Science, engineering, and the recession

It was the UK’s Bryan Appleyard who started me thinking about health and the recession. In an article on what to expect in 2009, he interviewed Chris Ruhm, who stands by his 1996 findings that recessions are good for your health.

“People get physically healthier and mortality rates fall during bad economic times,” he tells me. “It’s the opposite of what I expected to find.” . . .
“When times are hard, [people] control the things they can control – they live healthily.”

I think it makes sense that anxiety of any sort prompts some people to adopt healthy lifestyles, but I still don’t buy Ruhm’s conclusion that health gets better in bad economic times.
Appleyard also interviewed Rick Haythornthwaite, Chairman of the Board of Directors of MasterCard. Haythornthwaite comments that our brightest college graduates have preferred careers in finance since the early 1990s. If the Wall Street collapse encourages the “best young brains” to choose more valuable careers, that would be a plus.

“My hope,” says Haythornthwaite, “is that some of the most talented people will go back into science-based and engineering careers. So much of the financial sector is a zero-sum game, whereas science and engineering create sustainable wealth. That’s what’s going to get us out of this recession. It’s a good thing that jobs in the financial services are now so much less appealing.”

Fifty years ago Sputnik prompted the National Defense Education Act, which produced a generation of mathematicians and scientists. The high regard for science didn’t last, however, either in education and in government policy. So it’s encouraging to see President Obama’s science-related appointments: Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, as energy secretary; John Holdren, a Harvard physicist and energy expert, as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; Dr. Harold Varmus, another Nobel Prize winner, as a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology; and marine ecologist Jane Lubchenco as head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
SustainableBusiness.com also notices Obama’s MO:

The appointments send yet another message that the Obama administration will value the opinions of the scientific community–a choice that is distinctly different from the Bush administration, which has repeatedly gone against the advice of scientists working within the nation’s federal agencies and universities.
“The Bush administration has been the most remarkably anti-science administration that I’ve seen in my adult lifetime,” Nobel laureate David Baltimore, former president of the California Institute of Technology, said in an interview. “And I do think that there will be a sea change in the Obama administration with the respect shown for the findings of science as well as the process of science.”

A recent Newsweek article argues that newly capitalist China is suffering less from the recession than other countries, in part because it’s governed by engineers.

China’s faith in its ability to mold markets may derive from the fact that its leaders are mostly engineers, trained to build from a plan. Eight out of the nine top party officials come from engineering backgrounds, and the practicality of their profession may help explain why they didn’t buy into risky (and Western) financial innovation. These ruling engineers preside over a system that is highly process-oriented and obsessed with performance metrics. … [T]he fact that an increasingly rich China still works so well deserves studying, not least because the credit crisis is provoking a wider questioning of free-market orthodoxy.

I don’t think what works in China would translate to the United States, for any number of reasons. Please note, I am not, and I have never been, a member of the Communist Party. But I do believe American-style “free-market orthodoxy” all too often means that corporate interests take precedence over public interests, including public health. It’s the lobbying power of a company like Pepsi that allows them to place Diet Pepsi logos on baby bottles. From Marion Nestle:

[T]he level of cynicism is especially disturbing. What are we to make of the comments of a PepsiCo official who casually mentions that “marketing to the 8- to 12-year-old set is a priority,” as though it were unquestionably appropriate for a soft drink company to direct sales efforts to such young children?

My how far we’ve come from simply wanting to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.

I know, the quotation is from a Pepsi exec and that video was a Coke ad. But in the end they’re both just colored sugar water.

Related posts:
The financial crisis: Blame it on the collapse of Communism