More News from IWER

Associate dean Christopher Knittel and visiting professor Gilbert E Metcalf wrote: "If the goal is to make drivers pay for the roads they use, the right unit of taxation is not vehicle ownership. It is miles driven. A household that drives an electric vehicle 3,000 miles a year does not impose the same road-use burden as one that drives 20,000 miles a year. A flat annual fee treats them as if they do. That is not a user fee. It is a registration surcharge."

"A charter makes it easier for you to support customers and provide new services," said research scientist Christian Catalini. He said World Liberty Financial represents part of a backlog of crypto companies seeking to operate as banks and now getting approved under the Trump administration. "Being regulated as a bank is not a joke. I think in the long run this is going to be a net benefit for society," he said.

A recent study by professor Jackson G. Lu and co-authors found that people from lower social-class backgrounds are less likely to negotiate for workplace benefits, and they tend to face harsher social penalties when they decide to ask for more. This negotiation gap acts as a double bind that can compound economic disadvantages over a person's career. Remaining silent perpetuates financial struggles, but speaking up exposes lower-class workers to professional backlash.

A preprint study by senior lecturer Robert Nachtrieb and co-author claims that electricity consumption for AI has grown at a rate of 12.7% per year since 2015, and has accelerated to 15% in the last five years. In 2024, AI accounted for just 1.5% of global electricity consumption. If the 15% curve is maintained, it would reach parity with the rest of the world's consumption combined around 2050.

o help people make quick decisions after discovering a tick on them, two local women, Erin Dawicki and Michelle Ewy (both Sloan Fellows: MBA '24), teamed up to create an at-home test kit for Lyme disease. "The faster you treat it, the easier it is to treat and have complete resolution of symptoms for a lot of people," said Dawicki. "This is about accessibility and putting the power into people's own hands, to be able to have information about the tick they just pulled off of themselves, a child or a dog," said Ewy.

Senior lecturer Otto Scharmer wrote: "We live in a time where the three divides — ecological, social, and spiritual — remind us that this is a time of strong shadows, of rupture and fracture. A time that invites us to cultivate our inner sources of knowing and becoming."

Institute Professor Daron Acemoglu wrote: "As the college educated have become politically more powerful, they have also diverged further from the less educated in their geographic locations and their social lives, reducing their ability to empathize with the latter's problems and creating a major cultural rift between the two groups. In the process, a coalition between different segments of the college-educated and the tech sector has formed. I would argue this coalition has completely turned its back on the economic priorities of the less educated and has come to focus on cultural and global issues."

China has continued to suppress domestic consumption, with the goal of maximizing industrial output in strategic and low-value sectors alike. The result is what professor Yasheng Huang calls an "absolute advantage" economy: a country that competes simultaneously with the United States when it comes to artificial intelligence, electric vehicles, and electronics, and with the poorest nations in Africa when it comes to the manufacture of textiles, apparel, and household baubles.

In this podcast episode, distinguished senior lecturer Robert Pozen said that investors with significant savings should eschew classic 60-40 diversification strategies for a mix that is almost entirely stocks, with no bonds at all. "The upside over the long term is tremendous for being 90-10 rather than 60-40. You ought to figure out what you really need from your investment portfolio for living expenses, and the rest going to 90-10; otherwise, you're giving up a tremendous amount of the upside," he said

Institute Professor Daron Acemoglu's new book "What Happened to Liberal Democracy?" addresses fundamental questions. What is liberalism? Why is it so precious? Why is it internally conflicted? What has made it endangered? Above all, how are we to save it?