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MIT has been named one of the top colleges in America in the 2024 Wall Street Journal/College Pulse ranking, report Kevin McAllister and Tom Corrigan for The Wall Street Journal. “The Wall Street Journal/College Pulse ranking emphasizes how much a college improves its students’ chances of graduating on time, and how much it boosts the salaries they earn after graduation,” explain McAllister and Corrigan.
Politico reporter Joanne Kenen spotlights Prof. Adam Berinsky’s new book, “Political Rumors: Why We Accept Misinformation and How to Fight it.” The book “examines attitudes toward both politics and health, both of which are undermined by distrust and misinformation in ways that cause harm to both individuals and society.”
MIT has been named one of America’s Top Colleges in Forbes’ annual roundup, reports Emma Whitford and Janet Novack for Forbes. The annual list “showcases 500 of the finest U.S. colleges, ranked using data on student success, return on investment and alumni influence,” explain Whitford and Novack.
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.”
A new working paper, co-authored by Prof. Jonathan Gruber, explores the impact of the New Co-operative Medical Scheme (NCMS), “a health-insurance plan for rural Chinese that was launched in 2003 and folded into a more comprehensive program in 2013,” reports The Economist. “Though it is perhaps best known for being stingy, the NCMS saved millions of lives,” writes The Economist.
Research by Alden Cheng PhD ‘23 “suggests that big college football games in October 2016 distracted voters from seeing fake news stories that favored Donald Trump,” reports Kevin Lewis for The Boston Globe. “Counties around colleges that played a big game in that month had fewer online searches for pro-Trump fake-news-related terms and had lower percentages of votes for Trump than would otherwise have been expected, given other political demographics,” writes Lewis.
Prof. Nina Roussille has found that “women on average asked for 3.3% less than men for a full-time engineering job, with that gap growing to 6% for women with more experience,” reports Alicia Wallace for CNN. “However, when salary transparency was employed on the site and a median wage was given, the gap closed.”
Prof. Amy Finkelstein speaks with Politico reporters Erin Schumaker, Daniel Payne and Evan Peng about her new book “We’ve Got You Covered: Rebooting American Health Care.” “Health insurance is not delivering on its function,” says Finkelstein. “Over 1 in 10 Americans under 65 are uninsured at any given moment, and of the 30 million Americans who are uninsured, 6 in 10 are eligible for free or heavily discounted health insurance coverage. And yet they don’t have that coverage.”
Prof. Charles Stewart III spoke at the National Conference of State Legislatures Summit and addressed the importance of ensuring state and local governments are adequately funding election administration, reports Jennifer A. Kingson for Axios. Stewart noted that presidential elections cost $2 billion-$5 billion to administer nationally, yet most of the nation's 10,000 local jurisdictions are woefully underfunded.
Prof. David Autor and his colleagues have documented China’s impact on manufacturing jobs in the U.S. after joining the World Trade Organization in 2001, an effect known as the China shock, reports Shawn Donnan for Bloomberg in an article about how manufacturing job losses impacted Rockingham County in North Carolina. “Declining populations of young workers, as well as lower pay, have persisted in Rockingham and other communities hardest hit by this China shock, the researchers found in a 2021 paper,” writes Donnan.
Prof. Adam Berinsky speaks with "Our Body Politic" host Farai Chideya about his new book “Political Rumors: Why We Accept Misinformation and How to Fight it.” Berinksky explains that the, "mere questioning of political reality can have serious downstream consequences because sowing doubt about political policies and claims is much easier than resolving such doubt,” says Berinsky.
Fortune reporter John Singer spotlights Prof. Amy Finkelstein’s new book, “We’ve Got You Covered: Rebooting American Health Care.” The book details “an approach that could potentially transform the multi-dimensional dysfunctionality that is the U.S. healthcare system,” writes Singer.
Prof. David Autor speaks with Delphine Strauss of the Financial Times about the risks AI poses to jobs and job quality, but also the technology’s potential to help rebuild middle-class jobs. “The good case for AI is where it enables people with foundational expertise or judgment to do more expert work with less expertise,” says Autor. He adds, “My hope is that we can use AI to reinstate the value of skills held by people without as high a degree of formal education.”
Prof. Daron Acemoglu speaks with Boston Globe reporters Alex Kantrowitz and Douglas Gorman about how to address the advance of AI in the workplace. “We know from many areas that have rapidly automated that they don’t deliver the types of returns that they promised,” says Acemoglu. “Humans are underrated.”
Prof. Simon Johnson speaks with Reuters reporter Mark John about the impact of AI on the economy. “AI has got a lot of potential – but potential to go either way,” says Johnson. “We are at a fork in the road.”