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After President Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, economists and statisticians across the board were horrified. Because the firing raises the spectre of potential manipulation—and it raises the worry that, in the future, the numbers won't be as trustworthy. Professor Alberto Cavallo joins this episode to looked at two countries that have some experience with data manipulation. To ask what happens when governments get tempted to cook the books. And...once they cook the books... how hard is it to UN-cook them?

“It started to become a huge mess,” said Alberto Cavallo, an Argentine economist teaching at Harvard University who created a website that tracked inflation based on publicly available prices to fill the void left by Indec. Users bombarded him with all sorts of questions over email, like how much to adjust settlement payments to an ex after a divorce. “The examples add up, and you end up realizing how important some of these statistics are,” he said.

“There are essentially three parties who can end up bearing the cost of tariffs,” says economist Alberto Cavallo, head of the Pricing Lab at Harvard Business School. “It could be foreign exporters, it could be the US firms that are bringing those goods into the US, or it could be US consumers.”

The group of former Intel board members— Charlene Barshefsky, Reed Hundt, James Plummer, and David Yoffie—pointed out that the company is on its fourth CEO in seven years with little improvement in results. They argued that only a dramatic break could restore Intel’s competitiveness and protect U.S. national security interests, with a rescue plan focused specifically on emancipating Intel’s “Foundry” business, the manufacturing assets from which Intel produces semiconductor chips for its own products and for third-party customers.

A little over five years ago, the Trump administration announced Operation Warp Speed to deliver a vaccine for COVID-19. It was one of the most stunning successes of Trump’s first term. Recognizing a crisis, the U.S. government facilitated a public-private partnership that likely saved millions of lives in record time. Now we must do it again. As a country, we have a strategic imperative to win in artificial intelligence and secure our supply chains for critical technologies, including communications, computing, and advanced military systems. Time is of the essence. Yet the Administration’s plans for AI and self-sufficiency are in serious jeopardy unless we have American-owned, leading-edge chip manufacturing plants on American soil.

Professor Christina Wing joins this episode to unpack why most family offices are structurally flawed—and what to do about it. Christina shares insights from advising dozens of families and training hundreds of HBS students from Gen 1, Gen 2, and beyond.

Alberto Cavallo, a professor at Harvard Business School who is tracking prices at four major retailers, found that prices of imported goods are up around 3% since tariffs started rising. Prices of household goods, furniture and electronics have risen especially quickly.

And while inflation was fairly modest, prices were still going up, just at a gentle rate that most consumers would be hard-pressed to detect. Since early March, prices for imported goods have risen about 3 percent on average — with larger increases on goods from China, according to Alberto Cavallo, a Harvard economist.

Andrew Biggs’s “A Risky Plan for Social Security” warns that the bipartisan reform plan to provide long-term solvency for the Social Security system proposed by Sens. Bill Cassidy (R., La.) and Tim Kaine (D., Va.) is too risky (op-ed, July 25). But the Cassidy-Kaine plan is much less risky than ignoring Social Security’s current $25 trillion funding gap and allowing its trust fund to be depleted by 2033.

Jay W. Lorsch, the Louis E. Kirstein Professor of Human Relations, Emeritus at Harvard Business School (HBS) and a renowned expert on corporate boards who also did seminal early work on the relationship between environment and the organization, passed away on August 5 at the age of 93. In a distinguished career that spanned over five decades, Lorsch influenced generations of students and practitioners through his teaching and scholarship that contributed significantly to the shape of modern corporate governance and the development of new approaches to understanding organizational behavior.

H. Kent Bowen, a pioneering scholar in technology and operations management, and a beloved mentor, passed away on July 17, 2025, at the age of 83. Known for his visionary leadership and deep commitment to education and industry collaboration, Kent Bowen leaves behind a legacy that helped to shape the field of manufacturing and operations strategy across academia and practice.

In a discovery that could expand the array of current cancer immunotherapy treatments, scientists at Harvard Medical School have identified a new molecular brake that hinders the ability of T cells to attack tumors. The research, published Aug. 12 in Nature Immunology and supported in part by federal funding , offers a new pathway to design treatments that help more patients — a welcome development given that current cancer immunotherapies work in less than half of those who receive them. Get more HMS news The research, done in mice and in human cells, shows that a protein called STUB1…

With tariffs back in the daily news headlines, we talked with Andy O’Brien, chief of Operations, about their potential effects on Harvard Business School.

Work described in this story was made possible in part by federal funding supported by taxpayers. At Harvard Medical School, the future of efforts like this — done in service to humanity — now hangs in the balance due to the government’s decision to terminate large numbers of federally funded grants and contracts across Harvard University. What is the earliest spark that ignites the memory-robbing march of Alzheimer’s disease? Why do some people with Alzheimer’s-like changes in the brain never go on to develop dementia? These questions have bedeviled neuroscientists for decades. Now, a team of…