July 2009 Archives
Thomas L. Friedman's column on Tom Watson, "59 Is the New 30," is a reminder that there continues to be a global pensions storm as well as a US health insurance debate.George Magnus pleads for (further) raising retirement age in the Financial Times:
Source: Murray Gendell, "Retirement age declines in 1990s,"
Monthly Labor Review, October 2001, via Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Gazette, full article here.
In either case, government-supported retirement started 120 years ago at the initiative of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck with an explicit link between age (70 originally) and incapacity, not leisure. As Emperor Wilhelm I put it in his address to the Reichstag in 1881, "those who are disabled from work by age and invalidity have a well-grounded claim to care from the state." [emphasis added] The Kaiser and his minister were thinking of coal miners and spinning machine hands who deserved medals for surviving the machinery, dust, and noise into their 60s, let alone 70. Even then, many of the powerful saw things differently for themselves. When Wilhelm's son Wilhelm II retired Bismarck involuntarily, the Iron Chancellor was 74 and not entering his golden years joyfully, as the textbook-classic cartoon drawn by Sir John Tenniel (age 70), "Dropping the Pilot," makes clear:
Source: Wikipedia
And Frank Lloyd Wright was 67 and considered a has-been when he designed his most celebrated house, Fallingwater, as the Philadelphia Inquirer recently recounted. Wright was 92 when his Guggenheim Museum was complete; it is currently celebrating with a retrospective exhibition.
Source: Wikipedia
The problem with retirement talk is that one institution can be a means (to use the sociologist Erving Goffman's phrase) of "cooling the mark out," persuading someone to accept an inferior status and (in the vision of personal finance journalism) a stage of self-realization.
The anti-retirement faction can take some comfort from a recent Washington Post article on the extension of athletic careers. Sally Jenkins writes:
Maybe the demographic and recessionary squeeze on pensions and the need to keep working will yield a health blessing in disguise for people delaying retirement. And those who do want to retire as early as possible are going to need a society in which other people work longer. The real problem -- outside of physically and mentally stressful and dangerous work -- is encouraging growth of skills and renewal at all ages in the work force. I'll be returning to strategies for renewal at all ages in later posts.
Average life expectancy at birth in advanced economies is expected to rise from 77 to 83 in the next few decades. The population of over-65s is expected to double, while the number of over-80s will grow even faster. Meanwhile, low birth rates mean the working-age population will grow slowly or decline. The resulting rise in dependency of the over-65s on the working age population will be unprecedented. Unaddressed, it will create financial stress for individuals and the state, rising pensioner poverty, social dislocations and the possibility of intergenerational conflict.Retirement is a fraught subject because people of the same age bring such different expectations to it. Over the last few decades, as health and longevity of older people have improved, retirement ages have dropped. But why? Is age discrimination to blame? That depends on whether you believe the Wall Street Journal or USA Today. Or do the statistics reflect a sense of a relatively carefree period of travel, hobbies, and time with grandchildren that more and more people see as the best part of life. The blog Soul Shelter, citing Charles Lamb's famous essay "The Superannuated Man," about his own transition at 50 as a clerk in London's India House, suggests that we have been ambivalent about retirement for a long time.
Source: Murray Gendell, "Retirement age declines in 1990s,"
Monthly Labor Review, October 2001, via Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Gazette, full article here.
In either case, government-supported retirement started 120 years ago at the initiative of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck with an explicit link between age (70 originally) and incapacity, not leisure. As Emperor Wilhelm I put it in his address to the Reichstag in 1881, "those who are disabled from work by age and invalidity have a well-grounded claim to care from the state." [emphasis added] The Kaiser and his minister were thinking of coal miners and spinning machine hands who deserved medals for surviving the machinery, dust, and noise into their 60s, let alone 70. Even then, many of the powerful saw things differently for themselves. When Wilhelm's son Wilhelm II retired Bismarck involuntarily, the Iron Chancellor was 74 and not entering his golden years joyfully, as the textbook-classic cartoon drawn by Sir John Tenniel (age 70), "Dropping the Pilot," makes clear:
Source: Wikipedia
And Frank Lloyd Wright was 67 and considered a has-been when he designed his most celebrated house, Fallingwater, as the Philadelphia Inquirer recently recounted. Wright was 92 when his Guggenheim Museum was complete; it is currently celebrating with a retrospective exhibition.
Source: Wikipedia
The problem with retirement talk is that one institution can be a means (to use the sociologist Erving Goffman's phrase) of "cooling the mark out," persuading someone to accept an inferior status and (in the vision of personal finance journalism) a stage of self-realization.
