May 2009 Archives
Where's the outrage, indeed. The Washington Post's Philip Kennicott reflects on the decline of the fine art of museum controversy. Whatever happened to the tradition of exhibition scandals that began with the Metropolitan Museum's allegedly racist "Harlem on My Mind" of 1969, continued through the allegedly obscene Robert Mapplethorpe show of 1989, came home to Washington with the allegedly unpatriotic "Enola Gay" of 1995, and reached a premillenial fervor with the allegedly blasphemous "Sensation" in 1999?
Museum directors and activists weigh in. Do we have a more tolerant society, a public seeking solace in museums rather than shock after September 11, commodification of art and commercialization of artists (and not in the good old Andy Warhol sense)? Or was it the loss of all pretense to values in a society "so coarse that it doesn't leap out at us anymore," as the "Sensation" arch-critic William Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights put it. Kennicott publishes one of the rare open acknowlegements of the symbiosis of censurer and censured (if not actually censored):
Museum directors and activists weigh in. Do we have a more tolerant society, a public seeking solace in museums rather than shock after September 11, commodification of art and commercialization of artists (and not in the good old Andy Warhol sense)? Or was it the loss of all pretense to values in a society "so coarse that it doesn't leap out at us anymore," as the "Sensation" arch-critic William Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights put it. Kennicott publishes one of the rare open acknowlegements of the symbiosis of censurer and censured (if not actually censored):
[Arnold] Lehman [Brooklyn Museum director in 1999] says that if nothing else, "Sensation" helped his museum build exactly the audience he wanted: His museum, he says, now has the "single youngest audience for a general fine arts museum" in the country, and the most diverse audience.
And Donohue of the Catholic League, which still posts regular alerts about offensive art on its Web site, says he works hard to avoid the unintended consequences of controversy.
"Artists more than anybody will call me up and ask me to sound the alarms," he says. But he's become selective about which art he condemns so as not to build up an artist's reputation.
"If it's in some dump in Seattle, why would I draw attention to it?" he says.
But I think there's another reason for the decline of old-style museum contoversy, the shift of the protest frontier to environmental themes, especially in photography. At whom should the outrage be directed? At the governments and corporations creating such ugliness? Or at ourselves for benefiting from their activities -- and for aestheticizing the results?
CNN Online wonders, with the writer Daniel Wilson, what has happened to the Jetpack and other futurist devices of the 1964 World Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens. One answer is that the future not only isn't what it used to be; it never was. Or at least it had already ceased to be so in 1964. The best known review of the aged Robert Moses' discordant swan song remains the headline of the writer Martin Mayer's assessment: "Ho Hum, Come to the Fair." Even the New York pavilion was recycled from its 1939 predecessor on the same site. Now that was a Fair to remember, a late-Deco extravaganza where American Depression-era superhighway fantasies melded with the one-up grandiosity of Nazis and Communists at the brink of war. The 1964 event was never even sanctioned internationally as a genuine World's Fair. In 1968 the New York Times deplored the Fair's financial report announcing that bondholders had been left with 38 cents on the dollar of their investment, while past and future payments to Robert Moses himself would amount to $1.1 million by 1975. As for the content:
The CNN article coincides with a Times report on the problems of a once-promising new reactor design a French company is trying to implement in Finland, and the technological and financial snafus that are giving US utilities and authorities second thoughts about nuclear power from highly standardized, safe new designs as a partial solution to oil shortages and carbon emissions.
What's the lesson? That we persisted too long with an inherently unsafe technology? Or that we drew the wrong lessons from Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and now are trying to make up for neglect of research on a partial but significant answer to climate change and energy security? I have to say I'm not sure. But the problems of nuclear power are only part of a broader challenge. Despite (and partly because of) all the marvels of information technology, the rest of the future does indeed appear to be behind schedule. We actually may need more hype rather than less.
Had the New York World's Fair of 1964-65 left lasting educational, diplomatic or even entertainment memories, the disastrous financial report issued by the City Controller might have been chalked off as a Robert Moses Happening.The management of the 1964 Fair was all too futurist, foreshadowing not only the city's financial debacle of the 1970s but more recent outrages against investors and taxpayers.
The CNN article coincides with a Times report on the problems of a once-promising new reactor design a French company is trying to implement in Finland, and the technological and financial snafus that are giving US utilities and authorities second thoughts about nuclear power from highly standardized, safe new designs as a partial solution to oil shortages and carbon emissions.
What's the lesson? That we persisted too long with an inherently unsafe technology? Or that we drew the wrong lessons from Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and now are trying to make up for neglect of research on a partial but significant answer to climate change and energy security? I have to say I'm not sure. But the problems of nuclear power are only part of a broader challenge. Despite (and partly because of) all the marvels of information technology, the rest of the future does indeed appear to be behind schedule. We actually may need more hype rather than less.
Tom Vanderbilt has illuminating essay on Slate about the declining speed of American railroads as a case study in technological regression. As Vanderbilt observes on the Administration's plans for high speed rail:
Obama's bold vision obscures a simple fact: 220 mph would be phenomenal, but we would also do well to simply get trains back up to the speeds they traveled at during the Harding administration.
True enough, but at a recent open house of local historical museum, I did notice early 20th century timetables of the Pennsylvania Railroad Philadelphia - New York corridor. Verdict: for all the problems of today Amtrak, New Jersey Transit, and Philadelphia SEPTA service, I'm leaving the old rattan-seated Pennsy commuter cars out of my time-travel plans. Indeed, readers of Vanderbilt's excellent piece should still balance it with the observation of the great mid-20th century railroad enthusiast and dandy Lucius Beebe on the typical level of service beyond the celebrated premium-fare candy trains of yore: "the American public rode to dusty destinies in regimented discomfort." Apart from the absence of boiler smoke and cinders, today's airline passenger service may be only a return to a grim long-term transportation reality.
Regarding US railroads, there's another reason for our lag behind European and Japanese railroad service. As my friend Mark Reutter has pointed out, the technology used by Europeans after World War II was developed here in the US during the Depression by Budd and other formerly world-leading companies. Access for all: transportation and urban growth by K. H. Schaeffer and Elliott Sclar (Columbia University Press reprint, 1980). The US structure of competitive passenger routes between major terminals fostered a few flagship runs like the Twentieth Century Limited, but for most travelers and journeys it meant awkward delays and changes of terminal within cities because schedules and connections were not coordinated as they were in Europe. The shortest rail trip between two small Ohio towns could often mean a detour of two sides of a steep triangle via, say, Columbus, including a change of depots there. This happened less often in Europe. Until 1967, England even had what was popularly called the Varsity Line connecting Oxford and Cambridge, making travel through London unnecessary.
As Vanderbilt observes, time can erode as well as enhance skills. The most striking example of the regression of a technology may be art and science of making geared computers like the Greek engineering masterpiece, the Antikythera Mechanism, recovered a century ago from a Roman shipwreck and still yielding new secrets.
Special thanks to Dan Akst for the link!
