Emily Badger and Christopher Ingraham write for The Washington Post about a study by MIT researchers that examines how poverty impacts life expectancies across the country. “What's especially striking is that the poor live even shorter lives in some places than others. They have longer life expectancies in affluent, cities with highly educated populations,” they explain.
A new study co-authored by MIT researchers finds that people who live in expensive, well-educated cities tend to live longer, reports Jim Zarroli for NPR. Zarroli explains that “the study suggests that the relationship between life expectancy and income is not iron-clad, and changes at the local level can make a big difference.”
Bloomberg News reporter John Tozzi writes about a new study co-authored by MIT researchers that finds a growing disparity between the life expectancies of rich and poor Americans. The researchers found that, “top earning Americans gained 2 to 3 years of life expectancy between 2001 and 2014, while those at the bottom gained little or nothing.”
A study conducted by Prof. Esther Duflo found that when women were offered financial support through livestock and educational training, they were able to climb out of poverty, according to The Economist. “Seven years after the programme began their average monthly consumption was almost one-third higher than it had been after two years.”
Bryanna Cappadona reports for Boston.com that Matt Damon will be MIT’s 2016 commencement speaker. “Damon joins a long list of notable MIT commencement speakers, including U.S. Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith in 2015, DuPont CEO Ellen Kullman in 2014, and Dropbox co-founder and CEO Drew Houston in 2013,” writes Cappadona.
Actor and Cambridge native Matt Damon will speak at MIT’s 2016 commencement, writes Steve Annear for The Boston Globe. In addition to his success in Hollywood, Annear writes that Damon “is one of the founders of Water.org, a non-profit dedicated to delivering access to clean drinking water in developing countries.”
Academy Award-winning actor, filmmaker and social activist Matt Damon will deliver the 2016 commencement address at MIT, reports the Associated Press.
In an article for the New York Times, Claire Cain Miller highlights Prof. David Autor’s research that indicates that disadvantages early in life cause more issues for boys than girls. “Boys particularly seem to benefit more from being in a married household or committed household,” says Autor.
In an article for The New York Times, Eduardo Porter highlights Prof. Abhijit Banerjee’s new study that found that cash transfer programs aimed at assisting people living in poverty do not discourage people from working. Prof. Banerjee explains that when it comes to welfare, “Ideology is much more pervasive than the facts.”
Prof. Daron Acemoglu discusses the work of Angus Deaton, who won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Economics, with Washington Post reporter Ana Swanson. “I think his understanding of how the world worked at the micro level made him extremely suspicious of these get-rich-quick schemes that some people peddled at the development level,” says Acemoglu.
Bourree Lam reports for The Atlantic on an interactive map of U.S. counties produced using Prof. Amy Glasmeier’s Living Wage Calculator. “Glasmeier says that firms can use it to estimate how to pay their employees fairly,” writes Lam.
Ana Swanson reports for The Washington Post on an interactive map created by Prof. Amy Glasmeier that displays the gap between minimum wages and living wages across the U.S. The map shows that the East Coast “is one of the most challenging places for minimum-wage workers to make ends meet.”
Using their “Living Wage Calculator,” Prof. Amy Glasmeier’s team has created a map of the communities in the U.S. that have the widest gaps between living wages and minimum wages, reports Rob Wile for The Huffington Post.
Boston.com reporter Megan Turchi writes that MIT researchers have developed a map that compares the cost of living and minimum wage for households across the U.S. Prof. Amy Glasmeier explains that one of her goals for the map is to “to inspire policy makers to step up and ensure their wage scales were livable.”
In an article for Bloomberg Business about how poverty can impact brain development in children, John Tozzi highlights research by Prof. John Gabrieli examining how family income can affect academic achievement. "It’s only in the last few years that there’s been any systematic research asking about the biological side of the story," explains Gabrieli.