The anti-retirement faction can take some comfort from a recent Washington Post article on the extension of athletic careers. Sally Jenkins writes:
Somebody once described retirement as "statutory senility." . . . . Studies show that retirement is no good for you. Even if you hate the job you go to every day, sudden abrupt inactivity is a bad idea. A working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research entitled "The Effects of Retirement on Physical and Mental Health Outcomes" studied people in complete retirement over six years. It found that retirement led to a 5 to 6 percent increase in illness, a 6 to 9 percent decline in mental health, and a 5 to 16 percent increase in mobility difficulties. The study also suggested that when retirement is involuntary, the symptoms -- which can range from expanding waistlines to depression to tobacco and alcohol use -- tend to be even worse.
Maybe the demographic and recessionary squeeze on pensions and the need to keep working will yield a health blessing in disguise for people delaying retirement. And those who do want to retire as early as possible are going to need a society in which other people work longer. The real problem -- outside of physically and mentally stressful and dangerous work -- is encouraging growth of skills and renewal at all ages in the work force. I'll be returning to strategies for renewal at all ages in later posts.
Dan Akst's post on height opens up one of the most intriguing topics in social science -- not the well-established fact that tall people earn more than short people but why this is so. The authors of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) study he cites say it's because tall people have been more likely to have reached their full cognitive development -- in other words, their IQs grew faster, too.
But that can't be the whole explanation. The world's leading scholar of height, whose work tends to support their hypothesis, is John Komlos of the University of Munich. His life story recently appeared in the New Yorker. He is one of the rare Americans to have his own institute at one of Germany's premier universities. At 5 feet 7, probably as a result of wartime and postwar malnutrition under Hungary's totalitarian regimes (his family emigrated after the 1956 revolution), Komlos developed such a powerful interest in the determinants of stature that he virtually created it as a subdiscipline. His disadvantage, contrary to the NBER paper, probably promoted his cognitive development.
The sociologist Irving Goffman was one of the highest paid members of his discipline and liked to boast that his royalties and investments each were at least equal to his salary. (Among other things, he had qualified as a blackjack dealer and pit boss in a Las Vegas casino, according to colleagues.) His former graduate student, Gary Marx, remembered him:
On the social level, studies are linking height with well-being, and diminishing US physical (and possible economic and political) stature with rising inequality. The credit for Northern European stature goes not to genes but to the European welfare state, Komlos and his collaborators have suggested. Here's a new motto for the US's social democrats: "Grow Up, America!"
Paradoxically, though, as Europeans get taller they appear to be choosing shorter leaders, or rather once more accepting the rule of assertive short people. And while Barak Obama is several inches taller than John McCain, the role of height in US politics has always been complex, or so I suggested during the 2004 campaign, before George W. Bush neutralized the four-inch gap with John Kerry.
See this paper (subscription possibly required) on the paradox that the effect of height on income appears due to adolescent experience rather than to effects of adult height. The white males in this study who were short in high school but grew to normal or above-average height in later growth spurts had the same disadvantages as those who remained short. So it's early social disadvantages, including lower participation in team sports, rather than later discrimination that is key. See also the excellent book of the science writer Stephen S. Hall, Size Matters, reviewed here.
The lesson I draw: It's attitude, not altitude, that matters.
But that can't be the whole explanation. The world's leading scholar of height, whose work tends to support their hypothesis, is John Komlos of the University of Munich. His life story recently appeared in the New Yorker. He is one of the rare Americans to have his own institute at one of Germany's premier universities. At 5 feet 7, probably as a result of wartime and postwar malnutrition under Hungary's totalitarian regimes (his family emigrated after the 1956 revolution), Komlos developed such a powerful interest in the determinants of stature that he virtually created it as a subdiscipline. His disadvantage, contrary to the NBER paper, probably promoted his cognitive development.
The sociologist Irving Goffman was one of the highest paid members of his discipline and liked to boast that his royalties and investments each were at least equal to his salary. (Among other things, he had qualified as a blackjack dealer and pit boss in a Las Vegas casino, according to colleagues.) His former graduate student, Gary Marx, remembered him:
In his book Stigma (1963), Goffman observed that there is "only one completely unblushing male in America: a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual, Protestant father of good complexion, weight, height, and a recent record in sports" Such men might become CEOs more often than others, but they're less likely to excel in other well-paid endeavors -- stand-up comedy, among other things -- where skills honed in childhood can flourish.As a Canadian Jew of short stature working at the margins (or perhaps better, frontiers) of a marginal discipline, he was clearly an outsider. His brilliance and marginality meant an acute eye and a powerful imagination. He had a fascination with other people's chutzpah, weirdness and perhaps even degradation. He appreciated people who had a good thing going and those able to assert themselves in the face of what could be an oppressive social structure and culture. In a stodgy, timid, bureaucratic world the hustler has a certain freshness and perverse appeal.
On the social level, studies are linking height with well-being, and diminishing US physical (and possible economic and political) stature with rising inequality. The credit for Northern European stature goes not to genes but to the European welfare state, Komlos and his collaborators have suggested. Here's a new motto for the US's social democrats: "Grow Up, America!"
