Corruption, lobbying, corporate malfeasance, and frauds: a weekly unconventional selection of must-read articles by investigative journalist Bethany McLean
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The Harvard Admission Lawsuit Decision Does Not Answer the Main Question: What Are Top Universities For?
A judge ruled this month that Harvard does not discriminate against Asian-American applicants, according to its own criteria. But what kind of students do those criteria select? Kate Waldock and Luigi Zingales discuss the Harvard case in a new episode of Capitalisn’t.
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The Humbling of Mark Zuckerberg
Zuckerberg’s Congressional testimony this week illustrated just how much Facebook’s top brass still underestimate the public anger against the company. Congress, however, is still too focused on publicly berating Facebook instead of actually regulating it.
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Vertical Media Mergers Are a Serious Threat to Freedom of Speech
Antitrust regulators should stop mergers where a firm owning the means of transmission acquires a provider of content. The people that own the pipes shouldn’t also own the water. As the Supreme Court stated in 1945, “Freedom to publish is guaranteed by the Constitution, but freedom to combine to keep others from publishing is not.”
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If Journalists Want to Save Journalism, They Should Stop Asking Google for Money
A new report claims Google has been using its Google News Initiative to stage a “media takeover” and reveals the increasing influence of the company on newsrooms.
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How Economic Concentration and Crony Capitalism Led to the Chaos in Chile
The signals of unrest in Chile mounted for years amid corruption scandals, rising inequality, and new monopolies. The fare increase on public transport that sparked the protests was only the final straw.
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How the “Watergate Babies” Released the Beast of Monopoly Upon America
Why did Washington respond to the 2008 financial crisis by pushing even more wealth and power into the hands of the same people that caused it? The answer is partly rooted in the legacy of the angry young Democrats who entered Congress in the wake of the Watergate scandal and unwittingly loosened the chains of concentrated corporate power.
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Banning Noncompete Agreements Benefits Low-Wage Workers
Examining the effects of a 2008 ban on noncompete agreements for low-wage workers in Oregon, a recent paper finds that the ban increased average hourly workers’ wages by up to 6 percent.
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Companies Are More Effective Than the White House in Stopping Whistleblowers
Harvard Business School professor Eugene Soltes tested the “integrity hotlines” companies are supposed to have to let employees report misconduct. In many cases, they do not work or do not protect whistleblowers’ anonymity, despite Sarbanes-Oxley prescriptions.
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The Lousy Job Economy: Young People Bear the Brunt of a Long-Term Decline in American Job Quality
A new study finds a steady decline in the quality of American jobs between 1979 to 2017, even as GDP has grown. This decline has been particularly severe for young workers and catastrophic for young workers without a college degree.
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Fighting Poverty With Field Experiments: the Nobel Laureates’ Revolution
As a student, Harvard Business School professor Vincent Pons decided to become an economist after a project in Morocco with Esther Duflo. The co-recipient of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics popularized a new research method based on scientific rigor but also human contact and listening.
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Esther Duflo: How to Find the Right Questions
In this piece, originally published in 2011 by the American Economic Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession, Esther Duflo, co-recipient of the 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, reflects on her academic career.
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