Innovation Hub

The American family is changing in many different ways. But perhaps one of the most significant is that, on average, American women are giving birth later. And birth rates have hit a 30-year low. In the early 1970s, the average age of first-time moms was 21… it’s now 26. The same trend is impacting fathers - their age has gone from 27 to 31 over the same time period. But why did this change happen? And what does it mean for our society, our economy, and our families? To find out, we talked to Caitlin Knowles Myers, an economist at Middlebury College who’s studied female fertility, and Claire Cain Miller, a correspondent for the New York Times who’s written extensively about the topic.

We constantly hear that technology is killing opportunities in the workplace. But reports by the World Economic Forum and Deloitte have shown that automation is creating — and will continue to create — millions of jobs in fields like sales, IT services, and big data. But to really know how tech is affecting our lives, experts like Daniel Theobald and Melissa Flagg say we need to focus less on the 30,000-foot view of the industry and more on what is going on at the ground level. We talk to Theobald, Vecna Robotics’ co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer as well as Flagg, the Northeast regional lead at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, about how we should be taking a ground-up approach to America’s technological development.

In the 1990s, most of the world’s medicines were manufactured in the United States, Europe and Japan. Today, almost 80% of them come from China. In her book, “China Rx: Exposing The Risks Of America’s Dependence On China For Medicine,” Rosemary Gibson says that China is becoming the world’s pharmacy, but that development, she argues, comes with many risks.

Experiences of mental illness are common in the United States and behind each individual case is a history. In his book, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry, Randolph Nesse, the director of the Center for Evolution and Medicine at Arizona State University, looks at emotional and mental disorders from an evolutionary perspective, and considers why natural selection left us with fragile minds.

Older, wiser and perhaps healthier? It may sound too good to be true, but Sue Armstrong, author of Borrowed Time: The Science of How and Why We Age, says that growing older doesn’t have to lead to infirmity. Science is finding ways to intervene in the aging process, and to improve the quality of our later years. After all, some organisms on Earth live for centuries, so there may be good models for rethinking and easing the process of getting older. Armstrong says that while there’s no magic elixir for aging, there is a more hopeful future ahead.

Should you be the best at one skill, or be pretty good at a bunch of different ones? David Epstein, the author of Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, says that practicing one skill for 10,000 hours (as some have suggested) might not necessarily set you up to be the next Tiger Woods or the next chess grandmaster. But in a world where we’re constantly encountering new experiences, Epstein believes that the ability to take knowledge from one situation and apply it to another, to generalize, is what really pushes us ahead.

How would you describe your childhood? Did your parents have a laissez faire attitude, letting you run wild and free, or did they have more rigid rules, which dictated your life choices?

Perhaps you’re now a parent yourself — which parenting approach have you chosen?

Matthias Doepke, a professor of economics at Northwestern University, argues that we often assume that parenting is all about culture, and that the reason that those from different countries or backgrounds parent differently is specifically because of those backgrounds (varied religious, political, and geographical traditions). But, Doepke argues, economics is a far more significant driver of parenting. He’s the co-author of “Love, Money and Parenting - How Economics Explains the Way We Raise Our Kids,” and he tells us how income inequality largely shapes how we raise our children.

When it comes to children’s books I’m certain you’ll find

There’s really one name that jumps first to mind

That name as I’m sure you’ll deduce

Could only belong to one Dr. Seuss

And so we take a look

At biographer Brian Jay Jones’ new book

All about that good doctor’s work and creations,

And it’s called “Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel And The Making of An American Imagination”.

Politics in the United States has long been dominated by two main groups – the Republicans and the Democrats – but, in recent decades, we’ve seen increasing divisiveness and conflict. Voters have become less concerned with what government does, and more interested in politicians they believe represent who they are.

Lilliana Mason, assistant professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, and Marc Hetherington, professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina, discuss what happens when politics gets personal. And they consider the consequences for our democracy.

Traffic is awful. It causes pollution, it makes people stressed, it costs cities and drivers billions of dollars… and if you’ve ever sat in a car, inching along a packed highway, you understand the toll it takes. So, how do we fix it? According to UCLA’s Michael Manville, there are a lot of proposed solutions, but only one - yes, one - really works.