Paradoxically, though, as Europeans get taller they appear to be choosing shorter leaders, or rather once more accepting the rule of assertive short people. And while Barak Obama is several inches taller than John McCain, the role of height in US politics has always been complex, or so I suggested during the 2004 campaign, before George W. Bush neutralized the four-inch gap with John Kerry.
See this paper (subscription possibly required) on the paradox that the effect of height on income appears due to adolescent experience rather than to effects of adult height. The white males in this study who were short in high school but grew to normal or above-average height in later growth spurts had the same disadvantages as those who remained short. So it's early social disadvantages, including lower participation in team sports, rather than later discrimination that is key. See also the excellent book of the science writer Stephen S. Hall, Size Matters, reviewed here.
The lesson I draw: It's attitude, not altitude, that matters.
A Northern New Jersey newspaper reports today on the latest in forensics, use of DNA evidence to solve burglaries and other property crimes:
What is sad is that a dispatcher's use of freely available technology, not advanced databases, could have defused the whole event. As of 11:10 on July 23, Gates's name, address, and telephone number were still available on line through Google and probably other means. (You can even get the Harvard housing office brochure about the house with rent information online.) A dispatcher could have searched the address, found occupants' names within seconds, used them to determine Gates's appearance and Harvard connection, and relayed all of this to the officers on their way to the scene. I'd be surprised if they didn't have laptops and/or smartphones with them that could have found the same information. And since Professor Gates said he had entered through the back door and turned off the alarm system, shouldn't the dispatcher also have known about the system's existence -- most cities now require registration to penalize repeat false alarms -- and let the officer know that the owner probably was the person observed at the door?
With the right background information the sergeant could have recognized Gates, addressed him by name, and explained that verifying identification was a formality in clearing the call. John Cook on Gawker quotes from a Gates interview refusing to blame the caller:
To me the episode is not only about race, class, and Harvard. It may be just as much about basic service management that could have defused the situation. Were Cambridge police procedures worthy of a world center of computing research? And are the Web's incursions on privacy necessarily opposed to the citizen's liberties? Sometimes there are unintended consequences of not using technology.
"Everyone now has a couple of Q-Tips in their crime scene kits," said North Bergen Police Lt. Frank Cannella, referring to the swabs used to absorb saliva, blood and other bodily fluids that contain DNA.And that makes the arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., one of the best known members of the Harvard faculty all the more puzzling. It isn't entirely surprising that the Cambridge police sergeant who arrived after a burglary call didn't recognize Gates; the era of the beat patrolman, even in dense urban areas like Cambridge's Ware Street, ended decades ago. The sergeant and the woman who reported the break-in also live miles from Cambridge. (As a former contributing editor to Harvard Magazine, where the caller worked, I have often visited the nearby publication offices on Ware Street, and and have never given a thought to who might be living in one of the old frame houses next door in a district of Harvard offices and apartments.)
What is sad is that a dispatcher's use of freely available technology, not advanced databases, could have defused the whole event. As of 11:10 on July 23, Gates's name, address, and telephone number were still available on line through Google and probably other means. (You can even get the Harvard housing office brochure about the house with rent information online.) A dispatcher could have searched the address, found occupants' names within seconds, used them to determine Gates's appearance and Harvard connection, and relayed all of this to the officers on their way to the scene. I'd be surprised if they didn't have laptops and/or smartphones with them that could have found the same information. And since Professor Gates said he had entered through the back door and turned off the alarm system, shouldn't the dispatcher also have known about the system's existence -- most cities now require registration to penalize repeat false alarms -- and let the officer know that the owner probably was the person observed at the door?
With the right background information the sergeant could have recognized Gates, addressed him by name, and explained that verifying identification was a formality in clearing the call. John Cook on Gawker quotes from a Gates interview refusing to blame the caller:
We depend on the police-I'm glad that this lady called 911. I hope right now if someone is breaking into my house she's calling 911 and the police will come! I just don't want to be arrested for being black at home! I think this was a bit of an extreme reaction.
To me the episode is not only about race, class, and Harvard. It may be just as much about basic service management that could have defused the situation. Were Cambridge police procedures worthy of a world center of computing research? And are the Web's incursions on privacy necessarily opposed to the citizen's liberties? Sometimes there are unintended consequences of not using technology.
The Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin proposes in the Washington Post:
One expression is unnerving: homestead. And it's worrisome precisely because it summarizes what are otherwise attractive attributes: courage, perseverance, willingness to take risks. There is also the belief that self-sustaining Mars colonies could perpetuate human society if the earth became uninhabitable, an idea endorsed at the very highest levels of science:
Homesteading Mars is based on the assumption that humanity can modify extraterrestrial environments as self-sustaining producers of the means of life. But the Dust Bowl of the 1930s was the result of the boundless technological optimism that encouraged the settling of the Great Plains, as explored in the classic work of the environmental historian Donald Worster, whose roots are in the region. First, in the nineteenth century came the idea that human activity would modify natural patterns: "Rain follows the plow." Then the First World War created an agricultural boom that produced a wave of speculative farming in the 1920s.
