Norbert Wiener was at MIT legend. He taught at the Institute for a long time (after getting his PhD from Harvard at age 17), where he epitomized the absent-minded professor. Of the legion of perhaps-apocryphal stories about him, my favorite was related by fellow mathematician Howard Eves,

When he and his family moved to a new house a few blocks away,...

An interesting article by James R. Hagerty in the Journal yesterday tells how lots of manufacturers, including Raytheon, GE, and Harley are installing tons of gear to monitor every element of their processes, from the speed of fans in a paint booth to the number of...

A couple months back I drew a graph of the employment rate, workforce participation rate, and employment-to-population ratio and argued that the unemployment rate was going down not because people were going back to work in huge numbers, but instead because they were dropping out of the labor force. I said:

The simplest and, I believe, best explanation for what’s going on here is that the US...

A couple recent articles, one in the WSJ by Dennis Berman and one in the NYT by Eduardo Porter, have raised the question of why all the amazing technologies we have these days aren’t showing up more strongly in the productivity and GDP...

Hi everyone,

The only thing I can personally say about the bomb attacks yesterday is that they were LOUD. I was in a cab at Huntington Avenue and Exeter St. when they went off. They sounded too loud to be benign, and sure enough...

Imagine a world where the robots did all the work.  They tend the crops, sew the clothes, cook the food, drive the trucks, and work on all the assembly lines in all the world’s factories.

In this world, everything would be a lot cheaper because labor costs would drop to zero. In fact, there’d be a startling abundance of stuff. And people would be freed up to do things other than work. We could use our time to explore, create, perform, craft, mingle, and so on because we wouldn’...

If you want to see the difference between sophisticated and unsophisticated thinking and writing about technology’s effects on the workforce, look no further than two recent posts, both from the conservative side of the house.

First is a March 25 piece by Luca Gattoni-Celli called “Steve Kroft: Philistine,” the...

We’re running a 99designs contest to help us design the logo for MIT Sloan’s new Initiative on the Digital Economy, and need your feedback. If you’ve got a minute today, please take our poll:

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