A Wall Street Journal piece by Carl Bialik, and his related blog post, examine how the mania for lists amplifies behavior -- and not necessarily for the better. Reporting on a study by the Princeton sociologist Matthew Salganik:
There's a curious historic link between the composition of musical hits and the debunking of herd behavior. Charles Mackay, the nineteenth-century Scottish journalist who wrote the classic of bubble-bursting, financial and otherwise, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, was actually the author of song lyrics, including political doggerel, that went platinum, at least by Victorian standards; one work sold 400,000 copies globally. Perhaps Mackay's exposure of popular manias was rooted in his own misgivings about mass taste. Angus Calder's account of Mackay's career in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography notes that late in life, Mackay described himself as being "painfully conscious" that his "worst" pieces had been most popular, while his serious poetry had received "slight or no recognition." Poor guy; I wonder how he would feel to know that the masses now value neither his songs nor his poems, but only his book on what fools they are.
[P]opularity in the music world, even unearned, breeds more popularity. Researchers enlisted more than 12,000 volunteers to rate and download songs from among 48 chosen for their relative obscurity. Some of these volunteers were lied to: At a certain stage in the experiment, popularity rankings for this group were reversed, so the least-downloaded songs were made to appear most-downloaded.
Suddenly, everything changed. The prior No. 1 began making a comeback on the new top dog, but the former No. 47 maintained its comfortable lead on the old No. 2, buoyed by its apparent popularity. Overall, the study showed that popularity is both unstable and malleable.
There's a curious historic link between the composition of musical hits and the debunking of herd behavior. Charles Mackay, the nineteenth-century Scottish journalist who wrote the classic of bubble-bursting, financial and otherwise, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, was actually the author of song lyrics, including political doggerel, that went platinum, at least by Victorian standards; one work sold 400,000 copies globally. Perhaps Mackay's exposure of popular manias was rooted in his own misgivings about mass taste. Angus Calder's account of Mackay's career in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography notes that late in life, Mackay described himself as being "painfully conscious" that his "worst" pieces had been most popular, while his serious poetry had received "slight or no recognition." Poor guy; I wonder how he would feel to know that the masses now value neither his songs nor his poems, but only his book on what fools they are.
A press release from the University of Cambridge has announced a forthcoming paper about the latest and possibly greatest stars of non-human animal intelligence, rooks, and their ability to make tools spontaneously without have learned their use from other birds or from humans. The rooks, birds related to ravens and crows, showed themselves the equal of better known animal tool users, the chimpanzees and their distant cousins, the New Caledonian crows.
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Results like this open up a new question. Since animals are more capable of using technology than we had realized, why don't they do so more often? They have mental abilities not readily observed in the wild but in some cases superior to humans' -- like chimps' recall of a series of random digits presented on a computer screen. Some scientists speculate that we had to lose some mental abilities (immediate memory) to acquire the capacity for language. As the press release notes, "Necessity is the mother of invention for clever birds." In the wild, they didn't need tools; food was all around them.
This Op-Ed by the materials science and engineering professor Stephen L. Sass, shows how much the technology that helped us bring out the brains in these birds, and spread the news about them, was itself the result of new constraints; a shortage of tin (for making bronze) in the eastern Mediterranean was the incentive that led to the Iron Age.
(The actual paper on Rooks was not yet available on the National Academy of Science site when this was posted.)
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News of non-human ingenuity rarely surprises me. I was the editor of John T. Bonner's classic synthesis, Evolution of Culture in Animals, still in print and an excellent introduction to the topic after 25 years of further research.In a series of experiments, the rooks quickly learnt to drop a stone to collapse a platform and acquire a piece of food, and subsequently showed the ability to choose the right size and shape of stone without any training.
Not only could they use stones to solve the task, but they were flexible in their tool choice, using and modifying sticks to achieve the same goal. When the correct tool was out of reach, they used another tool to get it, demonstrating the ability to use tools sequentially. In further tests, the rooks were able to use a hook tool to get food out of a different tube and even creatively bent a straight piece of wire to make the hook to reach the food.
Results like this open up a new question. Since animals are more capable of using technology than we had realized, why don't they do so more often? They have mental abilities not readily observed in the wild but in some cases superior to humans' -- like chimps' recall of a series of random digits presented on a computer screen. Some scientists speculate that we had to lose some mental abilities (immediate memory) to acquire the capacity for language. As the press release notes, "Necessity is the mother of invention for clever birds." In the wild, they didn't need tools; food was all around them.
This Op-Ed by the materials science and engineering professor Stephen L. Sass, shows how much the technology that helped us bring out the brains in these birds, and spread the news about them, was itself the result of new constraints; a shortage of tin (for making bronze) in the eastern Mediterranean was the incentive that led to the Iron Age.
(The actual paper on Rooks was not yet available on the National Academy of Science site when this was posted.)
Does technological change transform life, or does it mainly repackage age-old questions? Paul Farhi's look at the history of performance-enhancing substances in baseball in the Washington Post is a balanced analysis of a passionately argued issue. (Of course I'm biased; I was a source for another piece he wrote, on the iPod, in 2007. I liked that one, too.)
Why hasn't the same logic applied to steroids, which may in the long run not only shorten life but reduce its quality? Is the reason the way some people discount future harm, while others endure hunger for the promise of longevity? Part of the answer may be that micro-cultures, like those of various sports, can affect how people think about the future. One extreme case I found when writing encyclopedia articles on the history of fashion technology: the needle polishers of Redditch, England, the world center of needle production in the early nineteenth century. They were some of the best paid workers in Britain -- working-class heroes -- because the respiratory hazards of working in a cloud of dust commanded premium pay. They rarely lived beyond their thirties. For years they resisted innovations like mouth guards and ventilation fans on the grounds that less danger would mean lower pay. On the other hand, once safety technology was installed, workers did change their minds, and newcomers to the trade probably had saner expectations, reinforcing the changed culture. A contemporary account is here.
What's next? Nerds as well as jocks may have some hard decisions. The cumulative effects decades-long use of cognitive enhancing drugs like modafinil -- "smart pills" -- won't be fully understood for years. Are they "steroids for the brain"? David Dobbs has a good commentary.
In perhaps the earliest instance of a performance-enhancing substance, ancient Olympians sought a testosterone kick . . . by consuming sheep testicles. A physician of the era, Galen, advised Olympians to consume "the rear hooves of an Abyssinian ass, ground up, boiled in oil, and flavored with rose hips and rose petals."Athletes, sports historians, and physicians -- and Dr. Bill Mallon is all three -- weigh in on what's natural, what's a drug, and extent of the placebo effect.
Despite the success (and later ignominy) of some steroid users, Mallon says science hasn't really established whether steroids actually make better baseball players. Yes, the empirical evidence is undeniable -- steroids make you bigger and stronger, as one glance at a pre- and post-'roid Barry Bonds would show -- but how it affects hitting, pitching and throwing hasn't been subject to rigorous evidentiary tests, he says.After reading Farhi's article I have a question. Jim Bouton, the former Yankees pitcher and author of the pathbreaking expose Ball Four, is quoted as saying that players would still willingly take substances they knew would forfeit years of life if these could produce winning seasons. Yet the economist Robert Frank, citing the work of his Nobel Laureate colleague Thomas Schelling, has observed that hockey players accepted mandatory helmet rules even though individually they could have performed better without helmets. The law became a means to prevent a dangerous quest for relative advantage.
