Heavy control at paddock entrance
F1 > British GP, 2005-07-07 (Silverstone): Thursday

Heavy control at paddock entrance
F1 > British GP, 2005-07-07 (Silverstone): Thursday

Paul Stoddart battles to get his cars in qualifying
F1 > Australian GP, 2005-03-04 (Albert Park Circuit): Friday practice 2

F1′s voice of reason
2005-07-06
Anne Proffit

In a pack of incessantly howling wolves, Australian Paul Stoddart has become the voice of Formula One reason. The owner of an F1 team resigned to the rear of each F1 grid, Stoddart knows how to do more with less than any other team owner.

Each Sunday on a Grand Prix weekend Stoddart produces “Stoddy’s Sunday Sermon,” during which he pontificates on any number of interesting subjects having to do with the meeting’s activities or news within the world of F1 racing.

During the United States Grand Prix, Stoddart was inclined to talk about the rules proposal publicly released by the FIA and its president Max Mosley two days prior. Some points Stoddart agrees with in principle; others he has no time for. Stoddart believes that slowing the F1 cars dramatically by following the proposed rules to the letter would make them “15 seconds slower than the GP2 cars.” That solution doesn’t sit well with him.

The idea of slowing cars isn’t always workable. The clever minds of F1 engineers normally return the projectiles to ever-quicker laps within a few months. And slowing cars isn’t about to result in lower costs, according to the Minardi chief. “Any change in F1 has always cost money,” Stoddard reminds everyone. “Max Mosley should ask the people who pay the bills (what to do) before making his assumptions.”

The FIA’s nine-page document of proposed changes for the 2008 F1 championship (and presumably beyond) looks at all facets of cars and competition. Primarily it addresses the need to cut costs but, according to Stoddart, tackles the dilemma in the least effective manner.

“This was not a necessarily well informed document,” he chides. “The entrants with the best budget, the best technology, the best team and drivers will still win,” as they have since the start of competition in the 19th century.

In an effort to reach out to the teams, the FIA is proposing changes that focus on “decreasing the rate of car performance relative to protection for the public and all participants”, whatever that means; clear rules enforcement “with some degree of flexibility” (a cynic could have a field day with this one); cost containment designed to keep independent teams such as Minardi in the fold — but how?; getting rid of expensive materials; eliminating driver aids; and limiting downforce.

Stoddard has his own opinions on where this proposal should go. As an avowed opponent to Mosley’s continuing reign atop the FIA his comments tend to be vitriolic.

For instance, Stoddart has no support for a common ECU as suggested by the FIA. While a common electronic control unit might be able to police traction control (a “driver aid” the FIA wants to see banned) Stoddart does not believe such a component would lower costs or enhance competition in F1.

“We need to contain costs without destroying the sport,” he insists. “Traction control needs to go but I don’t think dumbing down technology is the way.”

The FIA would like to see a designated supplier of gearboxes as well, but Stoddart doesn’t suppose that will relegate added costs to the dustbin. “My gearbox is less than one percent of my annual cost and it need not be targeted,” he fumes. Stoddart thinks placing limits on gear ratios would be an obvious opportunity for cost cutting. As for placing the onus for changing gears on a driver’s left foot, “pedal operation goes back to the Dark Ages.”

On the touchy topic of downforce, Stoddart ruminates that a 30 percent reduction from 2004 levels will work just fine and still keep competition humming. “That is a sensible solution,” but one he’s sure the FIA will not like.

Like F1 fans Stoddart wants to see close, non-manipulated competition — and a complete loss of downforce via bodywork adjustments just isn’t going to work. “I have little resistance to cleaning up barge boards” and other chassis extremities, he says.

The FIA would like to ban tire warmers, but Stoddart thinks that’s not an issue for 2008. “If they want to ban them, that’s okay, but they must allow tire and fuel changes during the races again.” The differences between the proposal and the current tire rules, which ban slicks but have near-slick grooved tires, are so minimal as to be laughable.

But, yes, Stoddart agrees, let’s have a single tire supplier. “That is absolutely essential for cost containment and the single best way to reduce costs,” he declares. The ongoing tire war between Bridgestone and Michelin has resulted in added costs and chaos, as witnessed during the USGP less than two weeks ago. “With a single tire maker you can test the limits of the car and that’s valid.”

Mosley and his cohorts have asked that an FIA-designated supplier produce all brake discs, pads and calipers to an agreed specification beginning in 2008. Stoddart thinks that idea is rubbish: “Brake specification changes put enormous costs to the teams,” he counters. The rules Mosley suggests would do nothing to reduce those costs.

