Government

Senior Lecturer Luis Videgaray speaks with Government Technology reporter Nikki Davidson about concerns facing emerging AI programs and initiatives. Videgaray underscores the importance of finding vendors, "who are willing to protect the data in a way that is appropriate and also provides the state or local government agency with the required degree of transparency about the workings of the model, the data that was used for training and how that data will interact with the data supplied by the customer.”

Prof. Jonathan Gruber, MIT Innovation Fellow Brian Deese and Stanford doctoral student Ryan Cummings write for The New York Times about the health benefits of new weight-loss drugs and the risk they pose to American taxpayers. “The magnitude of potential benefit and potential cost — roughly $15,000 per year per person — posed by these drugs suggests that policymakers may have no alternative but to step in and bring their costs in line with their social benefits,” they write. “If policymakers succeed in doing so, we could build a model for drug price negotiation that enables an extraordinary medical breakthrough to improve both our health and our fiscal position.”

Writing for the Financial Times, Prof. Kristin Forbes delves into her new study examining how quantitative tightening (QT) programs impact markets. “QT programs have, so far, been working as central banks intended,” Forbes writes. “At the same time, they have provided a small degree of support for central banks’ efforts to tighten financial conditions, with minimal impact on market functioning and liquidity. QT has worked in the opposite direction to quantitative easing, but the effects are much, much more muted.”

Los Angeles Times reporter Gustavo Arellano spotlights Democratic Senator Alex Padilla ’94 and his political career in California. Padilla “realized the only way to make things better for the Valley’s growing Latino community, in an era of anti-immigrant sentiment across California, was to elect politicians who looked like them,” writes Arellano.

Prof. Jon Gruber speaks with GBH hosts Jim Braude and Margery Eagan about the impact of political corruption on economics worldwide. The United States “has an incredibly dedicated, professionalized civil government,” says Gruber. “People go into government and spend much of their careers serving really the public good.”

Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have provided an analysis of the successes and shortcomings of President Biden’s climate bill, reports Brad Plumer for The New York Times. The report says “the biggest obstacles facing renewable electricity are logistical,” writes Plumer. “Wind and solar are facing lengthy waits to connect the nation’s clogged electric grids, and it can take a decade or more to get permits for new high-voltage transmission lines and build them.”

Axios reporter Courtenay Brown spotlights a new report by researchers from MIT and the Brookings Institute that finds poorer counties in the U.S. with lower employment rates have, “attracted a large share of the hundreds of billions of dollars allocated for clean energy projects, semiconductor mega-factories and more.” Brian Deese, an Innovation Fellow at MIT, explains that: “Distressed communities are attracting new clean energy and semiconductor investment at roughly twice the rate of traditional private investment. If this trend continues, it has the potential to change the economic geography of the country and create economic opportunity in parts of this country that too many people have written off in the past.”  

Reuters reporter Timothy Appell spotlights a new study by researchers from MIT and the Brookings Institution that finds, “a surge of factory building fueled by Biden administration investments in ‘strategic sectors’ such as clean energy and semiconductors has so far flowed disproportionately to U.S. counties with relatively distressed economies and notably has not tracked ‘Democratic geography.’”

Prof. Ernest Moniz and his colleagues have designed a new consortium that plans to create an organized market for hydrogen, reports Llewellyn King for Forbes. This will allow hydrogen to become “a viable option in the pursuit of net-zero emissions,” writes King.

New York Times reporter Ana Swanson spotlights a working paper co-authored by Prof. David Autor which suggests “the sweeping tariffs that former President Donald J. Trump imposed on China and other American trading partners were simultaneously a political success and an economic failure.” Autor and his colleagues found that “the aggregate effect on U.S. jobs of the three measures — the original tariffs, retaliatory tariffs and subsidies granted to farmers — were ‘at best a wash, and it may have been mildly negative.’”

A more than $40 million investment to add advanced nano-fabrication equipment and capabilities to MIT.nano will significantly expand the center’s nanofabrication capabilities, reports Jon Chesto for The Boston Globe. The new equipment, which will also be available to scientists outside MIT, will allow “startups and students access to wafer-making equipment used by larger companies. These tools will allow its researchers to make prototypes of an array of microelectronic devices.”

Prof. Emeritus Henry Jacoby writes for The Hill about the potential impact of the 2024 presidential election on climate change. “Laissez-faire, ‘do nothing’ climate policy is a recipe for present and future climate and societal harm,” Jacoby writes. “The climate system will not magically self-repair if we continue to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.”

New York Times opinion writer Peter Coy spotlights the MIT Shaping the Future of Work Initiative, a new effort aimed at analyzing the forces that are eroding job quality for non-college workers and identifying ways to move the economy onto a more equitable trajectory. Nothing is “inexorable,” said Prof. Daron Acemoglu during the project’s kickoff event. “The answer in most cases is, AI will do whatever we choose it to do.”

Writing for The Boston Globe, Prof. Gang Chen emphasizes the harm caused by the “China Initiative.” Chen notes that “some initiatives by the government, such as the China Initiative and the National Institutes of Health’s investigation into academics’ collaborations with China, weaken rather than strengthen US national security. American scientific prowess has been built on the United States’ ability to attract the best and the brightest minds from around the world.” He adds that the China Initiative has been deterring scientists from pursuing their research and careers in the United States.”

MIT irradiation facilities engineer Andriy Tuz and Prof. Jacopo Buongiorno speak with Jennifer Hiller of the Wall Street Journal about Tuz’s path from Ukraine to MIT. Tuz joined the Institute “through the U.S. government’s Uniting for Ukraine program, which provides a way for Ukrainian citizens displaced by the war to stay temporarily in the U.S.,” writes Hiller.