Why hasn't the same logic applied to steroids, which may in the long run not only shorten life but reduce its quality? Is the reason the way some people discount future harm, while others endure hunger for the promise of longevity? Part of the answer may be that micro-cultures, like those of various sports, can affect how people think about the future. One extreme case I found when writing encyclopedia articles on the history of fashion technology: the needle polishers of Redditch, England, the world center of needle production in the early nineteenth century. They were some of the best paid workers in Britain -- working-class heroes -- because the respiratory hazards of working in a cloud of dust commanded premium pay. They rarely lived beyond their thirties. For years they resisted innovations like mouth guards and ventilation fans on the grounds that less danger would mean lower pay. On the other hand, once safety technology was installed, workers did change their minds, and newcomers to the trade probably had saner expectations, reinforcing the changed culture. A contemporary account is here.
What's next? Nerds as well as jocks may have some hard decisions. The cumulative effects decades-long use of cognitive enhancing drugs like modafinil -- "smart pills" -- won't be fully understood for years. Are they "steroids for the brain"? David Dobbs has a good commentary.
In the Wall Street Journal, my friend Robert Lee Hotz returns to the Twilight Zone of neuroscience, the postmortem anatomy of illustrious gray matter, and its preeminent subject, Albert Einstein:
Reports of atypical anatomy may mean less than they seem. Hotz reports a number of notable false starts with brains of famous subjects including Vladimir Lenin. I have also read studies of both human and veterinary surgery by scholars including Stefan Hirschauer and Dawn Woodgate, who note how professionals learn to deal with the great variation of the bodies of individuals from the specimens presented in textbooks and atlases.
Scientific tools have made typicality a more challenging subject than ever. In her acclaimed Human Brain Anatomy in Computerized Images, Hanna Damasio cites the tension between "anatomic constants and individual variation" and notes:
It's sad, then, that Einstein's mental remains may not rest in peace for a long time, but international science, too, appears to need its holy relics.
Dr. Falk was studying old images, of course, and not the slides circulated by the eccentric Princeton, NJ pathologist Thomas Harvey, who retained Einstein's brain before the body was cremated and held it for decades, often mailing sections to researchers without advance notice. Some of these found unusual features they believed might help account for Einstein's greatness. Dr. Falk sees in the photographs an unusual configuration of a feature of the brain called the Sylvian Fissure.By studying photographs of Einstein's brain taken at his death in 1955, paleoanthropologist Dean Falk at Florida State University identified a dozen subtle variations in its surface that may have heightened his ability to see physics in a new way. Her research suggests how the brain shaped the inner life of the 20th century's most famous mind.
"Einstein's brain is really unusual," says Dr. Falk. "On the surface at least, it looks different than others. It's suggestive."
Reports of atypical anatomy may mean less than they seem. Hotz reports a number of notable false starts with brains of famous subjects including Vladimir Lenin. I have also read studies of both human and veterinary surgery by scholars including Stefan Hirschauer and Dawn Woodgate, who note how professionals learn to deal with the great variation of the bodies of individuals from the specimens presented in textbooks and atlases.
Scientific tools have made typicality a more challenging subject than ever. In her acclaimed Human Brain Anatomy in Computerized Images, Hanna Damasio cites the tension between "anatomic constants and individual variation" and notes:
The issue of anatomic uniqueness has gained importance because of theReturning to the studies by Falk and others described by Hotz, my friend and colleague Samuel Wang, coauthor of Welcome to Your Brain, comments in an e-mail:
spectacular developments in neuroimaging technologies.
For now, nobody knows the relationship between surface contours and cognitiveAlice Calaprice, another friend and the editor of The New Quotable Einstein, also is not sure Einstein would have encouraged the investigations. He did not believe in the cult of his genius, she writes.
function, and there probably isn't one.
It's sad, then, that Einstein's mental remains may not rest in peace for a long time, but international science, too, appears to need its holy relics.
With the Memorial Day weekend and the summer holiday season arriving, you might be wondering what's a safer place to drive, the Big Sky roads of Montana or the scary parkways of New Jersey, after reading the ABC News online story on the results of a GMAC Insurance survey, "Top States with America's Worst Drivers." It suggests the wide-open spaces are a safer bet. Idaho, Wisconsin, and Montana drivers were best informed, in that order, and New York, New Jersey, and Hawaii motorists scored lowest.
After enough close encounters on the roads of the Northeast, and scenic bliss in Montana, I'd be inclined to endorse the survey's results. There's just one problem. According to most recent official data of the Census Bureau's Statistical Abstract of the United States, New Jersey is actually the sixth safest state, with only 1.0 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles, while Montana is the riskiest, with 2.3 deaths. New York State is about as safe as New Jersey. Idaho, the top state for knowledge, is slightly more dangerous for motorists than Hawaii (1.8 vs. 1.6 fatalities). Wisconsin might be your best all-around bet as the runner-up for driver information and 1.2 deaths per hundred million vehicle miles, just making the top quarter of safety rankings. But it's still 20 percent more dangerous than New York or New Jersey.
The automotive safety analyst Dr. Leonard Evans writes in the first edition of his standard Traffic Safety and the Driver:
The paradox is that the densely settled Northeast is generally a safer place to drive than the rural West because 1) severity of accidents depends greatly on speed, and our frequently crawling traffic is thus extra safe, and 2) when it is moving it often feels and looks dangerous, so we're more alert. Drivers in the rural West have much longer journeys between settlements and more incentive to go as fast as they can.
The British aeronautical engineer and statistician Reuben Smeed was the first to analyze the process mathematically. Smeed's admiring wartime employee in the RAF Bomber Command, Freeman Dyson, has written of his mentor's postwar renown as Britain's leading traffic engineer:
Getting back to the GMAC study, only one of GMAC's own list of five major causes of crashes relates directly to a question on the test. Take the test and then read Top Driving Mistakes that Cause Crashes and see if you agree with me. While I have a few reservations -- I'll withhold them to avoid spoilers -- the driving tips are generally excellent and could save lives. But most of the aggressive and just plain bad driving I've seen, everywhere, seems to have arisen not from ignorance of the rules but the conviction that they're only for other people.
After enough close encounters on the roads of the Northeast, and scenic bliss in Montana, I'd be inclined to endorse the survey's results. There's just one problem. According to most recent official data of the Census Bureau's Statistical Abstract of the United States, New Jersey is actually the sixth safest state, with only 1.0 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles, while Montana is the riskiest, with 2.3 deaths. New York State is about as safe as New Jersey. Idaho, the top state for knowledge, is slightly more dangerous for motorists than Hawaii (1.8 vs. 1.6 fatalities). Wisconsin might be your best all-around bet as the runner-up for driver information and 1.2 deaths per hundred million vehicle miles, just making the top quarter of safety rankings. But it's still 20 percent more dangerous than New York or New Jersey.
