Political and business media, pundits, and experts continue to cite prediction market odds as a credible forecast for the upcoming presidential election, regularly pointing to betting odds on prediction markets such as Polymarket, Kalshi, PredictIt, and Interactive Brokers as a guide to who is up and down in the horse race—but that is a big mistake. It appears few journalists, pundits and experts have dug deep into how these prediction…
If you’ve ever been bothered by the feeling that your friends have more robust social lives than you do, you’re not alone. Lots of people feel that way, and, mostly, they—and you—are right. For decades, social scientists have recognized what’s known as the friendship paradox, which says that on average, the friends of any given individual have more friends than the individual does. But even if the phenomenon isn’t good…
It is difficult to find any similarities between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in this heated electoral race. But there is one area in which there is a surprising amount of agreement: the need for the federal government to play an active role in encouraging investment in U.S. manufacturing. This bipartisan consensus reflects a growing trend among economists and experts, who are now revising the unfettered free-trade and laissez-faire attitudes…
This commentary originally appeared in Time. Just as the elimination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah a month ago catalyzed new opportunities for Mideast peace, the death of long-elusive Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar Thursday turbocharges the transformation of the Middle East towards a more secure and prosperous future. To appreciate the possibilities, it is vital to understand the significance of the Sinwar as a leader. There should be no doubt that…
Learning through experience requires us to shift from the purely intellectual to a more holistic engagement. I try to create that shift by opening each of my leadership classes with some form of art—a poem, a piece of music or a visual work. It’s a way of helping my students, many of whom are management or law students, executives, or leaders in their fields, step out of their typical "brain-bound"…
Let’s say that two entrepreneurs, a man and a woman, co-found a startup and raise venture capital. But the business struggles, and they shut it down and go their separate ways. Eventually, each of them independently forms a new business. Do these entrepreneurs have the same chance of getting venture capital funding for a second time? The answer is no, according to Yale SOM’s Heather Tookes, whose new research uses…
Conservatives often say that social media platforms are biased against their point of view. What did your research into the 2020 election find about whether that was true? Our research found that accounts sharing pro-Trump or conservative hashtags were suspended at a significantly higher rate than those sharing pro-Biden or liberal hashtags—they were about 4.4 times more likely to be suspended. At face value, this pattern could be interpreted as…
Current Topics menu All Topics menu Departments menu Collection No. 9 Two decades into the era of private space flight, companies are establishing ventures in low-earth orbit, sending private citizens into space, and pursuing exploration and development on the moon and beyond. We talked to Yale alumni and other leaders about how finance, law, and other day-to-day details of business get translated into space. Published October 15, 2024 Assembling an…
The brewing proxy fight between activist Starboard Value and pharmaceutical giant Pfizer has already taken a hostile turn. Anonymous sources have been disparagingly suggesting that Pfizer CEO Dr. Albert Bourla should be removed. After news reports suggested they initially sided with the activists, former Pfizer CEO Ian Read and former CFO Frank D’Amelio switched sides, abandoning their erstwhile Starboard allies and expressing their support for Bourla. Then, Starboard Value founder…
As we transition from “The Great Resignation” of 2022 to what might be called “The Great Layoff” of 2024, many companies are grappling with the challenge of reducing their workforce. While no layoff process can fully eliminate the associated pain, there are strategies to handle it with greater compassion and respect. Take Airbnb’s approach in 2020, for instance. Faced with the pandemic’s impact on the travel industry, CEO Brian Chesky…
This commentary was adapted from episode 145 of the Health & Veritas podcast. Trachoma is a disease I am certain I learned about in medical school and probably forgot sometime after I took part three of my boards in 1990. Why? Because it doesn’t occur in the United States—or at least rarely enough that I would never see it as a student or intern—and it is not a disease that…
Q: What is space law right now and what developments can we anticipate? Space law is a very underdeveloped field of international law. That’s understandable because until recently, activities in space were quite limited and primarily state led. The boom in commercial space companies and the plans by a number of nations to establish bases on the moon will necessarily lead to filling in the gaps, because the main legal…
Q: What questions have guided your career? The question I began with was, “What drives inequality in society?” Early projects led me to believe that the way organizations structure themselves and manage their employment relationships has a significant impact on why some people get ahead and some people don’t. At the time, organizations were getting essentially no attention from scholars interested in inequality, so it was an area where I…
