Capital
Capital, broadly viewed, drives modern life. Pioneering political economist Adam Smith defined four types of capital: useful machines, buildings, land improvements, and human capital. A few centuries later, human capital is much more than productive labor—it is knowledge embodied in people, the powerhouse of the service economy. Yet financial capital continues to fix value on Smith's physical assets, such as buildings and land, as well as on less tangible entities like venture capital or education. Social or political capital lies in the connections within and around social networks and the collective will to act. Capital is also British slang for great. Capital!
Human Capital
Photo: ©iStockphoto.com/Dan Tero
Avoid labor carnage
A down economy is not automatically a reason to lay off staff, according to the MIT Sloan Review article, "The Hidden Leverage of Human Capital." If the goal is to build long-term value, employees and their stock of productive skills and technical knowledge should be nurtured.
Harnessing India's human capital
The MIT International Review article, "Harnessing India's Human Capital through Educational Opportunities" urges action to address India's education crisis—millions of children are out of school and learning outcomes are poor in the government schools most students attend.
Honoring HR
Human resources offices do not always get respect, but that's a mistake, according to the Sloan Review Business Insight article on HR and human capital. In fact, most companies say they value human capital, but few do a good job of supporting talented staff in their careers. The summary outlines three steps to improvement.
MIT Press: Capital and Language (2008)
By Christian Marazzi
The cognitive capitalism argument states that the changes in financial markets and the transformation of labor into immaterial labor (i.e. abstract knowledge, general intellect, and social cooperation) are interconnected.
OpenCourseWare
Marathon Moral Reasoning Laboratory
Is it permissible to take one human life in order to save others? Test your moral balance on the list of sample moral dilemmas.Organizing for Innovative Product Development
Documents how creative ideas originate and how people are rewarded for technical and managerial success, focusing on the value of human capital and technology transfer.Economics of Education
Learn about basic human capital theory, the growing impact of education on earnings and earnings inequality, and how school accountability and state standards impact individuals.
Investment in Public Goods
MIT World: History of Boston Transportation, 1630-1990
Fred Salvucci, an influential transportation expert, describes how Boston became a site of transportation innovation—including railroads founded to transport diverse goods—through accidents and bursts of investment.
Energy Investments
Growing alternative energies
Massachusetts can reap benefits from clean energy investments, said Governor Deval Patrick in an Earth Day talk on campus. Clean energy has the potential to be an economic bonanza for the Commonwealth while improving the planet's well-being.Solar energy study funded
Thanks to a $10 million gift from the Chesonis Family Foundation, the MIT Energy Initiative is launching the MIT Future of Solar Energy Study, the third in a series of faculty-led explorations of key energy technologies. The project will assess direct solar energy technologies, review engineering and manufacturing options, and make recommendations for industry development.MIT's touts campus conservation
MIT has seeded new campus energy conservation investments with $500,000. A Campus Energy Task Force, established to develop an integrated strategy and program of action, establishes the campus as a learning laboratory to demonstrate how to sharply reduce energy use and greenhouse-gas emissions.
Investments for budding entrepreneurs
Business plans focused on harnessing clean energy and making fast, inexpensive medical diagnostic devices were big winners in a series of high-profile entrepreneurship competitions at MIT. Diagnostics for All, which makes a simple medical test kit out of paper for the developing world, won MIT's 100K Entrepreneurship Competition. FloDesign Wind Turbine won the inaugural $200,000 MIT Clean Energy Entrepreneurship Prize.
Learn about technology licensing
The MIT Technology Licensing Office enables staff and students to obtain capital investment to transform research discoveries into real-world solutions. Review the statistics on annual productivity, read success stories, and learn about common issues in the FAQs.
What helps the developing world?
Professor Esther Duflo PhD '99 applies economic principles to the developed world's well-intentioned capital investments in the developing world. Her research helps reveal what works and what does not. Recent papers include "What is Middle Class about the Middle Classes around the World?" (PDF) and "Use of Randomization in the Evaluation of Development Effectiveness" (PDF).
OpenCourseWare: Challenge of World Poverty
This course examines the problems posed by massive and persistent world poverty, particularly the causes of variable economic growth rates and endemic corruption.
Track real estate news
Find out what's happening in the real estate market on the MIT Center for Real Estate research news page. CRE Professor Bill Wheaton cites brighter news ahead in a recent Wall Street Journal article, a view supported by CRE's MIT commercial property price index.
