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Faculty Viewpoints

  • Video: Why You Should Care about Antitrust

    We asked Prof. Fiona Scott Morton, former chief economist for the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division and the founder of the Thurman Arnold Project at Yale, to explain why antitrust violations are bad for consumers and how the government can respond.

    An illustration of a man in top hat stealing coins from birds
  • Rational Order from ‘Irrational’ Actions

    Prof. Shyam Sunder outlines a strain of research, drawing on complexity theory, that suggests that outcomes of a social system can be rational even if its individual participants are not rational.

    A crowd of people.
  • Getting Corporate Diversity Programs Wrong

    Yale SOM leadership expert Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, who studied a previous wave of diversity initiatives, describes how such well-intentioned initiatives can go awry—and how to get them back on track.

    Protests sparked by the arrest of two Black men at a Starbucks location in Philadelphia in April 2018. Photo: Bastiaan Slabbers/NurPhoto via Getty Images.
  • In Defense of (Mathematical) Models

    Epidemiological models have played an influential role in governments’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Yale SOM’s Edieal Pinker takes a look back at one of the most influential models and argues that such rigorous efforts at understanding the likely course of the disease, while imperfect, are critical to good decision making.

    A chart of ICU occupancy under various scenarios from Imperial College London
  • What’s the Path to Equity in Health?

    We talked to Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, a Yale internist and an expert on the structural barriers to equitable treatment and health outcomes for people of color and other vulnerable populations.

    Doctors gathered around an x-ray on a computer screen
  • Seeking Scalable Solutions to Poverty

    Prof. Mushfiq Mobarak describes the arc of his research on scalable, evidence-based policy responses to poverty and how existing research tools have been applied to fight COVID.

    Garment workers demonstrating in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on September 20, 2020. Photo: Mamunur Rashid/NurPhoto via Getty Images.
  • On COVID-19 Vaccines, Big Pharma Knows to Just Say ‘No’

    In the face of pressure from President Donald Trump, nine major pharmaceutical companies have signed a pledge to complete testing before submitting vaccines for approval. Yale's Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Dr. Albert Ko write that the drugmakers’ caution may help provide badly needed confidence in the eventual vaccine.

    Moncef Slaoui, lead scientist on Operation Warp Speed, with President Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar at a press conference on vaccine development in May 2020. Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images.
  • Rethinking Police Organizations

    Prof. Rodrigo Canales has spent his career investigating how to transform the institutions that shape our lives. Effective police reform, he says, begins with shifting the focus from deterring crime to helping the whole community feel safe.

    Mexican police officers greeting a family
  • Holding Up a Mirror to the First Global Stock Bubble

    Yale SOM’s William Goetzmann, an expert in art and finance history, showed us satirical prints documenting the first global stock bubble, three centuries ago.

    An 18th-century print of a crowded street
  • Can Government Contain the Economic Crisis?

    Prof. Andrew Metrick, director of the Yale Program on Financial Stability, says that fighting a crisis is different from economic policymaking in normal times; governments need to be exceptionally generous and not get bogged down in stringent processes that keep money from getting to those in need.

    Closed businesses in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in August 2020. Photo: Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images.