How do different emotions impact everyday life? And what are the kinds of experiences we want and need—in the classroom, at work, and in our own developmental trajectories—to be able to deepen our emotional wisdom so we can make better decisions and have healthier relationships? In this episode of Learning Through Experience, we dig deep into feelings with Dr. Marc Brackett. As he underscored during our conversation, “We all have…
Harlan Krumholz: Welcome to Health & Veritas. I’m Harlan Krumholz. Howard Forman: And I’m Howie Forman. We’re physicians and professors at Yale University. We’re trying to get closer to the truth about health and healthcare. This is a very, very special episode. It’s our nation’s surgeon general—and our alum—joining us today for the second time for this very special episode of Health & Veritas podcast. Harlan Krumholz: Howie, I’m really…
Following her latest economic policy speech, Vice President Kamala Harris and Stephanie Ruhle discussed Harris’s economic plan, including her controversial pledge to pass a new federal law against price gouging. When pressed on how this matches her belief in the capitalist system, the vice president responded, “I am never going to apologize for going after companies and corporations that take advantage of the desperation of the American people.” Most states,…
In July, student protests in Bangladesh grew violent when the country’s longtime and increasingly autocratic prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, initiated an aggressive crackdown that killed hundreds of demonstrators. This brutality caused what had started as discontent about unemployment among the country’s most educated young people to bloom into a wider movement against inequality, corruption, and antidemocratic leadership. In the early days of August, protestors defied curfews and internet shutdowns to…
Harlan Krumholz: Howie, it’s great to see you, and welcome to Health & Veritas. Howard Forman: You’re Harlan Krumholz. Harlan Krumholz: And you’re Howie Forman. And we’re sitting together today. Howard Forman: Exactly. We’re in the studio. We’re physicians and professors at Yale University. We’re trying to get closer to the truth about health and healthcare. This is one of our periodic episodes without a guest, and there is so…
This commentary was adapted from episode 142 of the Health & Veritas podcast. Polio is back in the news, again. Over two years ago, we talked about a serious polio threat in the New York area, when one person developed paralytic poliomyelitis and wastewater detected the virus in several adjoining and nearby counties. Less than 1% of all infections result in paralytic polio; when we see wastewater evidence of polio,…
At our Yale CEO Caucus last week, we surveyed approximately 60 top CEOs in attendance on a broad range of economic issues. While our anonymous straw poll was informal and unscientific, the results suggest that CEOs are increasingly and broadly optimistic about the economy—in fact, much more bullish than just about any other group in the nation. The CEOs we surveyed are surprised by the strength of their views, as…
As a young finance scholar, one of the first topics Professor James Choi tackled was how automatic enrollment in retirement plans affects Americans’ saving. Two decades ago, putting employees into a 401(k) by default, rather than requiring them to proactively opt in, was a novel idea. Choi and his collaborators found that this small nudge yielded significant effects: at one company they studied, automatic enrollment increased 401(k) participation rates by…
This commentary was adapted from episode 141 of the Health & Veritas podcast. H5N1 remains a major public health story, even if the press rarely covers it. We have had a concerning outbreak of H5N1 bird flu, also known as highly pathogenic avian influenza, since early this year. When I last gave an update in June, I mentioned that 10 farm workers, 100 million poultry, and 168 dairy herds had…
How can we overcome change and learn to create a better experience at work—for ourselves and our teams? To launch us into Season Three of Learning Through Experience, my first guest explores with me the pedagogy of hope and transformation, focusing on interpersonal and group dynamics. As Dr. Lisa Lahey aptly put it during our conversation, “When we invest in our relationships and our own development, we pave the way…
Welcome to a new season of Learning Through Experience! This season will echo the cadence and pedagogy of one of my popular courses here at Yale. My conversations are with brilliant guests who help us think about how we learn through interpersonal and group dynamics. This podcast is not just for students though—it’s for everyone who wants to co-create a future of work that is compelling, enlivening and worth fighting…
Howie and Harlan are joined by Ania Jastreboff, a Yale endocrinologist and an expert on obesity medication, to talk about the remarkable range of diseases treated by drugs like Ozempic, Mounjaro, and Wegovy. Harlan discusses new Apple devices with the ability to detect sleep apnea and aid in hearing; Howie reports on outbreaks of polio in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Gaza. Links: Apple and Health “FDA clears Apple’s sleep apnea detection…
There’s a reason charity advertisements often revolve around a specific person: an upsetting picture or story is more likely to elicit donations than are statistics or depictions of a group’s collective plight. Psychologists refer to our tendency to open our hearts and wallets wider for specific people than we do for generalized ones as the “identifiable victim effect.” Yale SOM’s Deborah Small, who studies the areas where consumer choice, moral…
This commentary originally appeared in Fortune. The news that the International Monetary Fund will become the first major international financial body to officially return to Russia since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 underscores the systemic pro-authoritarian impulses of the IMF and its tolerance to blunt violations of international law by Russia under its current managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, who needs to be replaced urgently. With the U.S. presidential…
