decisions with sticky prices.”

Forbes’ Michael T. Nietzel spotlights Robert Hall PhD ’67 and Michael Woodford PhD ’83, who were awarded the 2026 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for their work on economic stabilization policies. “The work of Hall and Woodford has proved beneficial for managing economic shocks like those from the pandemic and the energy crises of recent years,” Nietzel writes. “While recessions and episodes of high inflation have not disappeared, they tend to be less long-lasting.”  

Robert Hall PhD ’67 and Michael Woodford PhD ’83 have won the 2026 Nobel economics prize for their work “developing models that help central bankers and finance ministers to stabilize their countries, avoiding long recessions and runaway inflation,” writes reporter Graeme Wearden for The Guardian. “The laureates’ work has provided us with a stable theoretical foundation for the models that are now used by central banks and governments around the world,” says John Hassler, chair of the Nobel Committee. “With them, we are better equipped to deal with shocks in the economy, such as energy crises or sudden changes in how much households consume.” 

Joe Romm ‘82, PhD ‘87, “a physicist by training who became one of the most influential voices in the debate over climate change and how to stop it, using his blog to provide deep-dive insights and sharp-elbowed critiques,” died on Sept. 14, reports Clay Risen for The New York Times. “There’s nobody else like Joe Romm,” says Michael Mann, Romm’s colleague at the Penn Center. “There’s nobody else who brought all of these interlocking talents and proclivities together in the way that he did. That gave him such a unique voice, and it’s a voice that we sorely could use today.” 

In an opinion piece for The Boston Globe, Prof. Jonathan Gruber discusses Massachusetts’ Question 5, the proposed tax rebate rule that would mandate that taxes be returned to taxpayers each time the state’s revenues grow faster than wages and salaries. “Most economists believe a recession is coming but we can’t say when. The best way to plan is to have the savings to help us through, or to invest so that we are as strong as possible when it hits,” writes Gruber. “Question 5 chooses the third path — spending the money now, and letting the state suffer in the future.”  

In an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal, Gabriele Mazzini, a research affiliate at the MIT Media Lab, explains why “policymakers and voters need to resist AI exceptionalism” amidst recent warnings of a potential AI apocalypse. “There is no sentient [AI] actor lurking in the weights to be reasoned with, feared or pacified,” writes Mazzini. “There are only human software engineers, product managers and corporate boards deciding which guardrails are worth the latency cost and which permissions can be skipped in the race to market.” 

Prof. Gary Gensler joins CNBC’s “Squawk Box” to discuss the AI race and shares his suggestions for government regulations. “I do feel that there’s a need for more responsible regulation of artificial intelligence,” says Gensler. “These existential risks [conflicts of interest, explainability, and bias], however you measure them, are much harder to control because you’ve got the competition between Chinese model developers, [and] U.S. model developers.”  

Writing for The Boston Globe, President Emeritus L. Rafael Reif describes the need to develop a universal “moral floor,” like the Ten Commandments, which provide clear guidelines for the use of AI. “Today, people are creating and developing intelligence that is much more capable, in narrow ways, than our own,” Reif explains. “We owe humanity the same discipline to civilize AI before it is too late: Write down what lines must never be crossed, make the list short enough to remember, and hold every actor building it, and using it, accountable for its actions.”

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.”