Banning expensive materials meets with Stoddart’s approval. What is needed, though, is “a list of approved, not banned materials,” as the elimination of exotic items like titanium simply opens the door to new, even more bizarre options.

But banning spare cars is a poor idea, because an accident in practice or qualifying can eliminate a team from competition. “It’s better to see 20 cars on Sunday afternoon than 16,” Stoddart explains, “So we should not ban spare cars. After an accident what do you do?” He feels that F1 definitely needs spare cars to keep competition levels at the agreed-upon mark.

If testing days decrease for the calendar year as proposed, the measure must not only meet with everyone’s approval in the paddock but should be balanced by added track time during race weekends, when a test comes to fruition. “I say limit testing and make it (a test session) open to the public so they can get some value from Formula One,” Stoddart suggests.

For the most part the Minardi chief is looking to enhance competitiveness and cooperation within the sport, instead of the current level of combativeness. “We need equal rules enforcement; that is what the teams have been crying out for forever and we need rules for unforeseen situations” like the tire debacle at Indianapolis. “We need to contain costs without destroying this sport,” Stoddart maintains.

“Formula one doesn’t need more problems; it needs solutions. Sensible governance between now and 2008,” Stoddart declares, “is the only way this sport can continue.”

Before F1 can address rules packages for 2008 and beyond, however, it must first look to solutions to today’s problems and the trial of the Michelin Seven. “Criticism is essential to a healthy F1,” Paul Stoddart believes.

That is why he is continuing dialog with the Michelin teams — despite riding on Bridgestone rubber — and trying to find a way to gain harmony within today’s Formula One paddock. Stoddart’s intent is pure but he speaks out in F1′s wilderness. Paul Stoddart is the voice of reason

Nan Kempner and Ellie Caulkins

July 7, 2005
A Woman Who Had Archives in Her Closet
By ERIC WILSON

ONCE, over a long lunch with Nan Kempner and friends, the designer Carolina Herrera recalled, the conversation turned to a favorite topic, the capricious politics of high society as related to guest lists.

“We were discussing if someone was having a big party, and they didn’t invite you, would you be upset?” Mrs. Herrera said. “We were all saying that it doesn’t matter, that it’s one less party to go to, and then Nan said, ‘If you didn’t invite me, I would feel like crying.’ I thought that was very sweet of her to tell the truth.”

Mrs. Kempner’s candor – some would describe it as existing without the filter of self-preservation – was as much of an asset in the minds of fashion designers as was a dedication to fashion so extreme that she worked tirelessly to maintain a body weight of 110 pounds, a human hanger to display couture samples and one of the most famous buyers of fashion in the world.

Mrs. Kempner, who died on Sunday at 74, claimed to have missed only one Yves Saint Laurent couture show from the time he established his house in 1962 until his retirement in 2002. Mr. Saint Laurent once addressed her as “la plus chic du monde.”

“I don’t want to reduce Nan Kempner to a fashion model, not at all,” said Pierre Bergé, Mr. Saint Laurent’s business partner. “She was not only a hanger. She was more important because it is easy to find a hanger, but she was also a wonderful woman with extraordinary style and who loved life. That kind of person has completely disappeared today.”

Assessing the scale of Mrs. Kempner’s impressive collection of 20th-century fashion will require an archivist. Mr. Bergé said she bought more than 100 Saint Laurent pieces, but it was probably more. A Vanity Fair profile in April said she owned some 250 of his designs. Her wardrobe is likely to yield several treasures, as she often bought one-of-a-kind samples off the backs of the runway models because they fit her and she could buy them at a discount.

Harold Koda, the curator of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said Mrs. Kempner had described unusual pieces she owned, like a pair of chaps made of white long-hair sheepskin designed by Madame Grès, although she was not certain where they could be found.

“There were things she favored at a given moment that she kept nearby,” Mr. Koda said. “But Nan had a stratified archaeological system, where she couldn’t always reach the things she knew she had.” Her sense of style was streamlined as well. Often described as a sleek sensuality, it was patterned after the look of Lauren Bacall in the 1940′s.

“The interesting thing about Nan is that, despite what she said, she always selected pieces that didn’t overwhelm her,” Mr. Koda said.

Mrs. Herrera described her as “the American fashion icon.”

“Being a real fashion icon is not just about the way they dress,” she continued, “but it is also the way they live and think, and she was very open about her life.”