There's no truly rational way to budget for Mars exploration. If we knew what we were going to find, it wouldn't be necessary. Much of the benefit of exploring is surprise, images and data that upset our assumptions. So yes, let's send people to Mars if that's the best way to advance knowledge. But remember that the Martian soil turns out to be laced with the oxidizing salt perchlorate, an ingredient of rocket fuel, among other things. Let's balance Aldrin's appeal and Hawking's injunction with a comment that another giant, the Nobel Laureate physicist Edward Purcell, made to me twenty years ago: With the energy it takes to get a person out of the earth's gravitational well, you can feed them for a lifetime.
Let the lunar surface be the ultimate global commons while we focus on more distant and sustainable goals to revitalize our space program. Our next generation must think boldly in terms of a goal for the space program: Mars for America's future. I am not suggesting a few visits to plant flags and do photo ops but a journey to make the first homestead in space: an American colony on a new world.There's no doubt about the excitement of Mars exploration. And it's certainly possible that astronauts would be able to conduct investigations and perform experiments that robots could not match. Nor does the word "colony" bother me; contrary to centuries of speculation there were no Native Martians to be dispossessed by us (or to invade Earth), in fact no unambiguous sign of present Martian surface life, though who knows what aquatic organisms might exist in the planet's interior.
One expression is unnerving: homestead. And it's worrisome precisely because it summarizes what are otherwise attractive attributes: courage, perseverance, willingness to take risks. There is also the belief that self-sustaining Mars colonies could perpetuate human society if the earth became uninhabitable, an idea endorsed at the very highest levels of science:
Homesteading Mars is based on the assumption that humanity can modify extraterrestrial environments as self-sustaining producers of the means of life. But the Dust Bowl of the 1930s was the result of the boundless technological optimism that encouraged the settling of the Great Plains, as explored in the classic work of the environmental historian Donald Worster, whose roots are in the region. First, in the nineteenth century came the idea that human activity would modify natural patterns: "Rain follows the plow." Then the First World War created an agricultural boom that produced a wave of speculative farming in the 1920s.
There's no truly rational way to budget for Mars exploration. If we knew what we were going to find, it wouldn't be necessary. Much of the benefit of exploring is surprise, images and data that upset our assumptions. So yes, let's send people to Mars if that's the best way to advance knowledge. But remember that the Martian soil turns out to be laced with the oxidizing salt perchlorate, an ingredient of rocket fuel, among other things. Let's balance Aldrin's appeal and Hawking's injunction with a comment that another giant, the Nobel Laureate physicist Edward Purcell, made to me twenty years ago: With the energy it takes to get a person out of the earth's gravitational well, you can feed them for a lifetime.
Bloggers are agog about the intellectual property outrage du jour, withdrawal of the works of George Orwell himself not only from the Kindle catalog but from the computers of "purchasers" who have just discovered that they were only licensees whose rights could be rescinded by refunding their money. (They already knew, presumably, that they could not resell or donate their copies.) David Pogue notes on his New York Times site:
But I don't think we've heard the last of the rights question. Several years ago, a libel suit persuaded one of the world's most respected publishers, Cambridge University Press, to withdraw a book published after rigorous academic review. By then, many copies had been sold, and the work is available on the antiquarian market, though often at rare-book prices. But what if all copies of an exclusively electronic book could be instantly and virtually pulped? I have written for Technology Review on the perils of digital limits on the rights of legitimate buyers.
Maybe bulky paper isn't a bug any more; it's a feature.
apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people's Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.After the predictable and understandable venting -- more an online collective guffaw than the two-minute hate chant of 1984 -- there's no explanation from Amazon, the electronic publisher, the Orwell Estate, or any other principal in this weird mystery. It's more Pink Panther than Winston Smith. And maybe it's already moot. Information Week reports (without details so far) that "Amazon Says It Will Stop Deleting Kindle Books."
But I don't think we've heard the last of the rights question. Several years ago, a libel suit persuaded one of the world's most respected publishers, Cambridge University Press, to withdraw a book published after rigorous academic review. By then, many copies had been sold, and the work is available on the antiquarian market, though often at rare-book prices. But what if all copies of an exclusively electronic book could be instantly and virtually pulped? I have written for Technology Review on the perils of digital limits on the rights of legitimate buyers.
Maybe bulky paper isn't a bug any more; it's a feature.
