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Community Corner

Hope Springs Eternal and Sometimes Materializes

My mother's cousin's husband Tom won the Nobel Prize in Economic Science, giving me hope for the economic future.

My sons keep asking if Obama can be re-elected. I tell them I doubt it, because the economy is doing badly and people vote with their purses, even if they don't think they do. I hope that whoever ends up as our next president has a strong grip on how to fix the country's financial problems. I don't feel all that hopeful that any of the Republican candidates has that grip. I'm not sure Obama has a particularly strong grip either. Every time I look at the unemployment numbers, I think, "Oy." But then something happens, and I think, "Okay, yes, maybe, we can start to feel hope, maybe someone out there really does know how to fix the economy!"

Monday morning, I had one of those moments after a weekend of false starts. On Friday night, I started reading Michael Lewis's book Boomeranglooking for clarity, and a shred of hope.  I love the way Lewis turns his business reporting skills into entertaining stories about financial disasters, which isn't so easy to do. Before I knew it, I was immersed in his chatty description of the financial missteps that undid Iceland, Greece and Ireland. Though the book is a surprisingly fun read, as it turns out, it's actually pretty bleak.

So I kept looking for hope and on Sunday went to see the new Ryan Gosling/George Clooney movie, "The Ides of March." Maybe there would be some cheeky insights into the political process. If not, at least there would be some pretty beefcake. The movie starts so well that I started to hope that Ryan Gosling would run for President. But it ends with a melodramatic thud; the only interesting observation comes when Gosling's character tells Clooney's character that presidents and presidential-hopefuls can get away with lying, cheating and starting wars, but the world gets fed up when they start sleeping with interns.

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Then my mother called on Monday morning and said that her cousin Carolyn's husband Tom had just won the Nobel Prize in economic science. Thomas J. Sargent, a professor of economics at New York University, who also teaches at Princeton, won the prize with Christopher J. Sims, a professor of economics at Princeton. The New York Times reported that the two men won the prize "for their research on the cause and effect of government policies on the broader economy, a major concern of countries still struggling to address the aftermath of the recent financial crisis. ...Dr. Sims said that his research was relevant for helping countries decide how to respond to the economic stagnation and decimated budgets left by the financial crisis. 'The methods that I’ve used and that Tom has developed are central for finding our way out of this mess,” he said. But asked for specific policy conclusions of his research, he responded, “If I had a simple answer, I would have been spreading it around the world.” Sims and Sargent will split the $1.5 million prize.

I don't really know Tom Sargent. I might have met him at a Seder or family birthday party. My mother thinks he was at our wedding. Since we didn't take table pictures, I'm not really sure. But his wife definitely came, and I do know her. Carolyn is lovely and smart. Her father, Moses Greenfield, was a professor of radiological science at UCLA and my Grandpa Sam's kid brother. My mother says that Tom is modest and low-key; when he heard he'd won the Nobel, he asked Carolyn if he should wear a tie to the ceremony.

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Knowing that Carolyn's husband is out there, doing research with his colleagues, trying to find solutions to the world's multiplying financial problems, made me think that maybe, possibly, there are people intelligent enough and motivated enough to engineer a financial solution and nudge the world's economy back to health, or something close to it. I don’t know how much time President Obama, Rick Perry and Mitt Romney spend talking to economic advisors, but I'm hoping cousin Tom is on at least one of their speed dials. 

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