Chicago In the News

The Chronicle’s biweekly column Chicago In the News offers a digest of commentary and quotations by a few of the University faculty members, students and alumni who have been headlining the news in recent weeks. Chicago faculty members are some of the most frequently quoted experts, so space allows publishing references to only selected examples. To read many of the full newspaper articles mentioned in this column, visit the University News Office Web site: http://news.uchicago.edu.

Shift in schools of thought?
Many analysts believe the government’s $787 billion stimulus package is the latest sign that U.S. policy has shifted from the free-market principles of Milton Friedman to the pro-government ideas of James Tobin. The late Yale University economist and Nobel laureate Tobin thought that spending could spur the economy. Not exactly, said John Cochrane, the Myron S. Scholes Professor of Finance at Chicago Booth, in a Friday, Feb. 27 article on Bloomberg news service. “It’s not part of what anybody has taught graduate students since the 1960s,” Cochrane said. “They are fairy tales that have been proved false. It is very comforting in times of stress to go back to the fairy tales we heard as children, but it doesn’t make them less false.”

Applications not letter-perfect
Rosemaria Martinelli, Associate Dean of Admissions at Chicago Booth, was quoted in a Tuesday, Feb. 24 article in BusinessWeek examining the dos and don’ts of college M.B.A. application letters. Greater competition amid applicants can be a difference-maker to those who read them, she stated. “We don’t have any third-party voice,” Martinelli said. “It’s a tremendously important piece of the puzzle.” Prospective students think they can name-drop, but admissions directors claim that can be a big mistake. “To me, if a person doesn’t really, really know that individual and their work, it’s meaningless,” Martinelli said. “And frankly, it’s meaningless if it’s my daddy’s best friend who I played golf with once.” Martinelli also was quoted in Fortune.

Family key to treating anorexia
Daniel LeGrange, Professor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience, weighed in on a family-based approach to treating eating disorders featured in the Tuesday, Feb. 24 Washington Post. Called the “Maudsley approach,” it views food as medicine and parents as integral to the healing process. Other costly treatments view parental involvement as interference. “Parents are so helpful in taking care of children in any other sphere of life, why do we not include them when it comes to the treatment of anorexia?” said LeGrange, Director of the Eating Disorders Clinic and one of the original developers of the Maudsley approach.

Carbon dioxide’s ‘long tail’
McClatchy news service profiled a book on climate change by David Archer, Professor in Geophysical Sciences and the College, in a Tuesday, Feb. 24 article. In The Long Thaw: How Humans are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate, Archer writes that scientific research shows that carbon dioxide from fossil fuels may impact climate for thousands of years. He writes that 10 percent of carbon dioxide could linger in the atmosphere, which he calls a “long tail,” for 100,000 years. Yet Archer concludes that there is time to cut emissions and avoid catastrophe. “The question may come down to ethics, rather than economics,” Archer said.

Financial crisis among worst
The current financial crisis is the fourth and biggest in the past quarter-century, said Robert Aliber, Professor Emeritus in International Economics and Finance at Chicago Booth, in a Sunday, Feb. 22 article in the San Francisco Chronicle. Economists believe that, based on past crises, Americans can expect unemployment to reach 12 percent, national housing prices to drop 36 percent and stocks to lose more than half their value. Plummeting commodity prices are affecting global economies from Russia to Venezuela to Canada to Iran. “These countries that a year ago had the world by the (tail) are finding out that life is very different when commodity prices are one-third as high as they were,” Aliber said.

Roadblocks to renewable energy
George Crabtree, Senior Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, was quoted in a Monday, Feb. 23 Los Angeles Times story on the development of green energy in the United States. President Obama’s stimulus package contains $8 billion on energy research, including $400 million for “game-changing” technology—a revolutionary idea to the nation’s energy problem. Officials report that over the past three decades, the United States has spent that amount on energy research and development without finding such a breakthrough. “Everything you can think of that is a renewable—or somewhat more renewable—energy option has roadblocks to it, and it needs a science solution,” Crabtree said. Removing government roadblocks could lead to greater efficiency in using funding, researchers said.

Doctor promotes diversity on staff
William McDade, Associate Dean of Multicultural Affairs in the Office of Medical Education, was the subject of a Monday, Feb. 23 article in the Chicago Tribune. The article highlighted McDade’s 29-year tenure at the Pritzker School of Medicine, where he has increased the number of minority physicians at Pritzker. McDade, now a working physician who conducts research on sickle cell disease, was once a Pritzker student and the first African American in the school to pursue both medical and doctoral degrees. “I know what it feels like to be the first person to do something in an academic environment that may not be very welcoming,” he said.