Citing an aside in David Brooks's column on the Sotomayor hearings,
"Eminent scientists": 26 percent
"Eminent French and English poets": 24 percent
"Eminent English writers and poets": 55 percent
"Historical geniuses": 30 percent
American Presidents: 34 percent
British Prime Ministers: 33 percent
Even allowing for higher morality before the later twentieth century, these are quite a contrast with the average of 8 percent who lose a parent by 16.
In the current Atlantic, see Christopher Hitchens on Abraham Lincoln's traumatic childhood:
Returning to the main point of David Brooks's column, he seems to be saying that if you want to know the price of success, you can't afford it. We still don't know why tragedies and abuse seem to strengthen some people and shatter others. But maybe it really isn't so bad to get what you wish for. High status people live longer. The tensions of power are a walk in the park compared to the stress of powerlessness. The elite have many pressures, but these arise from their greater autonomy. Even many middle-class people with professional credentials may have little control over the decisions most closely affecting them, especially now. And nobody understands this better than people who have known poverty and loss.
It is amazing how many people who suffer parental loss between the ages of 9 and 13 go on to become astounding high achievers.a reader in India writes
I would enjoy knowing the other examples that Brooks had in mind when he remarked that often those losing a parent in their childhood grow up to become high achievers. I can think of many such people in my own life, but would like to know the public figures.This is the kind of paradox I've been looking into. Teresa Amabile, in Creativity in Context, cites a number of studies (212, 263):
"Eminent scientists": 26 percent
"Eminent French and English poets": 24 percent
"Eminent English writers and poets": 55 percent
"Historical geniuses": 30 percent
American Presidents: 34 percent
British Prime Ministers: 33 percent
Even allowing for higher morality before the later twentieth century, these are quite a contrast with the average of 8 percent who lose a parent by 16.
In the current Atlantic, see Christopher Hitchens on Abraham Lincoln's traumatic childhood:
The law as it then stood made children the property of their father, so young Abraham was "hired out" only in the sense of chattel, since he was obliged to turn over his wages. From this, and from the many groans and sighs that are reported of the boy (who still struggled to keep reading, an activity feared and despised by his father, as it was by the owner of Frederick Douglass), we receive a prefiguration of the politician who declared in 1856, "I used to be a slave." In Lincoln's unconcealed resentment toward his male parent, we get an additional glimpse of the man who also declared, in 1858, "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master."Joshua Wolf Schenk has likewise traced the origins of Dr. George Vaillant's quest to understand long-term mental health in his father's unexplained suicide when the son was only ten.
Returning to the main point of David Brooks's column, he seems to be saying that if you want to know the price of success, you can't afford it. We still don't know why tragedies and abuse seem to strengthen some people and shatter others. But maybe it really isn't so bad to get what you wish for. High status people live longer. The tensions of power are a walk in the park compared to the stress of powerlessness. The elite have many pressures, but these arise from their greater autonomy. Even many middle-class people with professional credentials may have little control over the decisions most closely affecting them, especially now. And nobody understands this better than people who have known poverty and loss.
Some further thoughts based on readers' comments on my original post, and other recent articles:
From Seth:
I agree with Umesh Patil that scientific quality can have a long lag time. I should add that I hope the Pew Research Center will follow up with a survey focusing on what's happening at the graduate and postgraduate level now. It might also look at the controversy over opportunities for scientists and where there is really a shortage:
It's not clear that scientific (or humanistic) education improves people or societies. The Soviet Union had superb schools and some of the world's best popular high school science publications. What's important is not seeking domination at others' expense -- it's continuing to be in the first rank of a cooperative global enterprise.
Matthew Nisbet in his reply and on his blog looks on the positive side, the
Alex L., a Materials Science student, is alarmed by the absence of American-born peers at his research university in the Southeast. And I think that's a reflection not so much of the quality of secondary education as of the perception that the social respect may be there, but the opportunities are not. See the Pew report's table. Fully 31 percent of the public thinks business executives contribute "not much" or "nothing" to society, but so far that hasn't turned much talent from business to science and engineering. Quite the contrary. The low opinion of business may also signify, among other things, the perception that executives are putting short-term profits ahead of investment in research, so why expect great scientific career opportunities from them? For a more corporate-oriented critique of research support and competitiveness, see the current Harvard Business Review (abstract).
From Seth:
It's true that funding agencies do tend to stress low-risk projects, but this approach makes sense. Scientific achievements most often come from slow and steady progress, punctuated by an occasional major discovery. The major discoveries can't occur in a vacuum; they rely on having that foundation of knowledge that was built up over prior years.You're right that important work often is the result of cumulative efforts. The cult of paradigm-breaking, revolutionary science dismayed even Thomas Kuhn, whose Structure of Scientific Revolutions became of the best selling scholarly books of all time. On the other hand, my own friends and acquaintances in science seem to agree with the poll results that there's too much caution in grants. That may be true in journal editing, too, and not just in the US. The Spanish physicist Juan Miguel Campanario has studied the rejection of high quality papers.
