Fast Company reporter Kristin Toussaint writes about a new study by Prof. David Autor that finds middle class jobs for non-college grads are disappearing, particularly for Black and Latino workers. Autor suggest that higher minimum wages “are surprisingly effective at improving the incomes of workers in low wage jobs,” adding that “they don’t seem to have noticeable adverse effects on employment.”
Prof. David Autor has found opportunities for minority workers in cities have receded, particularly those without college degrees, reports Jonnelle Marte for Reuters. “As the middle hollowed out, (minority workers) were more exposed to middle-skilled work, and net of that, they were also over-represented at the low end and under-represented at the high end,” says Autor.
Bloomberg reporter Peter Coy writes that a new study by Prof. David Autor finds cities are no longer “escalators of opportunity” for people in middle-paying jobs, in particular Black and Latino workers. Coy writes that Autor proposes, “one solution is to raise minimum wages in cities, which would raise the living standards of low-income workers.”
A study by Prof. David Autor finds that cities no longer guarantee middle-wage opportunities for Black and Latino workers, reports Andrew Van Dam for The Washington Post. "Changes in occupational structure, in cities, have been larger and arguably less favorable among Blacks and Hispanics than among whites," says Autor.
Axios reporter Erica Pandey writes that a study by Prof. Thomas Kochan underscores how the Covid-19 pandemic has uncovered longstanding shortcomings in worker power. "The key to going from isolated protests at a place like Amazon or Walmart to a force that’s really going to get the company to respond is the customer," says Kochan."Customers are the hidden source of power for workers."
Prof. Fox Harrell speaks with New York Times reporter Joshua Rothkopf about the educational potential of deepfake technology. “To have the savvy to negotiate a political media landscape where a video could potentially be a deepfake, or a legitimate video could be called a deepfake, I think those are cases people need to be aware of,” says Harrell.
MIT Press and the University of California at Berkeley are launching a journal that will offer peer reviews of Covid-19 research, reports Paul Baskin for Times Higher Education. “We want to align with what the research community is doing and what it wants,” says Amy Brand, director of MIT Press. “But we also want to build in more quality control and more accountability.”
MIT alumna Payal Kadakia speaks with New York Times reporter David Gelles about her startup ClassPass, a platform that allows users to access a myriad of fitness classes. Kadakia explains that she was inspired to attend MIT, as “the curriculum is so mathematical. Everything is numbers. It was this idea of this world that I lived in.”
Profs. Daniel Rothman and Daniela Rus contributed to a Boston Globe piece exploring what the next big moonshot challenge should be. Rothman noted that, “We need to understand how the Earth system responds to environmental change,” while Rus expressed a desire to explore interspecies communication and the development of intelligent clothing.
Writing for The New York Times, research scientists Chelsea Barabas and Karthik Dinakar argue that risk assessment algorithms designed to help predict people’s future criminal behavior are “fundamentally flawed. They give judges recommendations that make future violence seem more predictable and more certain than it actually is. In the process, risk assessments may perpetuate the misconceptions and fears that drive mass incarceration.”
Writing for The Boston Globe, Shirley Leung spotlights the thousands of women who helped make the Apollo 11 mission a success, including Margaret Hamilton and Saydean Zeldin of the MIT Instrumentation Lab. Zeldin, who worked on the program responsible for turning the command module’s engines on and off, recalls that she “had to formulate the equations that we were going to code.”
MIT Solve has launched an innovation fund aimed at attracting funding for social-impact ventures tackling global issues such as access to clean water, reports Eillie Anzilotti for Fast Company. “There’s an increase in focus on these issues in the U.S. and across the world, and there’s definitely increased movement on the political and investment spectrums,” explains Alex Amouyel, executive director of Solve.
Writing for Fortune about the impacts of automation on the labor market, Geoff Colvin highlights Prof. Daron Acemoglu’s research analyzing the historical effects of technology on workers. Colvin explains that Acemoglu and his colleagues found that, “for the first time in modern history, automation isn’t necessarily good for workers overall.”
In an article for The Washington Post, Prof. Kate Brown examines the impacts of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown. Brown notes that the consequences of the accident reached further than initially thought, writing that “the fallout map shows that Chernobyl radioactivity drifted widely across Europe, usually in areas with higher altitudes and precipitation.”
In an article for Wired, Andrew McAfee, cofounder of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy, argues that the increased energy use and pollution associated with new technology is actually offset by the physical concept of dematerialization. “[W]e don’t need to worry that the iPhone and its digital kin are going to gobble up the planet, or even put a big dent in it,” writes McAfee. “In fact, they’re doing the opposite.”