James Galanos, whose business was based in Los Angeles, designed for both Mrs. Kempner and her mother, Irma Schlesinger, the wife of a California automobile dealer, and saw a sense of dressing stylishly instilled in Mrs. Kempner at a young age. “Whenever I saw her, she just looked smashing,” Mr. Galanos said. “She’s really one of the few women who consistently looked fantastic through the decades. She was mostly in Yves Saint Laurent. Basically she kept all her clothes and revived them from time to time. She was just so well dressed that you really couldn’t pinpoint what was there.”

Unlike many of the young women who attend the circuit of highbrow parties and borrow gowns from the houses that sponsor the events, Mrs. Kempner and her contemporaries usually paid for their clothes and wore them more than once. “There is a lack of glamour today,” Mr. Galanos said. “These designers give away clothes to the young stars, and they don’t look like they belong in the clothes, and the clothes don’t look like they belong to them. We just look and smile, and think it was better in the old days.”

Mrs. Kempner was not a conventional beauty, but she was funny and talked about fashion as Mae West talked about her body. “She had these great statements,” Valentino said. “I remember once coming out from one of my shows, and she cried out: ‘I don’t need another dress. I need another body.’ ”

There were many more in her repertory: “They say the camera loves me. The truth is I love the camera.” And the classic, “I wouldn’t miss the opening of an envelope.”

“She couldn’t stand to miss a thing,” said the publicist Paul Wilmot. “If there was an epitaph, it should be ‘Nan Kempner never went to a bad party.’ “

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Dominic Bugatto

July 7, 2005
Just a Minute, Boss. My Cellphone Is Ringing.
By JOHN LELAND

FERNANDO ZULUETA has an opinion on the use of cellphones at work: he loves it. Mr. Zulueta, 46, who owns a chain of charter schools in South Florida, scratches out the land-line number on his business cards so people won’t use it to call him. If he is in a business meeting and his cellphone rings, he often picks it up, even though he considers such behavior annoying.

“I regret to say it,” he said, speaking over one of his several cellphones, “but you see your caller ID flashing, and it happens to be a mayor or a state representative, and you say, ‘I’m sorry, I really have to take this call,’ and you take it.”

But it doesn’t have to be a mayor. Recently Mr. Zulueta interrupted a meeting to take a call from a bed deliveryman: “I like to be accessible. And I see things moving faster and faster in that direction.” He said he is frustrated by people who have his cell number but call his land line anyway. “They feel they can only call the cell in an emergency,” he said sadly.

Robin Reinhardt also has an opinion on cellphones at work: she hates them. Ms. Reinhardt, a vice president in charge of booking guests on MTV, prefers that people think they can call her cellphone only in an emergency. People who call her cell, thinking it’s more direct than going through her assistant, annoy her no end.

“I’m here at my desk with three lines ringing, and people call me on my cell,” she said, speaking over a land line from Los Angeles. “I get crazy.”

In the great American debate about cellphone etiquette, some of the early turf battles seem to be settled, with winners and losers falling into camps familiar from Western Civ classes. Movie theaters, funerals and libraries appear to have been carried by the cell Rousseauists, who believe the social contract forbids such things as shouting intimate details into a piece of plastic in a room full of strangers.

Most public transportation systems, on the other hand, appear to belong to the cell Hobbesians, who believe that since life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short, there’s no need to give the rider engrossed in her newspaper in the seat next to you a quiet commute. Restaurants constitute a middle ground, in a state of détente. Everyone knows it’s rude to use a cellphone at dinner, but civilized people do it anyway.

The workplace, though, remains unsettled territory. “This is the next area,” said Peggy Post, director of the Emily Post Institute and an author of “The Etiquette Advantage in Business.” Ms. Post, who often lectures business groups about cell use, spoke over a land line from her home office on the Florida Gulf Coast.

“We’re hearing more and more stories about cellphones in the workplace,” Ms. Post said, with no suggestion that any of those stories might be celebratory.

The points of friction, as Ms. Post and others describe them, are numerous: the executive who takes a cell call in the middle of a meeting; the phones that blast impossible-to-ignore ring tones in a busy office; the seminar leader who interrupts his speech to take a call on his cell; the co-worker who, like clockwork, answers hers to discuss lunch choices with a child.

Ms. Reinhardt’s list of cellphone abusers includes her fiancé, upon whom she has so far failed to impress her emergency-only rule. Then there’s her broker. “I’ve told him a thousand times,” she said. ” ‘Call me on my work phone.’ He calls on the cell. I see his number flash, and I don’t answer it. Ten minutes later he calls me on my work number.”