I agree with Umesh Patil that scientific quality can have a long lag time. I should add that I hope the Pew Research Center will follow up with a survey focusing on what's happening at the graduate and postgraduate level now. It might also look at the controversy over opportunities for scientists and where there is really a shortage:
The Sloan Foundation sponsors some of the most prestigious fellowships for young scientists, so their assessment of scientific opportunity should be cause for concern, even though the Obama administration doesn't share it. Last year Dr. Bruce Rosen of Massachusetts General Hospital told the Boston Globe:Among the most vocal critics: Michael Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York, which funds basic scientific, economic and civic research. He says there are "substantially more scientists and engineers" graduating from the USA's universities than can find attractive jobs.
"Indeed, science and engineering careers in the U.S. appear to be relatively unattractive" compared with other career paths, he told Congress in 2007.
"It is a time of great difficulty, in my own experience not seen since the mid-late '80's," he said. "In our own lab I've begun to see very promising young scientists choosing careers in business consulting rather than research positions, and am facing the very real possibility for the first time in a very long while of watching good scientists potentially lose their jobs for lack of support. This is obviously devastating for the individuals involved, and very dispiriting to the community of their peers who see themselves sometimes only a small step ahead."According to this article in Nature (full text may require subscription) there are significantly more principal NIH investigators over 70 than under 30:
"We're eating our seedcorn," says [NIH Director Elias] Zerhouni.Anna raises this issue from her own experience as a young investigator and also questions conventional scorekeeping on scientific prowess:
I don't understand why US eminence is an issue - as if we were in competition with everyone else, which doesn't seem to be the spirit of science. Haven't all of us learned, ever since grad school, that collaboration is the key to success in science? It is true that there is a lot of competition in science, but during recent years such competition has done more harm than good to science.And I agree that there's sometimes a note of panic or even chauvinism in criticism of America's scientific position. At least one distinguished economist, Amar Bhidé of Columbia (who earlier this year gave a presentation at the center I'm visiting), believes Americans' real vocation is as "venturesome" consumers, whose zest for innovation benefits themselves and the world far more than "techno-nationalism" would.
It's not clear that scientific (or humanistic) education improves people or societies. The Soviet Union had superb schools and some of the world's best popular high school science publications. What's important is not seeking domination at others' expense -- it's continuing to be in the first rank of a cooperative global enterprise.
Matthew Nisbet in his reply and on his blog looks on the positive side, the
almost unrivaled respect, admiration, and deference in American society, with these perceptions relatively unchanged since the days of Sputnik.I'm in accord with Matt's interpretation of that aspect of the report and also reject alarmism about a widening gap between science and the public. But it's that very esteem that made me highlight the public's concern about long-term trends.
Alex L., a Materials Science student, is alarmed by the absence of American-born peers at his research university in the Southeast. And I think that's a reflection not so much of the quality of secondary education as of the perception that the social respect may be there, but the opportunities are not. See the Pew report's table. Fully 31 percent of the public thinks business executives contribute "not much" or "nothing" to society, but so far that hasn't turned much talent from business to science and engineering. Quite the contrary. The low opinion of business may also signify, among other things, the perception that executives are putting short-term profits ahead of investment in research, so why expect great scientific career opportunities from them? For a more corporate-oriented critique of research support and competitiveness, see the current Harvard Business Review (abstract).
The Pew Research Center report on attitudes toward science in American life is intriguing. The masses appear be more respectful of scientists than vice versa. But the public is also more worried about the state of US research than scientists themselves are. The proportion of the public considering science America's "greatest achievement" has declined from 47 percent in 1999 to 27 percent now. While nearly half of scientists (49 percent) consider US science "the best in the world," only 17 percent of the public do. In fact, over a quarter (26 percent) regard it as only "average," a judgement shared by only 5 percent of scientists themselves.
There are some apparent contradictions in the thinking of scientists. Three quarters of them (76 percent) say this "a good time for science" in general, and a slightly smaller proportion for their own fields, but fully 87 percent are concerned about lack of funding for basic science as a "very serious" or "serious" impediment to "high-quality" research. Does that mean it's a great time -- for mediocre results? It probably reflects scientists' sentiment that grant-makers favor the routine and predictable. As a section of the report explains:
Here's a view from the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation site for a European perspective. It suggests lasting headaches from the US dot-com hangover:
There are some apparent contradictions in the thinking of scientists. Three quarters of them (76 percent) say this "a good time for science" in general, and a slightly smaller proportion for their own fields, but fully 87 percent are concerned about lack of funding for basic science as a "very serious" or "serious" impediment to "high-quality" research. Does that mean it's a great time -- for mediocre results? It probably reflects scientists' sentiment that grant-makers favor the routine and predictable. As a section of the report explains:
Comparable shares of scientists working in applied (62%) and basic (60%) research say that most research funders in their fields emphasize lower risk projects expected to make incremental progress. Across scientific disciplines, those working in the biological and medical sciences are more likely than others to say that most funders stress low-risk projects.