The automotive safety analyst Dr. Leonard Evans writes in the first edition of his standard Traffic Safety and the Driver:
[W]e find no convincing evidence that driver education, or increased driving skill and knowledge, increase safety.And he continues:
Few would suggest that criminal activity flows from insufficient study of ethics, and that instruction in this discipline would much reduce crime.
The paradox is that the densely settled Northeast is generally a safer place to drive than the rural West because 1) severity of accidents depends greatly on speed, and our frequently crawling traffic is thus extra safe, and 2) when it is moving it often feels and looks dangerous, so we're more alert. Drivers in the rural West have much longer journeys between settlements and more incentive to go as fast as they can.
The British aeronautical engineer and statistician Reuben Smeed was the first to analyze the process mathematically. Smeed's admiring wartime employee in the RAF Bomber Command, Freeman Dyson, has written of his mentor's postwar renown as Britain's leading traffic engineer:
He collected statistics on traffic deaths from many countries, all the way back to the invention of the automobile. He found that under an enormous range of conditions, the number of deaths in a country per year is given by a simple formula: number of deaths equals .0003 times the two-thirds power of the number of people times the one-third power of the number of cars. This formula is known as Smeed's Law. He published it in 1949, and it is still valid 57 years later.In other words, the more people drive, the fewer fatal accidents per hundred million miles they suffer. The most dangerous place of all to drive is in a developing country with open roads and low density of car ownership.
Getting back to the GMAC study, only one of GMAC's own list of five major causes of crashes relates directly to a question on the test. Take the test and then read Top Driving Mistakes that Cause Crashes and see if you agree with me. While I have a few reservations -- I'll withhold them to avoid spoilers -- the driving tips are generally excellent and could save lives. But most of the aggressive and just plain bad driving I've seen, everywhere, seems to have arisen not from ignorance of the rules but the conviction that they're only for other people.
Graduates doubting the wisdom of Daniel Akst's thoughts on self-employment should ponder this column by John Kelly in the Washington Post on the indignities of the psychological test used by one local media company for prospective hires as an alternative to conventional interviews.
While test publishers claim that studies bear out the value of their products in better fit and reduced turnover, their critics have a stock of anecdotes to the contrary. There's the experience of the Intel co-founder Gordon Moore (of Moore's Law fame), when tested for William Shockley's new semiconductor company by a New York psychological consulting firm:
The NFL uses the same test on players. As Selena Roberts wrote dryly in the New York Times,
Getting back to the Post column, if you must disregard Dan Akst's advice, the classic remedy may still be the one published by William H. Whyte in Fortune and reprinted in The Organization Man over 50 years ago.
While test publishers claim that studies bear out the value of their products in better fit and reduced turnover, their critics have a stock of anecdotes to the contrary. There's the experience of the Intel co-founder Gordon Moore (of Moore's Law fame), when tested for William Shockley's new semiconductor company by a New York psychological consulting firm:
I not only got to read [his own test report] --I got to read the one on [future Intel co-founder] Bob Noyce. And the general conclusion on both of us was we were great scientists but neither of us would be a manager.And at least in Connecticut, the courts have ruled that it's legal to disqualify a police candidate for scoring too high on an intelligence test, the rationale being that smart cops will just get bored and quit instead of using their brains to fight crime more imaginatively and advance in the service, as we uninformed lay citizens might suppose.
The NFL uses the same test on players. As Selena Roberts wrote dryly in the New York Times,
The Wonderlic would be dropped by all 32 teams -- which National Football Scouting answers to -- if it wasn't so valued for its history of consistent error.And Jonah Lehrer illustrates how meaningless it can be in real-life play.
Getting back to the Post column, if you must disregard Dan Akst's advice, the classic remedy may still be the one published by William H. Whyte in Fortune and reprinted in The Organization Man over 50 years ago.
An analysis of fuel efficiency and automotive safety in USA Today by Jayne O'Donnell and James R. Healey raises big questions about laws and technological progress. Better gas mileage might lead people to drive more, at least partly negating efforts to reduce emissions. Manufacturers required to increase fuel efficiency might also promote smaller cars that some safety officials believe are inherently less safe than larger ones. There were over 1,600 comments on these issues at the usatoday.com site, so I doubt I'd have anything new to add on either point. But there's a more intriguing one that the article also broaches: technology forcing. Can governments make companies innovate when they insist they're doing the best they can? The idea has had mixed results. Direction by Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) helped Japanese chip makers threaten the American semiconductor industry -- but also made them vulnerable to resurgent American manufacturers led by Intel once the personal computing era called for new designs.
The problem of any legal mandate is that it is often impossible to say in advance what researchers are capable of. This is sometimes discovered only under great pressure. In a paper on the history of the American jet engine program, the historian of technology and business Phil Scranton has written:
And they may be right. One intriguing precedent is the scale-up of penicillin. According to the the American Chemical Society page on this World War Two project:
The problem of any legal mandate is that it is often impossible to say in advance what researchers are capable of. This is sometimes discovered only under great pressure. In a paper on the history of the American jet engine program, the historian of technology and business Phil Scranton has written:
Without passion, without being driven by Cold War fears and by the challenges of mastery (in engineering and in organizational terms), without buckets of public money, and perhaps without secrecy, it is improbable that reliable jet propulsion would have been achieved at all, much less commercialized and normalized as a relatively speedy, if tedious mode of travel.After automotive industry resistance to the safety, fuel economy, and environmental standards of the 1960s and 1970s, the dire predictions of executives like Henry Ford II proved unfounded. Other industries fearing disaster from new health and safety laws generally seem to survive and prosper, though not all firms adapt successfully. Governments may help them by mandating higher quality -- and higher priced -- goods. High European gasoline taxes probably encouraged improvements like fuel-saving steel-belted radial tires; now Michelin, which pioneered them, is a major manufacturer in the US, too. Paradoxically, it is conservatives and libertarians who are otherwise the first to point out the unlimited possibilities of human ingenuity -- "the ultimate resource," as my friend the late free-market economist Julian Simon called it in a famous book of the same name. And it's a further paradox that liberals (in the New Deal as opposed to Simon's classical sense) have much more confidence in the ability of private industry to rise to environmental challenges through innovation than business advocates seem to. Perhaps liberals are ignoring realities, as conservatives say, but auto industry critics can't be faulted for a lack of American can-do spirit. See a Union of Concerned Scientists report from 2003.
And they may be right. One intriguing precedent is the scale-up of penicillin. According to the the American Chemical Society page on this World War Two project:
Pfizer's John L. Smith captured the complexity and uncertainty facing these companies during the scale-up process: "The mold is as temperamental as an opera singer, the yields are low, the isolation is difficult, the extraction is murder, the purification invites disaster, and the assay is unsatisfactory."The real question may not be whether a new generation of cars can be greener and safer -- and marketable -- without increasing the cost per mile of driving. I suspect it's how much of the development costs auto manufacturers and their suppliers will be able to bear in the global economic climate of 2009 as opposed to 2003, much less those of the Second World War and the Cold War. We may have a chance to test the slogan of Europe's student rebels 30 years ago: "Be realistic. Demand the impossible."
