Threats to lifelong mental health can arise for young children from sources including poverty, abuse or neglect at home, and racism, inequity, and pollution outside their doors, but the hopeful message that a range of experts brought to MIT on May 11 was that amid these many risks, approaches to provide effective protections and remedies […]
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The World Bank said on Tuesday that the global economy remained in a “precarious state” and warned of sluggish growth this year and next as rising interest rates slow consumer spending and business investment, and threaten the stability of the financial system. The bank’s tepid forecasts in its latest Global Economic Prospects report highlight the […]
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FREETOWN, Sierra Leone — One of the misimpressions people have about the world is that it’s going to hell. Perhaps that’s because humanity’s great triumph over the last half-century — huge reductions in poverty, disease and early death — goes largely unacknowledged. Just about the worst thing that can happen to anyone is to lose […]
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This is the second in the series “How America Heals” in which Nicholas Kristof is examining the interwoven crises devastating parts of America and exploring paths to recovery. .g-goldbergseriesinfo{ position: relative; display: flex; overflow: hidden; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 1.125rem 1.25rem 1.0625rem; border: 1px solid var(–color-stroke-quaternary,#DFDFDF); color: var(–color-content-secondary,#363636); max-width: 600px; margin: 1.3125rem auto 1.5rem; width: 100%; […]
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Why It Matters: Poverty is a big killer. In 2019, more than 8 percent of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty, subsisting on less than $2.15 per day, and about half the world on less than $6.85 per day. Poverty has insidious effects on housing stability, education, health and life expectancy. The pandemic drove […]
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José Echeverría pasa días de inquietud en una silla de metal reforzada con tablas y acolchada con un trozo de espuma que su madre, Nohora Vásquez, ajusta constantemente para que esté cómodo. La silla se está aflojando y pronto se caerá a pedazos. La enfermedad de Huntington, que ocasiona que José mueva la cabeza y […]
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José Echeverría spends restless days in a metal chair reinforced with boards and padded with a piece of foam that his mother, Nohora Vásquez, adjusts constantly for his comfort. The chair is coming loose and will soon fall apart. Huntington’s disease, which causes José to move his head and limbs uncontrollably, has already left one […]
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Seen from outside Washington, the debt ceiling battle might seem like an abstract argument between the political parties over federal spending and deficits. But for millions of low-income Americans who depend on the federal government for health care and basic nutrition, the debate is about their very lives. That’s because Republicans have singled them out, […]
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A computational tool developed by researchers at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change pinpoints specific counties within the United States that are particularly vulnerable to economic distress resulting from a transition from fossil fuels to low-carbon energy sources. By combining county-level data on employment in fossil fuel (oil, natural […]
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A heartbreaking video of a retiree that showed what groceries she could buy with 100 yuan, or $14.50 — roughly her monthly pension and sole source of income — went viral on the Chinese internet. The video was deleted. A singer vented the widespread frustration among young, educated Chinese about their dire finances and gloomy […]
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“Thai women can fight in Europe and different countries,” Muay Thai promoter Sombat Thaosuwan told VICE World News. “They are being promoted and are winning millions or tens of millions of baht in prize money. So stadiums in Thailand are changing their rules to be more contemporary with international standards.” But leniency around women’s fights […]
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J-PAL North America, a regional office of MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), has announced six new partnerships with government agencies and leading nonprofits through the State and Local Evaluation Incubator and the Housing Stability Evaluation Incubator, launched in August 2022. These collaborators span the contiguous United States and represent a wide range of […]
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When it comes to growing food, some of the smallest farmers in the world are becoming some of the most creative farmers in the world. Like Judith Harry and her neighbors, they are sowing pigeon peas to shade their soils from a hotter, more scorching sun. They are planting vetiver grass to keep floodwaters at […]
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Participating in an intensive three-week lab in Yucatán, Mexico, changed how MIT junior Penelope Herrero-Marques views her role as an engineer. The January trip was the first step in a new partnership between MIT D-Lab and Perkins School for the Blind, a Massachusetts-based national service provider and international nonprofit that strives to make education accessible […]
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On April 3, community advocates from around the U.S. who work in long-term care gathered with members of the MIT community to discuss ways to increase equity in the industry for care workers, families, and the elderly. With its impassioned attendees and emphasis on workers’ well-being, the meeting felt more like a grassroots strategizing session […]
