Have I ever mentioned the MIT econ. Mafia?*
From New Atlas, November 22:
Self service supermarket checkouts: a perfect example of a type of automation that does nothing much for overall productivity, but directly drives the income equality gap wider by taking money from less educated workers and funneling it up towards business owners
The gap in wages between the most- and least-educated US citizens has risen sharply in the last 40-odd years, and new research out of MIT finds that more than half of this disparity can be attributed to a single factor: automation. This bodes poorly.
The gross domestic product value of the USA has risen from US$6.82 trillion in 1980 to more than $20 trillion in 2022. But with nearly three times the pie to go around, not everyone's ended up with more on their plate.
According to MIT Economist David Autor, things have been radically different in the last 40 years than they were in the period between 1963 and 1972, when "wages rose robustly and evenly among all education by gender groups."
While real wages have risen nicely for the postgraduate-educated since 1980, American men without high school degrees were making 15% less in 2016 than they did in 1980, adjusted for inflation. The story is similar in the UK and Germany....
Over the years Professor Shiller has also picked up some tchotchkes, including an Econ. Nobel.
The Cowles connection probably has more utility and a few other folks have thought so as well.
In addition to Shiller several other Cowles associates have won Nobel prizes for research done while at the Cowles Commission.
These include Tjalling Koopmans, Kenneth Arrow, Gerard Debreu, James Tobin, Franco Modigliani, Herbert Simon, Lawrence Klein, Trygve Haavelmo and Harry Markowitz".
From 2015:
Paul Krugman and the MIT Economics Gang
Here's Professor Krugman with a very similar title, via Economists View (bolding=mine):
Paul Krugman: The M.I.T. Gang
The MIT school of economics:
The M.I.T. Gang, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times:
Goodbye, Chicago boys. Hello, M.I.T. gang....MORE
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, the term “Chicago boys” was originally used to refer to Latin American economists, trained at the University of Chicago, who took radical free-market ideology back to their home countries. The influence of these economists was part of a broader phenomenon: The 1970s and 1980s were an era of ascendancy for laissez-faire economic ideas and the Chicago school...
But that was a long time ago. Now a different school is in the ascendant, and deservedly so.
It’s actually surprising how little media attention has been given to the dominance of M.I.T.-trained economists in policy positions and policy discourse. But it’s quite remarkable. Ben Bernanke has an M.I.T. Ph.D.; so do Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, and Olivier Blanchard, the enormously influential chief economist of the International Monetary Fund. Mr. Blanchard is retiring, but his replacement, Maurice Obstfeld, is another M.I.T. guy — and another student of Stanley Fischer, who taught at M.I.T. for many years and is now the Fed’s vice chairman. ...
M.I.T.-trained economists, especially Ph.D.s from the 1970s, play an outsized role ... in policy discussion across the Western world. And yes, I’m part of the same gang.
So what distinguishes M.I.T. economics, and why does it matter? ...
At M.I.T..., Keynes never went away. To be sure, stagflation showed that there were limits to what policy can do. But students continued to learn about the imperfections of markets and the role that monetary and fiscal policy can play in boosting a depressed economy....
