Andrew McAfee, a principal research scientist at MIT, studies how digital technologies are changing business, the economy, and society. His book More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources, and What Happened Next will be published by Scribner in October of 2019. It’s about a change in our relationship with our world. Throughout the Industrial Era, human populations and prosperity increased greatly, but so too did resource use, pollution, and other exploitations of the Earth. Recently, however, we started treading more lightly on the planet. Aggregate resource use is now decreasing in America, as are pollution, energy use, and cropland — even as the economy continues to grow. More From Less... documents this happy phenomenon, and explains how it came about as a result of capitalism and technological progress.

His 2014 book, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (co-authored with Erik Brynjolfsson) was a New York Times bestseller and was shortlisted for the Financial Times / McKinsey business book of the year award. He writes academic papers, a blog for the Financial Times, and articles for publications including Harvard Business Review, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. He’s talked about his work on The Charlie Rose Show and 60 Minutes, at TED, Davos, the Aspen Ideas Festival, and in front of many other audiences. He was educated at Harvard and MIT, where he is the co-founder of the Institute’s Initiative on the Digital Economy.