Another major US government information technology project is on the rocks, according to the Washington Post. This time the agency is not the FBI but the Copyright Office, where transition to a mainly Web-based registration procedure is producing delays of eighteen months and longer:
The library's inspector general has warned that the backlog threatens the integrity of the U.S. copyright system.
The irony is that the slowdown stems from a new $52 million electronic process that is supposed to speed the way writers and others register their literary, musical or visual work.
Bureaucracy-bashers in the private sector should consider their own industries' snafus, which seldom hit the front pages. Among computer professionals, the high failure rate of major projects is well known. The consulting firm IT Cortex has a sobering page documenting the travails of business as well as government. Consequences can be even worse for private vendors if stalled orders during a transition cut off income and threaten to destroy years of carefully developed good will.
The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. is still the classic reference after nearly 35 years. And project managers everywhere are all too aware of Brooks's Law: "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." Frustrating as this crunch has been for applicants and Copyright Office employees, it's also an experiment that can help future digital transitions.
The Washington Post's Warren Brown has an intriguing history lesson on the customer-relations problems of the American car industry. Haggling was part of American automobile buying from the outset, but according to Brown, the high-pressure tactics of the modern American dealer originated in a single Memphis franchise after World War Two, when new vehicles were scarce and buyers could be browbean into signing a deal that assured fat commissions for salesmen and profit margins for their employers. It started with "unhorsing" (getting the keys of the prospect's own car), proceeded through "detention" (stalling, allegedly for trade-in value inspection), and if successful for the dealer, ended with "release" (a signed contract). This bit of improv had a long run. Even after postwar shortages disappeared, what was called the System or the Drill had spread to dealerships around the country. Customs often outlive the reasons for their birth. (West) German apartment leases long reflected housing shortages that followed the two world wars, resulting, for example, in the need to install and ultimately remove full kitchens including cabinets, which in turn inhibited moving, which in turn . . . .
There's another part of the story I hope Mr. Brown or another writer will tell. Consumers did not remain passive victims of tactics. Many of them relished the challenge of beating salesmen at their own game -- an ambition the dealers did not discourage. (Casinos are said to make much more money from unsuccessful card counters at blackjack tables than they lose to the rare proficient ones.) The fixed-price system of GM's Saturn division showed the possibility of an alternative dealer-customer relationship based on service rather than on price competition among its dealers, yet GM's corporate culture sabotaged the company's own innovations, unfortunately not for the last time.
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There's another part of the story I hope Mr. Brown or another writer will tell. Consumers did not remain passive victims of tactics. Many of them relished the challenge of beating salesmen at their own game -- an ambition the dealers did not discourage. (Casinos are said to make much more money from unsuccessful card counters at blackjack tables than they lose to the rare proficient ones.) The fixed-price system of GM's Saturn division showed the possibility of an alternative dealer-customer relationship based on service rather than on price competition among its dealers, yet GM's corporate culture sabotaged the company's own innovations, unfortunately not for the last time.
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Where have all the bad guys gone? To the electronic frontier, like other ambitious people, of course. Yes, the criminal world has upgraded from 1970s street offenses to high-tech fraud. In the Chronicle of Higher Education, the sociologist Dalton Conley gives a vivid first-person account of the transition to post-industrial criminality. A New York Police Department program sent officers to his family's apartment to mark their possessions to deter burglars -- engraving appliances with his mother's Social Security Number, a tactic hard to imagine now.
Today's criminals would be more interested in stealing my mother's identity than her toaster.And as Conley observes, it's also harder to find the line between aggressive use of the limits of financial law and actual swindling. Bernard Madoff and other conspicuous villains are priceless boundary markers for the organizations and individuals in that gray zone.
The Debt theme issue of the New York Times Magazine features a tongue-in-cheek interview with Myron Scholes, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics as a developer of the Black-Scholes options pricing theory that helped create modern finance, a founder of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, and a Clinton-era case study in the perils of brilliance.
Scholes reports that
Scholes reports that
a friend of mine did tell me that when he was a physicist and wanted to get a job in finance, he interviewed at a bank, and the bank asked what he was working on, and he did say, "Black holes." And they said: "Great! You're working on Black-Scholes? You're hired."No joke. An essay in the Financial Times by Sam Jones, about the Chinese-born Canadian mathematician David Li and the origin and unintended consequences of actuarial models in calculating mortgage default risks, reports:
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the arms race and, in 1993, the cancellation by the US congress of the superconducting super collider - intended to be the world's greatest physics experiment - particle physicists, experts in quantum mechanics and computing engineers were twiddling their thumbs. For the younger generation of newly qualified grads and PhDs, applying their expertise to finance was the obvious alternative to fighting it out for the dwindling number of jobs strictly in their fields.To which a letter to the editor from Charles Beichman, executive director of the NASA ExoPlanet Science Institute at Caltech, adds:
With the loss of trillions of dollars throughout the world economy, how much safer we all would have been if Congress had just paid the ransom over a decade ago and kept all those physicists safe in their laboratory at the Waxahachie, Texas, site of the SSC. So, please, listen carefully when I say that we have one or two major space telescopes that need funding. Otherwise I might consider moving to Wall Street.Gloomy markets, whatever they do to start-ups, are evidently golden for stand-up.
One of the rare financial benefits of going freelance: It slashes your dry cleaning bills. That's what first occurred to me on reading "When No One Wants to Look Like a Banker" in the New York Times Styles section. It explains:
Does the new style mean that all men now desire to be "creative professionals"? Those jobs are not so secure, either. Do employers really want bond traders to look like art directors or vice versa? And are financial people really wise to look creative? Investment bankers' critics on the Left have been charging that they have been too original. These critics want to make banking "dull again." (I'm agnostic on this notion; see my post on the Conservative of Catastrophe.)
Another problem of the new creative look, at least outside the arts and fashion, is that so many of today's most coveted careers may reward the very style scorned so emphatically by the article's sources. Consider political and civil service positions in Washington, now a growth sector again. And contemplate the garb of the top officials, at least the males, in the Times's own photo gallery of the Obama administration. Or read the assessment of the Washington Post's Marc Fisher. Washington remains America's capital of stodge.
An exhibition at the New York Public Library two years ago documented the origins of today's suits in the tailored padding worn under medieval plate armor. The advantage of conservative clothing, protective anonymity, is likely to endure.
Meanwhile in the Business section, the Times reports the continuing troubles of a flagship 122-year-old American men's clothing manufacturer, Hartmarx, makers of a top brand, Hickey-Freeman. Why hasn't the new trend helped them? Whatever the answer, it's refreshing to see a break from months of frugality journalism, and a new creed to replace the restored formality that in turn, not so long ago, ended Casual Fridays. But one question still troubles me. What happens to the age-old principle of dressing for the job you want?While double-digit declines have hit much of the retail sector, one of the few pieces of good news is one of the most surprising. In a reversal of every recession in the last 100 years, figures show that men have not cut back on buying clothes as much as women have. They're not buying power suits -- they're replacing them.