Are you ready for IPO?
The MIT Enterprise Forum, which offers educational programs through 24 worldwide chapters, posts podcasts of global broadcasts. Watch Are You Ready for IPO? or check out MIT's entrepreneurial resources.
Alumni in Capital
Venture capitalist launches superyacht
Tom Perkins '53, whose venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers (KPCB) has made more than 475 investments, generated $90 billion in revenue, and created 275,000 jobs, is now making new waves with his superyacht.Entrepreneur cofounded first Asian IT venture capital firm
Hanson Cheah '88, SM '89, a global entrepreneur based in Hong Kong, helped pioneer the Silicon Valley way of investing in Asia by cofounding AsiaTech Ventures with James Yao '89.Federal Reserve Role Shapes Everyday Economics
As COO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Sally Green SM '78 oversees more than $4 trillion dollars a day in transactions.John Thain '77 Addresses Sloan Convocation
Between serving as CEO of Goldman Sachs then Merrill Lynch, Thain is credited with revolutionizing the New York Stock Exchange. Get his perspective on management in his Sloan Convocation keynote.Digital Communications Inventor Began in Sputnik Era
Now an investor in start-ups, Andrew Viterbi '56, SM '57 developed the Viterbi Algorithm, a decoding procedure with applications to innumerable digital communication devices, and he and colleagues including Irwin Jacobs SM '57, ScD '59 started Qualcomm, a leading digital wireless communications firm.
What's Quick Take?
A bimonthly feature created by the MIT Alumni Association relating contemporary topics to personal life, work, and MIT culture. View the archive.
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Cities
Rome
Glimpse the future of urban mapmaking with the launch of Wiki City Rome, a SENSEable City Lab project that uses data from cell phones and other wireless technology to illustrate the city's pulse in real time.
Jerusalem
The Just Jerusalem Competition recently named four winners who will come to MIT to discuss how their projects can help future residents of Jerusalem live in peace.
Beijing
Learn about architecture graduate student Tracy Wharton's China experience and see Beijing Urban Design Studio designs that may shape China's great cities.
New Delhi
The fast-growing Indian city of Delhi faces a major problem—the monkey menace, the growing population of aggressive non-human residents, writes Ninad Pandit in the Writing Cities blog.
Washington DC
MIT established a Washington office in 1991 to maintain a continuous flow of information between MIT and the federal government. Visit MIT's DC office Web site to download the 85–page MIT Briefing Book or check the status of appropriations before Congress.
New century cities
The Center for Real Estate, Urban Studies and Planning department, and Media Lab have developed seven case studies for New Century Cities that are livable, technologically savvy, and mix public and private development.
OpenCourseWare: City to City
This practical workshop challenges students to research, write, and present their comparisons of a U.S. city and Copenhagen. Enjoy the lecture notes and image gallery.
Pictured perfect
View photos of Paris, Tokyo, Rome, London, and Budapest taken by Associate Professor of Computer Science Manolis Kellis '99, MNG '99, PhD '03.
Send comments and questions to:
quicktake@mit.edu
Residents of Italy's capital are glimpsing the future of urban mapmaking with the MIT-developed Wiki City Rome project, which uses data from cellphones and other wireless technology to illustrate the city's real-time pulse. Find links at left. Photo: ©iStockphoto.com/Gabor Izso.
Intellectual Capital
Sloan Podcasts
Love that math
Professor Arnie Barnett PhD '73 finds safety in numbers. As an aviation safety expert, he extends his passion for math to help conquer his own fear of flying by recalling statistics on crash probability. He shares his ideas for a new approach to the Electoral College and his constant vigilance against skewed statistics.Accountability is power
Activism is an obligation, according to Bruce Gordon SM '88, former president and CEO of the NAACP and longtime telecom executive. In a talk to MIT Sloan students, Gordon said the executive suite is an under-utilized source of power for social change. He urged students to 'Think about your individual capacity to effect change.'Leading through communications
Professor JoAnne Yates is bringing her expertise on organizational communications to Sloan's leadership team as deputy dean. She's also taking on a new challenge—diversity. Yates has made advancing gender equity a priority that will help expose students to a wide range of viewpoints.
We are smarter than me
The MIT Communications Forum looks at Collective Intelligence embodied in evolving information systems such as Wikipedia, how body language and voice tone impact collective communication, and how decentralized groups, such as the open-source software community, can out-innovate centralized organizations.