Here's a view from the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation site for a European perspective. It suggests lasting headaches from the US dot-com hangover:
In Washington, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation only classes the US sixth according to criteria such as investment in research and development, high technology infrastructure and the proportion of researchers in the working population. More seriously, of the 36 countries studied, the United States was the one that had progressed the least in ten years.In science and technology alike, there can be a long delay before a trend in education or grant support is reflected conspicuously, as in the Nobel Prizes, which honor researchers for work often done decades earlier on the basis of previous professional training. The laity, ignorant of scientific (and other facts) though they may be, might have more insight from a distance than researchers who must focus on the next proposal.
The turmoil over the Vietnam War didn't involve only Ivy Leaguers like McGeorge Bundy and Walt Rostow. It was also a civil war among Berkeleyans. As McNamara told a campus interviewer:
Neither my mother nor father had ever graduated from college. My father hadn't gone beyond the 8th grade, and they were determined that I would go to college. I took the entrance exams for Stanford; at that time (this was 1932 and 1933), very few first-class universities required entrance exams. Stanford did; I passed. But it didn't take me long to figure out that, even working part-time and receiving scholarships, I couldn't possibly pay the board, room, and tuition at Stanford, so I came to Cal. That's the only reason I was here. It was the only first-class university in the country that I could afford to go to. What did I pay? Well I lived at home. I paid $52 tuition per year. And for that I am eternally grateful.And he continued:
I hope I am an enlightened rationalist, and to the degree that I am, it came from this university. Surely I went to Harvard, and I've in a sense been educated in all the years after I graduated from formal education, but my basic philosophy, my basic moral standards, my basic ethical values came out of this university. . . .In the demonstrations of the Vietnam Berkeley was divided between liberal and radical factions that turned these values against themselves, bringing their mutual foe, Governor Ronald Reagan, to the fore in national politics. Reading between the lines in the interview, I can sense that McNamara regretted not only the outcome of the war but its effect on his alma mater.
Giant troves of quantitative data were collected, analyzed, disaggregated and reassembled. Plans -- typically on a five-year timetable -- were conceived and then, presumably, executed. He once called the Bank "an innovative, problem-solving mechanism . . . to help fashion a better life for mankind." Nobel Prizes in economics would later be awarded for disproving this mechanistic notion of institutions. But no Nobel was required to understand that rationalism isn't a synonym for reason, much less common sense, or that a planned solution was a workable or desirable solution, or that war or poverty were "problems" in the same sense as, say, a deficit.While Stephens cites McNamara as a cautionary tale for the Obama administration, the risks of unchecked rationality have been all too evident in the last ten years in industries like energy trading, insurance, and banking, staffed by people from places like Berkeley as well as Harvard. Calm deliberation can mask doubtful assumptions. As G.K. Chesterton put it, the madman is not the one who has lost his reason, but he who has lost everything but his reason.
The New York Times reports on a possible incandescent renaissance that could modify traditional bulbs to capture waste heat as light, improving their efficiency by 30, 50, or even 100 percent to qualify for new energy standards. Score one for technology-forcing legislation -- at least for now. It's doubtful that even with higher energy prices, entrepreneurs and established lighting companies would be investing in a high-priced replacement for such a homely, familiar commodity.