"I have guys coming in here saying, 'I don't want to look like a banker anymore,' " said Eric Goldstein, an owner of Jean Shop, a premium denim store in the meatpacking district. He is now dispensing advice on how to look like a "creative professional."
Does the new style mean that all men now desire to be "creative professionals"? Those jobs are not so secure, either. Do employers really want bond traders to look like art directors or vice versa? And are financial people really wise to look creative? Investment bankers' critics on the Left have been charging that they have been too original. These critics want to make banking "dull again." (I'm agnostic on this notion; see my post on the Conservative of Catastrophe.)
Another problem of the new creative look, at least outside the arts and fashion, is that so many of today's most coveted careers may reward the very style scorned so emphatically by the article's sources. Consider political and civil service positions in Washington, now a growth sector again. And contemplate the garb of the top officials, at least the males, in the Times's own photo gallery of the Obama administration. Or read the assessment of the Washington Post's Marc Fisher. Washington remains America's capital of stodge.
An exhibition at the New York Public Library two years ago documented the origins of today's suits in the tailored padding worn under medieval plate armor. The advantage of conservative clothing, protective anonymity, is likely to endure.
What do flat-screen televisions, soft-drink vending machines, and spectacular bridges have in common? All have hidden design flaws that engineers evidently had not expected, yet that have inadvertently encouraged dangerous behavior.
Consider a new study cited by MSNBC:
Design masterpieces, and even local prominent structures, may have a risk of their own. They can become what lawyers call "attractive nuisances," unintentionally promoting lethal behavior. The Golden Gate Bridge, one of the world's most beautiful spans, has drawn potential suicides almost since its completion in 1937. So have other bridges without its global renown. Psychiatric studies suggest that people deterred by barriers are unlikely to seek other means of self-destruction.
Should the respective designers have known better? "Childproofing" homes was already a familiar concept when flat-screen televisions were introduced. Old-style pinball machines had tilt mechanisms for decades, revealing an impulse to manhandle equipment for an advantage. And suicides were sadly familiar on the Eiffel Tower and, closer to home, the Empire State Building.
The cultural reception of technology helped create all three risks. Thin new televisions inspire an illusion of lightness that can lead parents to forget how heavy many of these sets were to move into place. The casualties of the vending machines have been disproportionately young men ready to challenge machinery. (The physician who wrote the best-known report was based at Walter Reed Army Hospital.) And reports of suicides by the press might have enhanced the romantic aura of the act while neglecting its horrific consequences, even for the few, severely injured, survivors.
These examples can help us think about other hazards -- from nanoparticles through space travel. We can't foresee all interactions of values and behavior with the things we create, but with more interdisciplinary study we can improve our record, and we can and must respond more quickly when they begin.
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Consider a new study cited by MSNBC:
Nearly 17,000 children were rushed to emergency rooms in 2007, the last year for which complete figures were available, after heavy or unstable furniture fell over on them. . . . [S]uch injuries had risen 41 percent since 1990.Frequently to blame were
ever-bigger flat-panel televisions that Americans have brought into their homes in that time, along with the entertainment centers and narrow, less-stable stands to hold them. Injuries from televisions alone accounted for nearly half of all injuries related to falling furniture during the study period -- 47 percent.Grownups also can go astray with fatal results, tilting vending machines to dislodge cans. In 1995, the Consumer Products Safety Commission worked with the soda can industry to develop warning labels for the machines after finding that rocking them -- whether to steal a drink or just to shake loose a stuck purchase -- was killing an average of two people a year and injuring six others. (The physics and economics of dispensing cans by gravity makes the equipment more top-heavy than it appears.)
Design masterpieces, and even local prominent structures, may have a risk of their own. They can become what lawyers call "attractive nuisances," unintentionally promoting lethal behavior. The Golden Gate Bridge, one of the world's most beautiful spans, has drawn potential suicides almost since its completion in 1937. So have other bridges without its global renown. Psychiatric studies suggest that people deterred by barriers are unlikely to seek other means of self-destruction.
Should the respective designers have known better? "Childproofing" homes was already a familiar concept when flat-screen televisions were introduced. Old-style pinball machines had tilt mechanisms for decades, revealing an impulse to manhandle equipment for an advantage. And suicides were sadly familiar on the Eiffel Tower and, closer to home, the Empire State Building.
The cultural reception of technology helped create all three risks. Thin new televisions inspire an illusion of lightness that can lead parents to forget how heavy many of these sets were to move into place. The casualties of the vending machines have been disproportionately young men ready to challenge machinery. (The physician who wrote the best-known report was based at Walter Reed Army Hospital.) And reports of suicides by the press might have enhanced the romantic aura of the act while neglecting its horrific consequences, even for the few, severely injured, survivors.
These examples can help us think about other hazards -- from nanoparticles through space travel. We can't foresee all interactions of values and behavior with the things we create, but with more interdisciplinary study we can improve our record, and we can and must respond more quickly when they begin.
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The Boston Globe Ideas section has an essay by the staff writer Drake Bennett on the implications of happiness research for the law. It's not surprising that lawyers should have taken an interest in research on happiness. The profession has 3.6 times the rate of depression of the average occupation, and a male suicide rate twice the U.S. national average. Even the Positive Psychology movement, which promotes happiness as a goal of psychotherapy, finds the legal profession a special challenge. Optimism improves success in nearly all professions, but pessimists excel in law, beginning with their studies.
According to the Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein and other legal academics and psychologists, personal injury damage awards underestimate the consequences for happiness of chronic conditions like back pain while exaggerating the lasting effect on our subjective well-being of blindness and the loss of limbs. Sunstein has suggested guidelines for damages that reflect studies of self-reported satisfaction after such casualties.
Some of the conclusions of Sunstein and others on happiness and the law make sense. Who would oppose increasing damages for constant misery from chronic pain or emotional distress, even if proving them is not as easy as establishing physical trauma? But Sunstein's proposal for awards guidelines suggests that damages for other major injuries might be reduced significantly on the grounds of psychological studies. A new category of expert witness could arise, defending negligent corporations by showing how the effects of dangerous products and environmental havoc really don't affect people's long-term life satisfaction, or at least creating doubt. Their doctrine might even be called the Dostoevsky Defense, from the famous passage on convict life in The House of the Dead: "Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him."
Other legal and behavioral scholars cited in the piece point out that there is more to life satisfaction than most surveys capture. One prime example is cultural contrast in reporting happiness to researchers. As one of Sunstein's collaborators, the psychologist and economics Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman, expressed it elsewhere, "it is hard to believe that the experienced well-being of the average employed Frenchman really matches that of the average unemployed American."
The new book I'm finishing on positive unintended consequences deals in part with human resilience. And our capacity to recover is impressive; think of all the refugees who became stars of their adopted nations. But should victims of wrongdoing or negligence be penalized for the often grueling work of recovery? And can any guidelines take account of how some people spring back from disaster and others never get over it?
