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Sept. 17, 2004 Famous professors in Ivy League colleges on the East Coast, and in Stanford and Berkeley on the West Coast, give us lots of advice in the form of wonderful-sounding theories. Economics professors tell us that President Bush's national debt will cause inflation, and political science profs say the occupation of Iraq will stimulate Al-Queda to attack us more. Professors of philosophy (who are responsible for most of the teaching about ethics in the great coastal universities) bitterly criticize America for "suppressing the rights of minorities." I am a retired professor myself, and an alumnus of Yale, so I have nothing against profs or the Ivies. Even as a child, I loved to study and discuss theories, scientific as well as philosophical, and I have great respect for theoreticians. (I’ve even come up with a few little ones of my own, that are now “generally accepted.”) However, I worked for 25 years as an engineer in industry before becoming an academic, so one side of my brain tends to say “Hey wait a minute --- let’s do an experiment, before we actually believe any of this.” My number one hero has always been Galileo, not Aristotle, for waking up the world to the proper role of real-life experiments. Theories, especially in complex subjects such as economics and politics, almost always have to ignore a few factors. Otherwise, we can not comprehend them with our limited human minds. For example, in economics, the theory espoused by Paul Krugman of Princeton U. tells us that our national debt ought to be causing runaway inflation, any minute now. But that ignores the huge factor of globalization, whereby cheap goods from China and Mexico have been keeping our prices down. Liberal economists also say that our negative balance of payments ought to cause the dollar to drop in value, which would be a serious form of inflation. But that ignores the factor of Asian electronics manufacturers and OPEC oil well owners needing to invest their profits in a safe place, so they keep buying our bonds --- thus the dollar is not precipitously dropping. It surely is legitimate to worry about all those modern debts, personal, corporate, and government, since this is an unusual situation for the United States. (I worried about it out loud in my previous column here, “Avalanche Coming Our Way!” at http://www.useless- knowledge.com/articles/apr/july015.html.) The Bush administration is not taxing us to diminish the debts, because unemployment is an even bigger worry right now, compared to the tiny bit of inflation. With low taxes, employment is actually improving, bit by bit. Turning to politics, how about the theory that our efforts in Iraq will enrage extremist Muslims and cause more suicide attacks here? That ignores the factor that suicide bombers who kill masses of civilians are crazy, and any resistance to their demands is bound to enrage them further. Saddam Hussein is crazy, and he had to be resisted eventually, either now or later. (I said that here, in my “Why We Are In Iraq, Really” column.) Sure, it’s legitimate to worry about Al Queda, and also to do something about it --- and the Bush administration is doing something. “The result is what counts,” more than the theory, and we have not been attacked in the U.S. since 9/11, even at the Republican Convention. The reason is that Messrs. Bush, Ashcroft, and Ridge have built up our power of defense, and that has to be our number one priority right now, regardless of our stepping on a few civil libertarian toes. We have the power that we need, economic and military, but we also need moral/ethical power in order to cooperate effectively. Christianity seems to be the most ethical (as well as practical) philosophical system. Imperfect as we are, and imperfect as our democracy and capitalism are, we are basically an honest and fair country, probably more so than any other big country in the world. Poor people with unusual names or unusual looks can advance themselves faster here than anywhere else, and that strengthens us economically and militarily. In spite of the criticisms of Democrats, African- Americans have gotten further here than in any other prosperous country, and we are making good use of their talents. Athletes and entertainers come to mind first, but where else in the world could Vernon Jordan (the Black CEO of Lazard Freres) or E. Stanley O’Neal (the Black CEO of Merrill Lynch) have worked their way to the top of the very biggest stock brokerages? Where else could Colin Powell and Condoliza Rice have gotten to similar positions of enormous power? Regarding women, where else could they have become the CEOs of companies like Lucent Tech. Or Hewlett-Packard? With President Bush, we have the power that we need, imperfect as it is. ------------ About the author: Dan Shanefield is a retired engineering prof, who worked at Bell Labs and then at Rutgers University. He wrote the book "Industrial Electronics for Engineers, Chemists, and Technicians". Visit his website or email Dan Shanefield: shanefield@ieee.org Tell a friend about this site! ------------ |
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