June 2006 - Posts
With today's defeat to Ghana, the World Cup has been dramatically cut short for the United States team that arrived with much fanfare and expectation after reaching the quarter-finals four years ago. Yet an
editorial in today's New York times highlights an area of the US team that is overlooked but very telling: more players on the US team have college degrees than that of any other team. The author, David Brooks, uses this statistic to explain how the university system in America stands at the very center of cultural, scientific and athletic achievement in society, a process that has been intententionally wrought by liberal government policies that have given much autonomy to the universities. He contrasts this with the university system in Europe which is much more dependent on government funding and support and correspondingly has experienced much slower rates of growth and diminished prestige as illustrated by the fact that in the early part of the twentieth century 73 percent of Nobel laureates were from Europe whereas in the period between 1995-2004 only 19 percent were. The World Cup is merely a manifestation of this as most European stars developed their careers by leaving school to train with youth clubs while their American counterparts received both an education and athletic training in the same venue. The trajectory of these two societies could not be more apparent.
An interesting
article in this week's Economist attempts to explain with an assortment of statistics the growing disparity between America's haves and have nots, mainly in the context of the growth in productivity attributed to developments in information technology during the last twenty years. The article contends that the 30% increase in the amount a worker can produce in one hour since the mid 1990s has dramatically helped to make the rich richer than to elevate the status of the middle and low income worker. The statistics are perhaps most startling: incomes of the middle class have risen a paltry 1% (adjusted for inflation) since 2000 whereas they rose 6% in the previous 5 years. The richest Americans now earn the same share of overall income as they did a century ago and the trend is increasing sharply with one additional difference: as opposed to living off their wealth, these workers are now earning their income at much higher proportions than they once used to. The typical worker nowadays is only earning 10% more than the 1980s even though overall productivity has been much larger. The ramifications of this widening disparity on the political climate in the USA and the American embrace of globalisation are as yet to be determined. Yet there are positive arguments to be made for this economic disparity: the need for higher education is more pronounced and this is reflected in the statistic that shows that 30% of Americans today have post-secondary degrees compared to 20% in 1980. But why have advancements in IT been so much more advantageous to the highly skilled and rich than others? Consider the fact that IT has helped to increase potential markets and productivity. The market for CEOs, now able to operate in diverse industries, is now larger and their corresponding salaries have increased due to ferocious bidding for their services. Entertainers and sportsmen now have access to a wider audience. Reading this article brought me solace as it provided sweet justification for the amount of hours that we graduate students pour into our research for that ultimate prize, the PhD, and a ticket to enter the upper echelons of the work force.
Today I viewed a moving PBS frontline documentary entitled
The Age of Aids that chronicles the history of the Acquired Immunodifficiency Syndrome that has now claimed a staggering 25 million lives worldwide since it was first discovered 25 years ago. I first became aware of this surreal statistic through a headline this week in the New York times, in which the United Nations called for a
renewed effort in the tide to stem the explosion of AIDS. The Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) was first passed from chimpanzee to humans in what is believed to be sometime in the 1930s by a hunter-gathering tribe in west central Africa that butchered these primates for food. The virus killed a number of these early infected individuals and through the many cases of transmission, ultimately developed a particular immunity to the human immune system that to this day has prevented a cure from being found. Two major events that contributed to its explosion in the general population. The first is due to the smallpox vaccination used extensively in Africa during that time period which consisted of a common needle being used to vaccinate many individuals and the second involves the migration of men from the rural tribes into the large urban centers to seek work. The introduction of AIDS into the U.S. is thought to have occurred from vacationing homosexual American men in Haiti whose sexual encounters with the locals made them contract the disease and bring it back to cities with large gay communities, particularly San Francisco in which the disease first surfaced in early 1981. How did HIV which first originated in Africa come to Haiti you ask? During the independence of Congo (formerly Zaire) in the 1960s, many young Haitian professionals (doctors and teachers) were asked by the Congo government to come to Africa in order to help the liberated country on the course to modernisation. Eventually, when the politicaly instabilities of the country returned these Haitians left either to immigrate to Western Europe or the U.S.A while many returned to Haiti. The proliferation of AIDS in the gay community of San Francisco created in the conservative Reagan administration an unwillingness to battle the issue since many monotheistic religions regard homosexuality as devious social behavior that was now being dealt justice. The PBS documentary shows how many hemophiliacs in the United States contracted AIDS unknowingly through blood transfusion as many of the donors had been HIV positive heroine users (poor no doubt, and seeking financial compensation for their offering) which had contaminated the entire blood supply of the American Blood Bank. When taken together, one realizes that outbreak of the disease and the political climate of the times created a hotly contentious environment where the unknown virus was able to profilerate at an astonishing rate. The inability of politicians to reassure the general population of the truths of aids - particularly that it can only be contracted through sexual transmission or via blood - lead to widespread discrimnation against those individuals infected with the disease. Even the techniques developed to screen for the virus were extremely unpopular, for why would anyone want to be checked for a disease which carried such a strong social taboo and had no known cure? Most tragically, AIDS has ravaged the African continent the hardest where it is now believed that 25% of the population is infected. This continues to prevent the economic development of these countries by depriving them of their human capital and diverting a large portion of their GDP towards combatting the disease. In my opinion, my scientific peers and I need to take a leading role to educate the public about this horrible disease that is the burden of our generation and raise awareness of safe sex practices. Too many people are dying.