Experience Faculty & Research

On December 10, the United Nations will mark the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In an era of spreading nationalism and gross violations in places like Yemen, Myanmar, South Sudan and Venezuela, it is fair to ask whether the Universal Declaration and the global human rights movement have improved the human condition.  And given these contemporary challenges, there’s the further question of where we go from here. Read More...

This past May and August, escalations in the trade and technology conflict between the US and China rattled stock markets and pushed bond yields to historic lows. But that was then: since then, financial markets have once again become giddy. US and other equities are trending towards new highs, and there is even talk of a potential “melt-up” in equity values. The financial-market buzz has seized on the possibility of a “reflation trade”, in the hope that the recent global slowdown will be followed in 2020 by accelerating growth and firmer inflation (which helps profits and risky assets). Read More...

This past weekend several dozen journalists and activists from around the world convened in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Under the auspices of an organization called the Social Change Initiative, on whose board I sit, they came together to discuss the crisis facing news gathering and dissemination in deeply divided societies.  All of our societies seem deeply divided these days, and the declining role of newspapers as messengers of truth is an important factor. As in the U.S., newspapers in the UK and Ireland are struggling financially, upended by the disruption of an advertising model that is no longer sustainable. And as the news media decline around the world, online platforms take their place with few, if any, of the important journalistic checks to ensure truth. Read More...

So you need a little retail therapy. Time for a new suit, dress or leather jacket? Want to make your fashion a conversation starter? Read More...

A cloud of gloom hovered over the International Monetary Fund’s annual meeting this month. With the global economy experiencing a synchronised slowdown, any number of tail risks could bring on an outright recession. Among other things, investors and economic policymakers must worry about a renewed escalation in the Sino-American trade and technology war. A military conflict between the US and Iran would be felt globally. The same could be true of “hard” Brexit by the UK or a collision between the IMF and Argentina’s incoming Peronist government. Read More...

Proposals for a broad tax on wealth are not new, but they are receiving renewed attention in the United States. Steadily increasing income and wealth inequality has raised social and ethical concerns, even among a subset of the wealthy. This trend, along with declining social mobility, is contributing to political polarization, which in turn leads to poor and erratic policy choices. And we know from history that rising inequality and intensifying social and political polarization can lead to more dramatic and even violent outcomes.  Read More...

They are 50 against Google and 9 against Facebook. The New York prosecutor is leading the charge against Facebook with 8 of her colleagues and  the Texas attorney has opened an investigation against Google with almost every state, but without California, where Google's headquarters is located. Read More...

Today three Senators — Democratic Sens. Mark Warner (Va.) and Richard Blumenthal (Conn.), along with Republican Sen. Josh Hawley (Mo.) — are introducing a bi-partisan bill designed to increase competition between digital platforms. The bill is called the Augmenting Compatibility and Competition by Enabling Service Switching (ACCESS) Act. Axios has the story here. You can read the actual bill here. Read More...

Next week marks the 50th anniversary of the Nobel Prize in Economics, as it has come to be known. It was first awarded in 1969 by the Swedish central bank as an addendum to the other, much older, Nobel prizes (and is correctly known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel). This upstart status subtracts nothing from the esteem, or cash, accorded to the laureates. The latest winner, or winners, will be announced Monday. Read More...

Social media inflames tribalism and makes democracy more difficult and unstable in many ways. To name just a few: It accelerates the movement of citizens into informational bubbles and then poisons those bubbles with inflammatory stories and videos; it undermines trust in institutions and in fellow citizens; it allows violent ideologies to ferment and recruit; it opens a door for easy manipulation by America’s foreign enemies. Read More...

In a recent opinion piece in The Washington Post, Alex Karp, the chief executive of a data-analysis company called Palantir, warns that when Silicon Valley executives “try to impose their moral framework on America, something has gone seriously and dangerously awry.” Public policy decisions, he adds, need to be made by “elected representatives and judges, not by unelected engineers running global businesses.” But Karp fails to acknowledge that companies like Palantir decide with whom they do business and have an obligation to address the harmful consequences of their business relationships. This responsibility rests not only on tech companies but on all corporations. Read More...

YouTube has a serious problem with disinformation, but the company’s senior leadership continues to wish it away. A recent blog post by YouTube’s CEO, Susan Wojcicki, exemplifies the problem. Wojcicki celebrates the many ways the company adds value to society while sidestepping it’s most difficult challenges. Not least among these challenges is the manipulation of video images on the YouTube platform to advance various political agendas. Read More...

Here’s another reason why health care costs so much—massive amounts of waste and energy use. An example: Flu season is coming up and health care workers are required to get a flu shot, generally by colleagues using single-use gloves. A medical facility with 30,000 employees that requires everyone to be vaccinated using gloves would release over three metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions if landfilled, and six metric tons if incinerated. (Each pair of gloves weighs 33 grams, totaling nearly one metric ton of gloves).  Read More...

Back in the day, the internal combustion engine in the automobile solved many problems—including what to do with all the horse manure that was piling up. Not incidentally, it also transported people more quickly and reliably to where they wanted to go. Today, we have a bigger problem—what to do with the greenhouse gas emissions piling up. And, not incidentally, we also have an interest in being transported in a more comfortable, customizable way that ultimately allows us to transform our cars into our living room or our office. Read More...

Although the method chosen by the Indian government of removing Article 370 has been unfortunate, seven decades of reality suggest that it did not work, and if anything, was regressive from a development standpoint. Democratic methods, including all-party delegations, interlocutors, and negotiations with Pakistan to stem the tide of militancy in Kashmir, have not worked either. India had two choices: To try something new or let the situation fester indefinitely. Read More...