A response to viewer questions and comments on my segment about Los Alamos, N.M.

I received many responses on my segment on Los Alamos, N.M. the other night. I wanted to respond to some of them. No names are used because the emailers wrote to the NewsHour, not this page.

There were several emails about the economic contrast that formed the basis of the story:

“I appreciate the contrast that was drawn between Espanola and Los Alamos but how can any blame be assigned to the National Lab at Los Alamos for this stark contrast? A) It’s a nuclear weapons and research lab, not a social engineering laboratory, and B) not one word was mentioned of the state government of New Mexico’s role in helping blighted Espanola. I am sure Espanola is not economically burdened by its proximity to LANL, I am not sure it is helped by its proximity to Santa Fe!!”

“…Has it occurred to anybody associated with the interview that Espanola does not appear to be the breeding grounds of advanced education and educated citizens of Los Alamos is not Wal-Mart writ large, they hire PhDs preferentially. How about doing a census of how many PhDs, Master’s and just plain college graduates are in Los Alamos vs. Espanola? And maybe conclude that that makes THE difference? As long as education is talked about, but not practiced, Espanola and Los Alamos will stay worlds apart.”

“The report on the New Mexico Offers Case Study in Economic Inequalities FAILED to state that employees who work at the Los Alamos National Laboratory live and pay taxes in a multitude of communities such as Espanola, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Indian Pueblos and Taos….”

“…It was unfair and biased in that it appeared to blame the problems in Espanola and nearby areas entirely on the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). Studies have been done on the economic impact of the lab on the State and have found the impact is in the neighborhood of tens of millions of dollars per year. The lab employs many residents from the Espanola area and has small business procurement programs that favor suppliers from the State. Yet all you could come up with to credit LANL with is its program to support teachers? … What do you – or local residents – think would be the economic condition of the area if the lab had not been created here more than 50 years ago?….Finally, your implication that unhappiness resulting from poverty, especially in comparison with the “great wealth” seen in Los Alamos, is responsible for the heroin problem in Espanola, was particularly absurd. You did not even mention the wealth on display in Santa Fe, most of which has nothing to do with the lab, and which tends to be far more ostentatious that the lifestyles seen in Los Alamos. (Many years ago I saw an article which identified Los Alamos as the community with the highest per-capita net worth in the country. One of the factors the article credited for this was the fact that the people in Los Alamos have no place to spend their money!)…”

An inevitable risk of juxtaposing the country’s richest community with one of its poorest is the inference that the latter is somehow responsible for the former. We made no such claim, but could hardly avoid the fact that others at least thought Los Alamos and/or the government should be doing more.

As a personal matter, it seems to me, based on my relatively brief reporting stint there, that there’s little more the people of Los Alamos can do to alleviate the problems in the valley. And it’s not clear why it’s any more their responsibility than ours as a country. This is an obvious answer, I suppose, but at least the viewer grievances will get a larger audience here on “The Business Desk” than they would otherwise.

But the emails also allow me to underscore the deeper issue: the negative externalities, as economists might put it, of inequality, regardless of whose fault it is. (Or whether the ostentation of Santa Fe might have provided a more vivid contrast than staid, PhD-sodden Los Alamos.)

No, the heroin abuse problem in Chimayo is not a function of wealth seen in Los Alamos. To think so WOULD BE absurd. But to think that it is unrelated to the bleak economic prospects of the area is a similar stretch. Why it’s HEROIN as opposed to alcohol or meth is a matter of historical happenstance. But that it’s a response, in some measure, to one’s relative position on the economic ladder is, I think, important to consider.

Two of the more startling stories I’ve done for the NewsHour over my 23 years with the show involved British epidemiologist Michael Marmot. I was first made aware of him a few years ago when talking to the now-famous investor/author Nassim Nicholas Taleb (“Fooled by Randomness”; “The Black Swan”). He is especially famous at the moment for having called the crash and made big money for his clients by doing so.

Taleb had mentioned inequality and, to be provocative, I had asked him, “What’s so bad about inequality?”

“Read ‘The Status Syndrome,’” he said. I did and subsequently worked the author, Michael Marmot, into two of our stories.

Marmot’s message, based on reams of global data, is that inequality hurts the health of those on the lower rungs and shortens their life expectancy. Just being LAID OFF increases one’s chances of a heart attack by 20 percent. Stress seems to be the mediating variable, triggered (thinks Marmot) by “feeling a lack of control over your own life.”

We may be in for a bushload of layoffs, I’m afraid. And though absolute inequality may well DECREASE as those at the top lose more than those at the bottom (and even more so under a more progressive taxation system were Senator Obama to win), the divide between those with jobs and those without may be especially vivid and painful in a contracting economy.

See our two stories involving Marmot for further elaboration.

And finally, a viewer wrote: “In his segment on New Mexico, Paul Solman incorrectly said that the Fat Man bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Little Boy was dropped on Nagasaki. That’s backward, Little Boy was Hiroshima and Fat Man was Nagasaki.”

Yes. Sorry about that. You can’t be too careful. And I wasn’t.