Penn Integrates Knowledge Professors

PIK Professor Ezekiel Emanuel discussed the improved political viability of a public option in the U.S. health care system. “I think both Republican and Democratic voters recognize that they want to have security, and a public option does communicate that security to them,” he said.

PIK Professor Sarah Tishkoff gave a guest lecture at a New Jersey private school about the social construction of race as a biological category. “I feel like we have to talk about it because if we don’t, it’s just going to promote misunderstanding,” she said.

PIK Professor Philip Tetlock was highlighted for his research on differences in experts’ ability to predict future events. The best forecasters, he found, were scholars with broad, interdisciplinary interests and open minds.

PIK Professor Dorothy Roberts said former University of Delaware professor Arica Coleman’s book, “That the Blood Stay Pure,” which documents the history of black and indigenous relations in Virginia, “provides a crucial missing chapter of America’s racial history.”

PIK Professor Dorothy Roberts’ book “Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century” was cited for showing “unequivocally that all people are indeed created equal, despite political and economic special interests that keep trying to persuade us otherwise.”

PIK Professor Michael Platt joined a conversation about surviving trauma and Puerto Rico’s “monkey island.”

PIK Professor Ezekiel Emanuel spoke about a class exercise in which he asks students to shop for health insurance using the government marketplace. When he attempted the assignment, he found it easy to accidentally use an unaffiliated site. “Unless you know what the right place looks like, what the offers are, they’ve done a very good job of making it look like it’s the [government] health insurance site.”

PIK Professor Herbert Hovenkamp said anticompetitive practices, which protect the largest firms by making it difficult for employees to change jobs, are on the rise. Simultaneously, he said, large tech companies are buying up potential competitors “before they can ever emerge as vibrant competitors themselves.”

PIK Professor Philip Tetlock was cited for his “gold standard” performance in a 2015 forecasting contest. Contestants in this year’s contest will have access to all the data on Tetlock’s team’s winning methodology.

PIK Professor Herbert Hovenkamp said challengers of Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp would need evidence of consumer harm to justify invoking antitrust law.