Cass Sunstein, who is President Obama's nominee for the new position of regulatory czar, might have a new forum for his brand of hedonic jurisprudence. Some legal scholars are already concerned about his possible overuse of cost-benefit analysis.I asked my colleague Stan Katz about the chances for adoption of Sunstein's ideas on happiness and law, and was reassured to hear "not in our lifetimes." That's something to be happy about.
(I've also written on happiness for the Hastings Center site Bioethics Forum.)
According to the Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein and other legal academics and psychologists, personal injury damage awards underestimate the consequences for happiness of chronic conditions like back pain while exaggerating the lasting effect on our subjective well-being of blindness and the loss of limbs. Sunstein has suggested guidelines for damages that reflect studies of self-reported satisfaction after such casualties.
Some of the conclusions of Sunstein and others on happiness and the law make sense. Who would oppose increasing damages for constant misery from chronic pain or emotional distress, even if proving them is not as easy as establishing physical trauma? But Sunstein's proposal for awards guidelines suggests that damages for other major injuries might be reduced significantly on the grounds of psychological studies. A new category of expert witness could arise, defending negligent corporations by showing how the effects of dangerous products and environmental havoc really don't affect people's long-term life satisfaction, or at least creating doubt. Their doctrine might even be called the Dostoevsky Defense, from the famous passage on convict life in The House of the Dead: "Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him."
Other legal and behavioral scholars cited in the piece point out that there is more to life satisfaction than most surveys capture. One prime example is cultural contrast in reporting happiness to researchers. As one of Sunstein's collaborators, the psychologist and economics Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman, expressed it elsewhere, "it is hard to believe that the experienced well-being of the average employed Frenchman really matches that of the average unemployed American."
The new book I'm finishing on positive unintended consequences deals in part with human resilience. And our capacity to recover is impressive; think of all the refugees who became stars of their adopted nations. But should victims of wrongdoing or negligence be penalized for the often grueling work of recovery? And can any guidelines take account of how some people spring back from disaster and others never get over it?
Cass Sunstein, who is President Obama's nominee for the new position of regulatory czar, might have a new forum for his brand of hedonic jurisprudence. Some legal scholars are already concerned about his possible overuse of cost-benefit analysis.I asked my colleague Stan Katz about the chances for adoption of Sunstein's ideas on happiness and law, and was reassured to hear "not in our lifetimes." That's something to be happy about.
(I've also written on happiness for the Hastings Center site Bioethics Forum.)
When I read about the newspaper crisis, I think of Edwin Diamond, the New York University journalism professor who opened a conference I attended on "The Potential Downside of the National Information Infrastructure" at the now-discontinued Annenberg Washington Program in 1995. In his lecture, and in his landmark study of change at the New York Times (still in print after over 15 years), he revealed the fragility of newspapers' relationship with technology. Diamond compared the renaissance of science and technology sections, fueled by advertising revenue from the computer industry, to a similar space boom in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Reflecting on his part in promoting space exploration, he paraphrased the famous song of Tom Lehrer: "'I make them go up, where they come down/ Is not my department,' said Wernher von Braun." Thinking of computers and science sections in the 1960s he reflected: "We made it go up."
Diamond (as I recall; there's no transcript or recording) seemed to suspect that newspapers' computer-related advertising revenue would decline sooner or later, and that new technology might come right back down on the heads of newspaper owners. Of course management didn't agree. To the contrary, they believed that they were following the old business-school wisdom that the railroads got into trouble because they continued to believe they were in the train business rather than the transportation business. At the dawn of the Web age, newspaper publishers and editors believed with some reason that they had an unassailable position. The Times' experiments with remote printing of faxed editions go back to 1935 and succeeded at the Republican convention in San Francisco in 1956. Once the age of the personal computer dawned in the 1980s, editors and publishers of elite newspapers weren't sure about what they could charge for direct electronic delivery, how such a product would ultimately be formatted, or how it would coexist with print. They still aren't. But it was reasonable for them to think that 1) advertisers wanted to reach affluent customers, that 2) such readers needed high-quality information, and that 3) no competitive news organization could match the skills of their teams of specialist writers. There was no problem, in this way of thinking, that younger readers might prefer the electronic version; they'd be all the more desirable to marketers, and banner ads would more than make up for the loss of conventional display advertising.
Sadly, advertising cuts have forced even the youth-oriented satirical weekly The Onion, which had been laughing off the crisis, to close its San Francisco and Los Angeles editions. And Rupert Murdoch is planning to charge for News Corp. Web content. No more Mr. Nice Guy! (See Andrew Sullivan's excellent Quote For the Day and links on this announcement.) Can the Amazon.com Kindle DX revive the ailing quality press? Maybe the third time (after Space and the PC) will be the charm. The Times editors took a story appropriate for its Bits blog -- a minor glitch in the device's speech software -- and put it on the front page. They're making it go up.
(Since the problem was mispronunciation of Barack Obama's name, it's worth mentioning that the spell checker of the otherwise excellent blogging software I'm using flags both parts, suggesting among other alternatives Bareback and Barabbas for the President's forename and Obadiah and Alabama for his surname.)
Diamond (as I recall; there's no transcript or recording) seemed to suspect that newspapers' computer-related advertising revenue would decline sooner or later, and that new technology might come right back down on the heads of newspaper owners. Of course management didn't agree. To the contrary, they believed that they were following the old business-school wisdom that the railroads got into trouble because they continued to believe they were in the train business rather than the transportation business. At the dawn of the Web age, newspaper publishers and editors believed with some reason that they had an unassailable position. The Times' experiments with remote printing of faxed editions go back to 1935 and succeeded at the Republican convention in San Francisco in 1956. Once the age of the personal computer dawned in the 1980s, editors and publishers of elite newspapers weren't sure about what they could charge for direct electronic delivery, how such a product would ultimately be formatted, or how it would coexist with print. They still aren't. But it was reasonable for them to think that 1) advertisers wanted to reach affluent customers, that 2) such readers needed high-quality information, and that 3) no competitive news organization could match the skills of their teams of specialist writers. There was no problem, in this way of thinking, that younger readers might prefer the electronic version; they'd be all the more desirable to marketers, and banner ads would more than make up for the loss of conventional display advertising.
Sadly, advertising cuts have forced even the youth-oriented satirical weekly The Onion, which had been laughing off the crisis, to close its San Francisco and Los Angeles editions. And Rupert Murdoch is planning to charge for News Corp. Web content. No more Mr. Nice Guy! (See Andrew Sullivan's excellent Quote For the Day and links on this announcement.) Can the Amazon.com Kindle DX revive the ailing quality press? Maybe the third time (after Space and the PC) will be the charm. The Times editors took a story appropriate for its Bits blog -- a minor glitch in the device's speech software -- and put it on the front page. They're making it go up.
(Since the problem was mispronunciation of Barack Obama's name, it's worth mentioning that the spell checker of the otherwise excellent blogging software I'm using flags both parts, suggesting among other alternatives Bareback and Barabbas for the President's forename and Obadiah and Alabama for his surname.)
