Alan Shusterman

We’ve been drifting in the economic doldrums for the past few years. Wondering how to get ahead, or just stay even, many wonder if there is anything to be grateful for this holiday season.

Everyone has to find their own answer, of course, but I recently came across a speech Bobby Kennedy gave in 1968 about economic performance and the good life. In short, he says don’t be fooled by ‘economic indicators’ like the Gross National Product. If you’re looking for true value (and something to be grateful for) look to poetry, family, intelligent discourse, and public service.

Thanks Bobby. It’s good to be reminded of what really counts.

Our Gross National Product now is over 800 billion dollars a year. But that Gross National Product, if we judge the United States of America by that, that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage, it counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them, it counts in the destruction of the Redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder and chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm.

And it counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts with it rifles and fixed knives and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. The Gross National Product does not allow the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play, it does not include the beauty of our poetry, the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debates, or the integrity of our public officials.

It measures neither our wit, nor our courage, neither our wisdom, nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

I just read Bill McKibben's article in Rolling Stone (2012 July 19): Global Warming's Terrifying New Math. According to Bill, fossil fuel companies have proven fuel reserves that would release 2795 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere were it all to be burned. That's a huge problem because Bill also says that scientists estimate that any chance of keeping global warming within tolerable limits requires that we add no more than 565 gigatons of CO2 to the atmosphere by 2050.

If fossil fuel companies are determined to sell (and we are willing to buy) all of that carbon, the climate and civilization don't stand a chance.

Can we stop the Big Burn before it's too late?

España! España! España!

My favorite game. My favorite team (after FC Barcelona, but so many players from FCB make it to the national squad, it seems silly to split hairs). And champions of the 2012 European Cup. What more can a sports fan ask for?

I happened to be walking down Columbus in North Beach (San Francisco, CA) when the Italy-Germany game began. Several cafes had the game on TV, but the owners of this one went all out, throwing open the windows and doors so that passers-by (many wearing the blue of Italy) could share in the waves of joy and gloom that radiated out of the flat screen TV's. (photos to be posted later)

"When fast and slow time meet, fast time wins. This is why one never gets the important things done because there is always something else one has to do first. Naturally, we will always tend to do the most urgent tasks first. In this way, the slow and long-term activities lose out. In an age when the distinctions between work and leisure are being erased, and efficiency seems to be the only value in economics, politics and research, this is really bad news for thorough, far-sighted work, play and long-term love relationships." (Eriksen, Tyranny of the Moment, 2001)

I invite your (patiently cultivated, well-turned over) comments.

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Prof. Gilbert Stork of Columbia University has enjoyed a lengthy and amazingly productive career as a synthetic organic chemist. It was my good fortune to spend a few minutes with him in spring 1976 when I was considering Columbia as a possible graduate school. I remember him looking out one of the windows in his office while he reflected on the fact that his younger organic colleagues (all of whom I had met earlier that day) had, no doubt, pumped me full of praise for life in New York city (which, perhaps they and he knew, was a very tough sell to a native Angeleno like me). He followed that comment with his own observation that most of his colleagues actually lived in New Jersey and their grad students spent nearly all of their waking hours in the chemistry lab, not in the city.

The article “Gilbert Stork: In His Own Words and in the Musings of His Friends” (J.I Seeman, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., Volume 51, Issue 12, pages 3012-3023, March 19, 2012) provides 12 pages of memorable observations about growing up, education, scientific research, and life. Here are two insightful “Storkisms” on how science works,
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A couple weeks ago I remarked on the steady climb in college tuition. An easy-to-use infographic, How Spending Has Changed, from Dr. Stephen J. Rose (The Atlantic, “The Money Report,” April 2012) adds another perspective by comparing 2007 consumer spending to that of 1947 consumers.

It turns out that certain necessities, like food and clothing, have become much cheaper than before. Not only do these items account for a smaller part of our spending, we spend less on them period. On the other hand, business services, education and health care are all moving in the other direction. We spend more on them than ever before and these items are becoming bigger and bigger pieces of our “spending pie”.

For more information about consumer spending, and the factors that drive it, along with comparisons to 1967 spending, see the magazine article, “How We Spend,” that accompanies the infographic.

Reed’s tuition for 2011-12 was only $42,540 (see Tuition, Fees, Room & Board History) so $100K tuition isn’t going to be a feature of campus life anytime soon. However, a front page article (“Ron Wyden puts a number to the soaring cost of college – 439 percent“) in yesterday’s Oregonian pointed out that average college tuition rates over the last 30 years have risen much faster than the consumer price index, must faster than average family incomes, and (this is truly amazing) much faster than the cost of medical care. So perhaps a six-figure tuition bill isn’t that far off?

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As my colleagues, and most of my students, know, I have flipped back and forth between being an experimental chemist and a computational/theoretical chemist. Because I am currently on the computation/theory side of my orbit, I was hoping that this Experimental Error article about the miseries of the lab would enhance the reputation of my line of work.

You can imagine, then, how sad I felt when I encountered, 7. Sometimes experiments fail for a reason. Sometimes experiments fail for no reason. This entry pointed out that “abrupt and inexplicable failure changes your work to meta-work” and compared an inexplicable failure in the lab to the vagaries of working with computer software. Unfortunately, I have to agree. Whether I am updating software and operating systems, rebooting hardware and resetting display resolution, or making the unhappy discovery that my filenames are using the wrong suffix or have been synchronized to the wrong folder, I spend hours every day doing meta-work.