Harlan Krumholz: Howie, we’re back. Welcome to Health & Veritas. I’m Harlan Krumholz. Howard Forman: And I’m Howie Forman. We’re physicians and professors at Yale University, and we’re trying to get closer to the truth about health and healthcare. Our guest today is Dr. Margaret, or Peg, McGovern, but first we like to check in on current or hot topics in health and healthcare. And for our listeners, it’s worth…
For decades, the Business Roundtable, a professional association and lobbying organization formed by CEOs from many of the largest companies in the United States, asserted that companies exist to create value for shareholders. So, it was noteworthy when, in 2019, the leaders of 181 companies signed onto the organization’s revised “Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation” that committed to creating value for all stakeholders. Recently, leaders of the Yale…
Joan Tabachnick ’86 has worked in the field of child sexual abuse prevention for more than 30 years and developed widely used educational tools and programs. She serves on the advisory council of Stop It Now, and recently retired as the executive director of MASOC—the Massachusetts Society for a World Free of Sexual Harm by Youth. Q: What do people need to understand about child sexual abuse? For many years,…
This commentary originally appeared in Fortune. Writing in the journal Public Opinion 1951, Yale researchers Carl Hovland and Walter Weiss labeled their postwar studies on the trick of persuasive messaging regardless of the truth as “the sleeper effect.” They found that a message lingers through repetition, even if factually unfounded. Now just days away from the historic debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, the Harris…
How bad is housing affordability in the U.S.? Is it actually a crisis? There are many ways to define housing affordability, but common indicators point to much higher costs of both owning and renting than what we have seen since pre-COVID times. Average home prices grew more than twice as fast as average incomes between 2020 and 2023. This is an historically unprecedented rise in the U.S. home price-to-income ratio.…
Q: How do workplaces navigate this moment of intense, divided politics? It may be wise to pay attention to, “What do we want to create?” We may be better off focusing on how we talk to each other rather than what we say. A little bit less about content and a little bit more about process. In that circumstance, advocating for colleagues to take on your political position might not…
The Fed is expected to cut interest rates in September. What does your research say about whether borrowers should wait to take out a loan? Our research shows that many people make the mistake of waiting to take out a mortgage or other long-term loan if the Fed is expected to lower interest rates in the future. By waiting, people hope to secure a lower interest rate on a long-term…
This commentary originally appeared in Fortune. As presidential campaigns race to the close, the electorate moves past gauzy themes and adversarial finger-pointing, which tell us little about candidates’ plans, to examine differences in goals and policies. Previously, we analyzed the paradoxical positions of Donald Trump’s pro-business, laissez-faire, global burden-sharing presumptions—and the realities of the contrasting MAGA-Marxist pronouncements they conceal: record fiscal deficits, interventionist and politically motivated attacks on companies, threats…
Few people like to consider themselves followers, but when it comes to evaluating goods, services, and even our own colleagues, it turns out many of us are. That matters because collective evaluation processes—whether a restaurant’s ratings on Yelp or performance reviews at work—can play a significant role in sinking or launching a product, service, or someone’s career. New research from Yale SOM’s Tristan Botelho shows how the design of evaluation…
This essay was originally published on TIME. The rousing performances by Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor Tim Walz, along with the Obamas, the Clintons, Oprah, and many others, at the Democratic National Convention marked a pivotal moment in the 2024 presidential election. Now that both political parties have formally introduced their candidates to America and voters steadily begin to turn their attention to the election, the Democratic and Republican…
Q: What does it feel like to be launched into space? It’s noisy. There’s so much shaking. But what you really feel is pressure. With the weight of the solid rocket fuel plus all the hydrogen and oxygen, you move slowly off the pad. Relatively slowly, I mean—you’re going a hundred miles an hour when you clear the tower, but then you keep going faster and faster. You’re strapped tight…
This commentary originally appeared in Fortune. Starbucks became a global brand as strong as the likes of McDonalds, Coke, Pepsi, Google, Apple, and Levi Strauss in a record time—but its value as an enterprise has been plummeting in recent years. So, the man who built the brand, Howard Schultz, intervened even though he no longer held any official position in management or on the board. Schultz remains the largest shareholder—and…
This commentary originally appeared in Time. Having studied leadership across sectors for nearly a half century, I’ve found that power sharing at the top is often harder than delegation and execution down the hierarchy of command. Leadership partnerships across sectors that work well have a secret recipe—which Kamala Harris seemed to understand but which Donald Trump seems to have missed, given their recent selections of running mate. Barack Obama and…