We still can't rule out short-term bottlenecks with new incandescent designs. Automated light bulb factories turned out to be very difficult to engineer in the early 20th century. Between the wars, the Hungarian-born physical chemist and philosopher of science Michael Polanyi was a light bulb inventor and a consultant to the Hungarian lighting industry. In his book The Tacit Dimension he cited the surprisingly long time required to resolve problems with light bulb production lines in Budapest that had been operating smoothly with the same equipment in England. Scaling up the new designs around the world might be challenging. The incandescent bulb has proved so popular because decades of incremental changes in production technology had produced such a lean system. According to the unusually complete Wikipedia article on the subject,
Light bulbs aren't the only surprise in energy efficiency studies. I was recently amazed to learn from The Green Home site that at least in smaller sizes, cathode ray tube (CRT) televisions actually use fewer watts per square inch than liquid crystal display (LCD) sets:
We still can't rule out short-term bottlenecks with new incandescent designs. Automated light bulb factories turned out to be very difficult to engineer in the early 20th century. Between the wars, the Hungarian-born physical chemist and philosopher of science Michael Polanyi was a light bulb inventor and a consultant to the Hungarian lighting industry. In his book The Tacit Dimension he cited the surprisingly long time required to resolve problems with light bulb production lines in Budapest that had been operating smoothly with the same equipment in England. Scaling up the new designs around the world might be challenging. The incandescent bulb has proved so popular because decades of incremental changes in production technology had produced such a lean system. According to the unusually complete Wikipedia article on the subject,
[b]y 1964, improvements in efficiency and production of incandescent lamps had reduced the cost of providing a given quantity of light by a factor of thirty, compared with the cost at introduction of Edison's lighting system
Light bulbs aren't the only surprise in energy efficiency studies. I was recently amazed to learn from The Green Home site that at least in smaller sizes, cathode ray tube (CRT) televisions actually use fewer watts per square inch than liquid crystal display (LCD) sets:
As television screens grew to mammoth proportions it quickly became apparent that they were also becoming mammoth energy hogs. According to the California Energy Commission current LCDs use about .27-watts per square inch and plasmas use 0.36-watts per square inch. In contrast, a CRT uses .23-watts per square inch. A set to set comparison is not possible because CRTs are not manufactured in quite the giant economy sizes of the other two types of display, but here is one example, also from the Commission: a CRT with a 30 inch screen - very generous size for that type - uses 101 watts. An LCD that is 42 inches in diameter uses 203 watts and a plasma screen of the same size uses 271 watts.To conclude on energy and the pace of innovation. 1) Laws and bans may accelerate innovation. But since advocates acknowledge that low manufacturing standards and inadequate recycling plans for CFLs can also negate their environmental benefits, the state thereby begins a regulatory treadmill of testing and enforcement. Nationally CFL recycling is still a work in progress. 2) Just as automobile makers used their efficiency gains in the 1990s to offer more powerful cars with the same MPG ratings, the LCD has helped promote ever-larger televisions using more energy than CRTs. 3) If you have a CRT, why not keep it, and if you need a TV, why not get a good used CRT for very little? Think of it as adopting a dog from a shelter.
Nova's Science Now on Tuesday evening seemed to promise me a miracle cure. When I was in first grade and the class was singing, my teacher told me to mouth the words. And my own mother seemed to accept the verdict. Today's parents would probably march off to the principal's office to protest such a withering blow to self-esteem. But for us, it became a family joke. The announcement's reference to "pitch-correcting software" seemed to promise a vocal training program that could teach us tonally challenged folk to sing on key.
Auto-Tune turns out to be less -- and more. It's not some kind of tutorial for self-improvement. Rather it's an acoustic Photoshop that retains a singer's tonal quality while altering pitch to correct errors and assure consistency. It's been an open secret of sound engineers in live as well as recorded music, famous since its over-the-top use in Cher's Believe over a decade ago. And it worked wonders for the host Neil deGrasse Tyson, even if it took hours of work by a top audio engineer to create presentable crooning.
There's more to it than that. Auto-Tune is now the focus of debate on whether the processing of sound has gone too far (as in Jay-Z's video D[eath] O[f] A[utotune]) or as Jace Clayton suggests in Frieze Magazine, the software's global popularity
Auto-Tune turns out to be less -- and more. It's not some kind of tutorial for self-improvement. Rather it's an acoustic Photoshop that retains a singer's tonal quality while altering pitch to correct errors and assure consistency. It's been an open secret of sound engineers in live as well as recorded music, famous since its over-the-top use in Cher's Believe over a decade ago. And it worked wonders for the host Neil deGrasse Tyson, even if it took hours of work by a top audio engineer to create presentable crooning.
There's more to it than that. Auto-Tune is now the focus of debate on whether the processing of sound has gone too far (as in Jay-Z's video D[eath] O[f] A[utotune]) or as Jace Clayton suggests in Frieze Magazine, the software's global popularity
creates a different relation of voice to machine than ever before. Rather than novelty or some warped mimetic response to computers, Auto-Tune is a contemporary strategy for intimacy with the digital. As such, it becomes quite humanizing. Auto-Tune operates as a duet between the electronics and the personal. A reconciliation with technology.And on the classical side, the most prophetic ideas may have been those of Glenn Gould, who embraced recording as aesthetically (and ethically) superior to concert performance, as Michael Hiltzig reminds us in the Los Angeles Times:
He frequently scorned the notion that a recording could never be as "real" as a live performance, or that inserts, splices, overlays and other engineering manipulations somehow violate artistic integrity.Auto-Tune doesn't have much to offer people like me; it's not clear whether any voice training software program could help. But the Nova program does show a major side of technological change in the arts. Ever since Voltaire scoffed at the future of the newfangled "tinsmith's instrument," the piano, in its challenge to the "magnificent harpsichord," creative people -- for better and for worse -- have always developed and used tools in ways their inventors never foresaw.
One time he challenged a panel of 18 friends, ranging from audio engineers and professional musicians to his doctor and a librarian, to identify by ear the splices in eight sample recordings.
No one caught more than a handful.
"The tape does lie and nearly always gets away with it," Gould concluded.
Edward Tenner