The H1N1 epidemic began as a prologue to tragedy and is ending like a Gilda Radner - Emily Litella sketch from the old Saturday Night Live: "Never mind." Yet it might still mean life or death for many people. On the positive side, the Guardian reports that British scientists have established the virus's full genetic code, and that the pace of vaccine research is encouraging. Further,
[a]t a meeting of Asian health ministers in Bangkok today, the WHO director general, Dr Margaret Chan, said the world was "better prepared for an influenza pandemic than at any time in history", largely because of precautions taken over the threat of bird flu.But the newspaper also notes rising skepticism in the UK and around the world about public health warnings. Authorities fear it could imperil a possible return of a more virulent strain of the virus this fall:
"People are taking a sigh of relief too soon," said Dr Richard Besser, acting director of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
"The measures we've been talking about - the importance of hand-washing, the importance of covering coughs, the real responsibility for staying home when you're sick and keeping your children home when you're sick - I'm afraid that people are going to say, 'Ah, we've dodged a bullet. We don't need to do that,'" he said.
Welcome to the world of "risk communication," a hybrid of corporate public relations, government public health, sociology, psychology, and lobbying. Lindsay Tanner and Mike Stobbe of the Associated Press have noted other experts' alarm about the spread of skepticism.
So the interaction of viruses, animal production, transportation, and communication -- especially, of course, the Web -- is a system that may be growing more complex, and potentially dangerous.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Procter & Gamble and Colgate have responded vigorously to consumers' new thrifty avoidance of higher-priced premium brands -- by raising prices of flagship products like Tide detergent even more.
We consumers can't get it right, living beyond our means during bubbles when we should be saving, and throttling back in downturns, putting each other and countless people overseas out of work. In January the award-winning British economic journalist Anatole Kaletsky even wrote a column with the ferocious headline "Punish Savers and Make Them Spend Money" -- and a Harvard counterpart, N. Gregory Mankiw, has recently made similar suggestions. (Mr. Kaletsky also proclaimed in April 2008 that if the Democrats were self-destructive enough to nominate him, "Obama would lose to McCain" in a "Greek tragedy" of "ineluctable doom.")
The paradox of thrift may have originated with John Maynard Keynes, but extreme saving, like the hypermiling that began even before the crisis, is an American specialty. In fact, extreme behavior of all kinds is both our glory and our potential downfall. As W. J. Rorabaugh wrote in The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition, we were the biggest drinkers on earth in the early nineteenth century, when distilled spirits were one of the few ways to move Western grain economically to Eastern markets before the railroads. Yet a hundred years after the whiskey boom, the Prohibition movement was gathering force and by 1919 had secured the Eighteenth Amendment. Americans got drunk together in communal bouts in the young Republic, so they had to sober up together in its maturity. We are the opposite of the ancient Greeks, with their motto "Nothing in Excess" inscribed on the temple of Apollo at Delphi.
The historian David Shi, author of The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture, found Americans turning to "therapeutic simplicity" well before the banking crisis. But in the end, even Amish communities increasingly depend on sales of craft and industrial products -- consumption -- to maintain their way of life. So we should also keep in mind the wisdom of one of our own oracles, Mae West: "Too much of a good thing can be wonderful."
We consumers can't get it right, living beyond our means during bubbles when we should be saving, and throttling back in downturns, putting each other and countless people overseas out of work. In January the award-winning British economic journalist Anatole Kaletsky even wrote a column with the ferocious headline "Punish Savers and Make Them Spend Money" -- and a Harvard counterpart, N. Gregory Mankiw, has recently made similar suggestions. (Mr. Kaletsky also proclaimed in April 2008 that if the Democrats were self-destructive enough to nominate him, "Obama would lose to McCain" in a "Greek tragedy" of "ineluctable doom.")
The paradox of thrift may have originated with John Maynard Keynes, but extreme saving, like the hypermiling that began even before the crisis, is an American specialty. In fact, extreme behavior of all kinds is both our glory and our potential downfall. As W. J. Rorabaugh wrote in The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition, we were the biggest drinkers on earth in the early nineteenth century, when distilled spirits were one of the few ways to move Western grain economically to Eastern markets before the railroads. Yet a hundred years after the whiskey boom, the Prohibition movement was gathering force and by 1919 had secured the Eighteenth Amendment. Americans got drunk together in communal bouts in the young Republic, so they had to sober up together in its maturity. We are the opposite of the ancient Greeks, with their motto "Nothing in Excess" inscribed on the temple of Apollo at Delphi.
The historian David Shi, author of The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture, found Americans turning to "therapeutic simplicity" well before the banking crisis. But in the end, even Amish communities increasingly depend on sales of craft and industrial products -- consumption -- to maintain their way of life. So we should also keep in mind the wisdom of one of our own oracles, Mae West: "Too much of a good thing can be wonderful."
Ted Anthony of the Associated Press interviewed me for his provocative analysis of the American spirit in a time of troubles. My take:
In a world of multiple threats, boldness and caution can lose their meaning. President Gerald Ford's decision to follow expert recommendations and immunize all Americans against the last feared swine flu pandemic in 1976 led to hundreds of cases of paralysis from Guillain-Barré syndrome and more than 30 deaths from the vaccine, versus only one from swine flu itself. Today, voluntary and imposed travel limits and government-ordered destruction of pigs can create economic, social, and political disruptions rivaling all but the most deadly strains. But how do we know how virulent the current swine flu virus will become? As Faye Flam reports, researchers still have a lot to learn about its complex ancestry and possible new forms. But the strain that caused the 1918 pandemic is definitely on its family tree.
So while we should be doing more to prepare for disruptions -- I remember how few people in my area had enough bottled water on hand when flooding in central New Jersey disabled a pumping station for a week or so -- it's good and healthy that we're not more concerned. We have learned to delegate our worrying.
If people had a vivid enough imagination of the threats they really face, the reactions that might occur could be almost as severe as the threats that we're anticipating.The dark side of the attention economy, in which human time becomes the scarce resource no matter how much content on the Internet is free, is competition among our anxieties, from emerging viruses to suitcase bombs. We probably worried too much about cyberterrorism in 1999 (and in general about computer failures in the date transition to the year 2000) and not enough about supposedly old-fashioned hijacking.
In a world of multiple threats, boldness and caution can lose their meaning. President Gerald Ford's decision to follow expert recommendations and immunize all Americans against the last feared swine flu pandemic in 1976 led to hundreds of cases of paralysis from Guillain-Barré syndrome and more than 30 deaths from the vaccine, versus only one from swine flu itself. Today, voluntary and imposed travel limits and government-ordered destruction of pigs can create economic, social, and political disruptions rivaling all but the most deadly strains. But how do we know how virulent the current swine flu virus will become? As Faye Flam reports, researchers still have a lot to learn about its complex ancestry and possible new forms. But the strain that caused the 1918 pandemic is definitely on its family tree.
So while we should be doing more to prepare for disruptions -- I remember how few people in my area had enough bottled water on hand when flooding in central New Jersey disabled a pumping station for a week or so -- it's good and healthy that we're not more concerned. We have learned to delegate our worrying.
Edward Tenner
