The Wall Street Journal-20080116-The Informed Reader - Insights and Items of Interest From Other Sources
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The Informed Reader / Insights and Items of Interest From Other Sources
Demography:
Economic Debate Must Focus on Elderly's Role
The aging of America will alter the texture of society, something rarely acknowledged in frequent, accounting-oriented debates about entitlement programs, Megan McArdle says in the Atlantic.
The fact that about one in five Americans by 2030 will be retired will change the labor force, the economy and the look of main street, says Ms. McArdle, in an essay that mingles economic analysis with observations from her mother's faded hometown of Newark in upstate New York. One-stop retailers such as Wal-Mart will grow at the expense of more specialized local stores. The demand for labor-intensive services such as health care, food preparation and transportation will rise. Growth in both productivity and the labor force will slow.
The coming wave of boomer retirees often is discussed in terms of the potential drain on Social Security, but Ms. McArdle says the economy should be able to cope. Funding Medicare, she says, poses a much bigger problem, and there have been few good ideas on how to address it.
The U.S. also will have to shift resources from educating children to what some see as the more emotionally difficult work of caring for the elderly. Another great challenge that the U.S. will have to overcome is age discrimination, to ensure that people are kept in the work force longer. Seniors tend to excel in such areas as customer service and management, and it would make sense to tap those skills in more useful places than supermarket aisles. At the same time, workers will have to accept that in later years their wages likely will diminish.
It also is important to remember that, for all the financial dilemmas longevity causes, longevity itself is something to be celebrated. The aging population might require deferred retirements, higher taxes and slower growth. But slowing growth means both workers and retirees still will be somewhat richer than they are now, and they will enjoy that wealth for far longer than their parents' generation.
-- The Atlantic -- January/February
Science:
Idea That Life Began in Ice
Spurs Raft of Experiments
What if life began not in the famous warm primordial soup, but in primordial ice?
In Discover magazine, science writer Douglas Fox describes a series of experiments seeking to confirm this hypothesis in the face of considerable skepticism. Opponents argue that ice slows the rate of chemical reactions to a point where life couldn't develop. The lower the temperature, the lower the chances that chemicals would randomly collide and form into the first basic self-reproducing structures -- called RNA -- from which all life evolved. Plus, that reaction would need liquid. As a result, the conventional candidates for life's birthplace have been warm, wet places such as tropical ponds or boiling volcanic vents.
But ice has some qualities that might outweigh these disadvantages as an incubator for life. Even at very cold temperatures, small amounts of water can persist in ice. Conveniently, the water is trapped in tiny compartments, which would serve as millions of test tubes, each with a different RNA experiment. What's more, while freezing slows most chemical reactions, it speeds up a few that could have served as stepping-stones to life.
Some studies have corroborated some of those claims, one of them a 25-year-old experiment by Stanley Miller, who died last year after a lifetime studying the chemical origins of life. Another experiment has shown that ice actually helps RNA form into chains.
Even if the ice theory is correct, it doesn't rule out the possibility that a primordial soup also gave birth to life on Earth. But it does have implications for life on other planets. It would allow for the possibility that life has formed on cold places like Mars or Europa, a moon orbiting Jupiter.
-- Discover -- February
Books:
Pulp Fiction's Dirty Secret:
Writers as Agents of Change
The hard-boiled detectives and tough dames of pulp fiction never attained the literary respectability of "The Sun Also Rises." But their creators left a permanent mark on serious literature by killing off the long, ornate phrasing that dominated pre-World War I literature.
Ernest Hemingway was one of the first prominent writers to use clipped, allusive sentences. But the pulps carried the style into the mainstream, says Otto Penzler, editor of a new anthology of pulp fiction, on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. Pulp fiction's cheaply printed magazines, featuring scantily-clad women on the covers, were aimed at young, blue-collar men.
As an example of how the style could deliver the required suspense, Mr. Penzler offers a passage from a Raymond Chandler short story, "Red Wind": "On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husband's neck. Anything can happen."
-- National Public Radio -- Jan. 15
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