Experience Faculty & Research

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...

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...

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...

This month, the Business Roundtable, a group comprising the CEO’s of America’s largest and most powerful corporations, formally abandoned the view that maximizing shareholder value should be a company’s primary objective. The implication is that shareholders will no longer always take precedence over other stakeholders such as customers, employees, suppliers, and the communities in which firms operate. In its statement justifying the move, the organization cites the need to pay fair wages, provide more benefits, and invest in training to help employees navigate a rapidly changing economy. Read More...

There are three negative supply shocks that could trigger a global recession by 2020. All of them reflect political factors affecting international relations, two involve China, and the United States is at the center of each. Moreover, none of them is amenable to the traditional tools of countercyclical macroeconomic policy. Read More...

The Business Roundtable this week released a statement announcing a new focus on creating value for all stakeholders, not just shareholders. But what does it mean, and how can the 200 executives who signed the statement follow through? What do Bechtel Group, American Express, Chubb, Target, Carlyle Group, JPMorgan and Tishman Speyer have in common? Their CEOs were just six of the nearly 200 executives who signed the Business Roundtable’s new “Statement on the Purpose of the Corporation,” taking out a full two-page ad in the Wall Street Journal on August 19 to explain the need to move on from the idea that “corporations exist principally to serve their shareholders.” As a customer or an employee of a company, we have all at one time or another experienced the challenge of feeling that the company is putting profits before customer experience or employee benefits or the community. Read More...

Why it’s not as easy to see as you might think, and how you can make everyday changes to reduce your plastic use. This spring I was on a cruise off Bermuda, some 650-plus miles off the mainland United States. The sea was azure—the color of the sky on a clear blue day. The water was crystal clear other than a few golden strands of sargassum seaweed. I was on the boat with an intrepid group of major plastic producers and users (Dow Chemical, Clorox, Nestlé Waters, Coca-Cola), nonprofit organizations (Greenpeace, WWF), social entrepreneurs, investors, funders and academics like me. We were gathered by SoulBuffalo, our host, to experience the ocean plastics challenge firsthand and to use our time confined together at sea to determine what we might do about it. And there was horror lurking beneath. Read More...

Something is going badly wrong for American teenagers, as we can see in the statistics on depression, anxiety, and suicide. Something is going very wrong on many college campuses, as we can see in the rise in efforts to disinvite or shout down visiting speakers, and in changing norms about speech, including a recent tendency to evaluate speech in terms of safety and danger. This new culture of “safetyism” is bad for students and bad for universities. Read More...