More News from IWER

For years, the conventional wisdom about young workers has been: Gen Z doesn't want a traditional career. They'd rather freelance, day-trade, chase side hustles, and treat a 9-to-5 as a relic that their parents clung to. Professor Emeritus Paul Osterman has spent decades testing that kind of assumption against hard labor-market data, and in his new book "Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment," he says the evidence points in the opposite direction. "Is that rhetoric really reflected in the attitudes of younger people?" Osterman asked. "The evidence is that it's absolutely not."

The price of the tokens by which corporates pay frontier labs for AI usage has been falling dramatically for months now. For research affiliate Paul Kedrosky, token pricing represents "the first hyperdeflationary commodity in the history of modern economies" because, whether or not they come into contact with other parts of the economy, "they do huge damage to it," causing price deflation. With these falling token prices, Kedrosky calculates that frontier model companies must achieve 400% annual unit growth "just to stand still financially," he said.

Principal research scientist Andrew McAfee said: "If you can't successfully address the fundamental fact of Moore's Law — the rule that the number of transistors on silicon chips doubles every 18 to 24 months — you're just not going to be around for long. The business model that we developed for running a company in the 20th century doesn't work in the digital, hardware, software, or networking industries."

Kevin M. Warsh made his first appearance as the Federal Reserve's chairman at its annual conference in Jackson, Wyoming. "He was very clear: He is not telling us what he's doing at the next meeting," said professor Kristin Forbes. Still, Ms. Forbes conceded that Mr. Warsh was in a "tricky situation" as he contends with the market's reactions.

Senior lecturer Phil Budden said organizations can get lost in the excitement over the latest version of generative or agentic AI technology and "forget what's going on in the background. It turns out that the fancy AI model at the top of the stack is based on data stored in some traditional data centers, and it matters where those data centers are," Budden said. "If you have a data center in the Emirates and somebody starts a war in the Gulf, that may become a target."

In his new book, "No One Works Here," senior lecturer Paul Cheek urges managers and business leaders to think twice before throwing a roadblock into the flow of what could be very efficient automation. "The companies that are most likely to fall behind their peers are the ones that insist on keeping a human in the loop for decisions that a machine could have made yesterday," he wrote.

US corporate profits have hit a record high while workers' slice of the pie has sunk to historic lows, fueling discontent among many Americans and a growing political backlash. "There's been, for several decades, a shift in the balance of power from labor to capital in the US," said assistant professor Anna Stansbury. "It seems unlikely that what's happening now can be used to infer a big secular shift in power beyond the ongoing steady trend that we've been seeing for a long time," she added.

Research scientist Martin Fleming wrote: "The stability and cooperation of the U.S.-China relationship should start with the recognition that the twin national giants will remain competitors, partners, and each other's customers. In short, these global leaders will have to learn to live together. As is the case with most technology firms, this triple-sided relationship is necessary to reduce risk and increase stability."

A study led by professor Abdullah Almaatouq mapped self-reported friendship ties in several datasets. In one network of 84 adults, 53 percent of 775 nominated ties were reciprocal. In other words, both people identified each other as friends. Does that mean half of all friendships are fake? No, but it showed something interesting. People often assume a friendship is mutual when the other person may define it differently.

"If we don't receive the imports from Canada, we have to switch on more expensive plants. We could get the power from those more expensive plants, but we would then be increasing our CO2 emissions in addition to paying higher costs," said senior lecturer John Parsons. Parsons noted that this electricity could be more expensive because it runs on gas, which, unlike renewable power, would require the purchase of fuel.