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NASHVILLE — Jacqueline Acevedo is a shy seventh grader who spends long hours at the Baptist church where her father serves as a volunteer pastor after earning a scant wage from his day job selling bread. Gabriel Garcia is a talkative 10-year-old whose mother is a chemist but drives for Uber and whose father squeezes […]
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Mel King, an adjunct professor emeritus in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) and renowned activist, community leader, and politician, passed away on March 28 at the age of 94. Through his teaching, ideas, and the institutions he created at MIT, King profoundly influenced DUSP and its community members, who showcase the love […]
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Throughout the pandemic, millions of Americans on Medicaid have been shielded from losing health care coverage. Medicaid provides health coverage for low-income Americans; for the past three years, states suspended their typical process of redetermining whether someone remained eligible for coverage. States must now reverify that every Medicaid recipient still qualifies for the program within […]
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When Congolese doctor Denis Mukwege won a share of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018, Milain Fayulu SM ’22 was filled with pride in his home country. He eagerly set an alarm from Miami to wake up in the early hours and watch Mukwege’s speech in Norway. In the speech, Mukwege discussed his experience caring […]
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The number of homeless people in Australia is rising. More than 122,000 Australians were homeless on Census night in August 2021, up from 116,000 people counted in the previous Census in 2016. The data, released last week, was collected during COVID-19 lockdowns, in the most populated parts of the country, when state governments figured out […]
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GREENWOOD, Miss. — Since its opening in a converted wood-frame mansion 117 years ago, Greenwood Leflore Hospital had become a medical hub for this part of Mississippi’s fertile but impoverished Delta, with 208 beds, an intensive-care unit, a string of walk-in clinics and a modern brick-and-glass building. But on a recent weekday, it counted just […]
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Over the last two decades, technology companies and policymakers warned of a “digital divide” in which poor children could fall behind their more affluent peers without equal access to technology. Today, with widespread internet access and smartphone ownership, the gap has narrowed sharply. But with less fanfare a different division has appeared: Across the country, […]
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They come by foot and by boat. Desperate, many bring nothing more than the clothes on their backs. They seek asylum and hope. Since 2015, more than a million refugees have flooded into Greece. Syrians, Afghanis, Iraqis, and Kurds, they’ve been uprooted from their home countries by violence and oppression. Political gridlock traps them in […]
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Haruko Wainwright, the Norman C. Rasmussen Career Development Professor in Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) and assistant professor in civil and environmental engineering at MIT, grew up in rural Japan, where many nuclear facilities are located. She remembers worrying about the facilities as a child. Wainwright was only 6 at the time of the Chernobyl […]
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Even though Flavio Emilio Vila Skrzypek left his native country of Peru to study at MIT, you can tell immediately that his homeland is close to his heart. Vila, who is pursuing a master’s in city planning, has made it his mission to improve land-use policy back home. “Property policies in Peru should learn from […]
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In the weeks since Vincenzo Luciano pulled a dozen bodies from the rough sea in southern Italy, he has kept a careful eye on the beach, now strewn with jackets and sneakers, for the missing son of a shipwreck survivor he promised to help find. On Wednesday, Mr. Luciano, a 50-year-old fisherman, watched from a […]
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If we apply the legal scholar John A. Powell’s “targeted universalism” approach to eradicating poverty — an approach that involves setting a goal and recognizing that certain groups will need distinctive interventions for that goal to be met — then our attitude toward different antipoverty policies should be “both and.” We don’t need new solutions […]
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Gratitude should lead us to make sure that older Americans can live comfortably in retirement. Solicitude should lead us to do so in ways that do not needlessly leave the next generation less prosperous than it could be. Those should be the terms of our debates about Social Security and Medicare. And they would clearly […]
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As a theory of poverty, “exploitation” elicits a muddled response, causing us to think of course and but, no in the same instant. The word carries a moral charge, but social scientists have a fairly coolheaded way to measure exploitation: When we are underpaid relative to the value of what we produce, we experience labor […]
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As their currency plunged to new lows recently, Iranians did what they had grown all too used to: They crowded exchange shops, hoping to convert their increasingly worthless rials into dollars. At the grocery store, prices had climbed so high that many people had only enough to buy vegetables. And as the Persian New Year […]
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For many years, the Indonesian government’s food aid program sent bags of rice to villages, where local leaders were supposed to distribute them to poor residents every month. But starting about five years ago, Indonesia changed that. Instead of rice bags, the poor were sent debit cards to buy the equivalent amount of food at […]
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