Three years after President L. Rafael Reif delivered an “intellectual call to arms” to examine the impact of technology on jobs, the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future has published its final set of recommendations. “In an extraordinarily comprehensive effort, they included labor market analysis, field studies and policy suggestions for changes in skills-training programs, the tax code, labor laws and minimum-wage rates,” writes Steve Lohr for The New York Times.
In a piece exploring why certain countries experience wealth or poverty, The Economist spotlights Prof. Daron Acemoglu’s book, “The Narrow Corridor,” and recent research by Acemoglu and Prof. Simon Johnson. The Economist notes that Acemoglu and Johnnson “found a further element of randomness which may explain contemporary patterns of wealth and poverty—namely, which countries are more prone to certain diseases.”
A new working paper by MIT researchers details how the use of a universal basic income (UBI) helped people in Kenya with difficult economic situations, writes Kelsey Piper for Vox. The researchers found that the UBI provided “income benefits in good times and then stability benefits during bad times,” says Prof. Tavneet Suri.
MIT Profs. Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo as well as Prof. Michael Kremer of Harvard, who won this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics, will donate their $916,000 in prize money to the Weiss Fund for Research in Development Economics. “The donations will fund research grants that support the work of development economists and students through 2035,” reports Abbi Matheson for The Boston Globe.
Speaking with Bloomberg’s Rafaela Lindeberg, Prof. Abhijit Banerjee suggests that the U.S. must increase taxes in order to fight poverty more effectively. “If you actually want to deal with poverty, happiness and anger in the U.S., the government will need to have more resources,” says Banerjee. “I’m quite comfortable saying that, yes, taxes have to be raised.”
Prof. Esther Duflo speaks with Molly Wood, host of the Marketplace Tech podcast, about the ways in which she uses artificial intelligence to enhance her poverty research. Machine learning allows researchers to pinpoint “where the program is the most effective, and therefore where a government with limited budget would want to expand it,” explains Duflo.
Profs. Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo speak with PBS NewsHour’s Paul Solman about their use of randomized control trials to address global poverty. “[T]hat's what the Duflo/Banerjee research is all about, trying to reduce the guesswork of economic development policy by seeing what seems to work, and what doesn't, at least in its current form,” explains Solman.
Graduate student Shekhar Chandra cites the work of Prof. Elfatih Eltahir in an article for CNN about the rising temperatures in India. “Experts at MIT say that even if the world succeeds in cutting carbon emissions, limiting the predicted rise in average global temperatures, parts of India will become so hot they will test the limits of human survivability,” writes Chandra.
A preliminary report by MIT researchers examines how subway subsidies affect the rates of MBTA ridership among low-income residents, reports Crystal Haynes for Boston 25 News. “Researchers also found low-income riders took more trips to health care and social services than they would without the subsidized Charlie Card,” Haynes explains.
Prof. Amy Glasmeier speaks with New York Times reporter Eric Ravenscraft about the Living Wage Calculator, which uses specific data to estimate the cost of living in different areas of the country. “The question is, can you live on a minimum wage? And the answer is basically, no,” explains Glasmeier.
Writing for The New York Times, graduate student Lucy Page examines how many people are still living in extreme poverty in middle-income countries such as China, India and Nigeria. “Governments are often slow to redistribute income to the poor for two main reasons: problems of capacity and problems of will,” Page and her co-author explain.
Fortune cites the work of Prof. Esther Duflo in their special report on the shrinking middle class and what can be done to fix it. “Duflo has shaken up the economics world with a radical premise: Aid programs should be tested and evaluated with the same rigor as prescription drugs, through randomized controlled trials.”
In an article for The New York Times about the most effective ways to supply aid to impoverished populations in developing countries, Marc Gunther highlights GiveDirectly, a nonprofit co-founded by graduate students from MIT and Harvard. Gunther explains that GiveDirectly aims to “reshape international giving by using cash as a kind of ‘index fund’ of development against which actively managed interventions can be measured.”
Profs. Abhijit Banerjee and Benjamin Olken speak with NPR’s Jason Beaubien about their efforts to improve Indonesia’s Raskin, or Rice for the Poor, program. "There's a certain tendency among both social scientists and policymakers to assume that the solution to a complex problem has to be complex,” says Banerjee, “and I don't think that's always true."
BBC reporter Dave Edmonds speaks to Prof. Esther Duflo, co-founder of J-PAL, about her use of field studies and randomized control trials to test the effectiveness of programs in developing countries. Duflo explains that by examining data from randomized control trials, “out of the noise emerges some kind of melody of the logic of behavior.”