Institute Learning
Read about research
New Office articles and multimedia offerings profile research breakthroughs and education innovations every day. Read about new work, choose a favorite topic, or sign up for RSS feeds including one for the MIT News Wrap, a biweekly audio digest, updated every other Monday.OpenCourseWare cubed
MIT's own OCW has spawned a new universe of intellectual capital—the OCW Consortium. This powerful idea of free knowledge means you can study Faith and the African-American Experience at Notre Dame, introductory anatomy from UC Berkeley, or Offshore Hydromechanics at Delft University in the Netherlands.Brain sciences connection
Cognet hosts news, information, and multimedia content related to brain sciences, including on-demand video, audio and visual footage, and podcasts. Learn about topics such as the architecture of memory at this site founded in 2000 by the MIT Press.
MIT Press: Journey to Data Quality
By Yang W. Lee PhD '88, Leo L. Pipino, James D. Funk, and Richard Y. Wang
Discusses the challenges of developing a systematic way to keep information in databases timely, accurate, and relevant and offers different approaches for assessing data, both subjectively by users and objectively using sampling and other techniques.
Political & Social Capital
Calling for policy change
Boosting support for basic science and engineering is a critical step toward a viable energy future, according to one politician willing to spend some of his own political capital on energy. U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-NM, told an MIT audience in April that a lack of consistent policies and long-term consensus has hamstrung federal efforts.
Driving development
What type of business has the best opportunity to further growth in developing countries? Among the common choices—POES (privately owned national firms), FOES (foreign-owned enterprises), or SOES (state-owned enterprises), Professor Alice Amsden says POES are the most entrepreneurial and creative.
Honoring MIT@Lawrence
MIT was recently named to the President's Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll for exemplary service to disadvantaged youth for the success of the MIT@Lawrence project. The Department of Urban Studies and Planning founded this long-term partnership between the Institute and a network of community organizations.
Spending spring break in Ghana
Sloan MBA student Malaika Thorne's blog entry documents the impact of a spring trip to Ghana for an upfront view of the economic and cultural challenges and promise of sub-Saharan Africa. Learn more about this International Management seminar organized by the MIT Sloan Africa Business Club.
OpenCourseWare: Civil Society, Social Capital, and the State in Comparative Perspective
The extensive reading list explores social networks and community norms and their impact on social welfare, political stability, economic development, and governmental performance.
Understanding cultural dynamics
Find out how cultural anthropology learns how people understand and act in the world. In this short film, Doing Anthropology, three members of MIT's Anthropology Department talk about their current work and the process of doing fieldwork.
Competition funds service learning
The Public Service Center's 7th annual MIT IDEAS Competition, which helps fund projects that help others, honored a Braille writing device, a wheelchair that can transverse rough terrain, and a Wii game designed to help stroke patients recover.
MIT is 'In The World'
In The World, an MIT News Office column, illustrates how people from MIT are using technology—from the appropriately simple to the cutting-edge—to help meet the needs of local people in places around the planet.
Journalism peer reviewed
Journalists and readers alike can get professional views of current new stories in the Knight Science Journalism Tracker. Blog entries peer-review science, environmental, and health and medicine stories as well as comment on journalism itself.
Mining social reality
One of Technology Review's 2008 ten technologies to watch was Reality Mining, a concept developed in Professor Sandy Pentland's lab about collecting data from common devices like cell phones to connect and simplify lives. Watch videos of his work using technology tools to improve social capital in areas such as social networks, pervasive computing, and developing nations.
Campus Improvements
Buildings going up
MIT's Evolving Campus set of buildings completed in the early 2000s included award winners such as the Stata Center and Simmons Hall. Now, a new set of buildings is rising including the Koch Institute and the Sloan School expansion.
Tree-moving day
Two mature pin oaks moved down Main Street from their original location in front of the Dibner building to make an instant garden at E32. Watch the slide show that documents how the Department of Facilities prepared, moved, and replaced the trees with care (PDF). The capital investment of moving the two trees was about half the cost of one new tree.
Boost your FSILG space
Learn how to raise money for capital improvements at your fraternity, sorority, independent living group (FSILG). The FSILG Fundraising Guide, created by the MIT Alumni Association, will get you started. And don't forget the Independent Residence Development Fund (IRDF), which provides low-interest loans for capital improvements and renovations for FSILGs.