Rebecca R. Hastings, the director of the information center at the Society for Human Resource Management, said: “Right now, cellphones are the cigarettes of this decade. It’s an addiction. And just like cigarettes are banned from some places, so are cells banned. I think we’ll see more organizations take a firmer line.”

Unlike many new technologies which are beloved by users but resented by everybody else, cellphones are considered a nuisance even by the people who embrace them. In what must be comforting news to the cell Hobbesians, a recent University of Michigan poll of 752 adults found that 6 of 10 users found public cell use “a major irritation.”

Last year the Society for Human Resource Management surveyed 379 human resource professionals and found that 40 percent of their companies had formal policies governing cellphone use at work. The policies range from regulations about driving and dialing to limits on the use of personal cellphones in the office.

One reason office cell etiquette is so scattered is that different people use the phone differently. Some people flaunt their cellphones at work to show how important they are, said Ms. Hastings, whose office takes 400 calls a day for help with workplace issues. “In some office cultures, the more calls you get, the more powerful you seem,” she said.

Others use the cell as an alternative communications network for the people they really want to talk to – children, paramours, baby sitters, plumbers, gurus – while the land line carries all the calls they want to screen out. “People tend to give their cellphone number out less frequently, and it’s not printed in a phone book,” Ms. Hastings said. “So they feel it’s a little more direct to them. Whereas the desk phone, anybody could be calling you.”

To an extent this is changing, users said. As cells embed themselves deeper into people’s lives, it is only natural that cellphone numbers have become less exclusive. Most people contacted for this article said they had long ago crossed the line where they used the cell like a Batphone for emergency calls only.

But this blurring of lines between business and personal use only makes cell use harder to regulate, said Paul Levinson, chairman of the department of communication and media studies at Fordham University and author of “Cellphone: The Story of the World’s Most Mobile Medium and How It Has Transformed Everything!”

“It’s a principle of media evolution that media are extensions of our bodies and personalities,” he said. “Prior to the cellphone, the way we dressed communicated who we were in the workplace. Now, what ring tone someone has, how often the cellphone rings, how we respond to it when it rings. These are defining personality types in the office, which makes them harder to regulate than matters that aren’t part of our bodies and psyches.” Professor Levinson, who spoke over a land line, said he sometimes takes calls during his media classes, but only if the conversation will edify his students.

In the absence of clear guidelines, the opportunities for abuse continue to expand. Dr. Neil Gailmard, an optometrist in Munster, Ind., who helps other optometrists manage their business affairs, said that two or three patients a day receive calls on their cellphones while he is treating them, despite a sign in his office asking patients to turn their phones off.

Sometimes it will be an important call, he said. But recently a patient took a call to discuss her evening plans: where to meet for drinks, where to make reservations for dinner. “You’re stuck in an awkward situation,” he said. “The patient doesn’t seem to regard that the doctor is waiting. People have very personal discussions.” When patients talk too long, he recommends offering to leave the room. “I find that gets them to hang up,” he said. “They don’t want you to leave.”

Dr. Gailmard is even more disturbed by doctors who take calls while seeing patients, but said he is not surprised. “I think it’s rude. But what actually happens in doctors’ offices is very different from what should happen.”

Even while cell etiquette in the workplace is divided into the Rousseau and Hobbes schools, devices like camera phones and BlackBerries – which let people read and send e-mail while they’re supposed to be paying attention to a conference call – are raising new questions about what is and isn’t appropriate behavior at work. Two current television ads for camera phones show people using the phones to humiliate or blackmail colleagues. Needless to say, Ms. Post found this a breach of good manners. “They make most people uneasy,” she said.

Ms. Hastings is of like mind. “Just as you dress for success,” she said, “you need to manage your gadgets for success.”

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July 3, 2005
Were the Good Old Days That Good?
By LOUIS UCHITELLE

TOM RATH, the protagonist in Sloan Wilson’s 1955 novel, “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,” certainly had his share of troubles: the stressful conformity, the constant striving for success, the superficial suburban friendships, the war experiences he kept hidden from his wife. It all ate away at him.

But Tom, like most Americans in the first three decades after World War II, took a rising standard of living for granted. When he needed more income to make ends meet, he simply landed a better-paying job. Indeed, at parties throughout suburbia, Mr. Wilson wrote, “the public celebration of increases in salary was common.” And Tom didn’t fret about medical bills, job security or the quality of public schools for his three children.

Fast forward to Tom and Marie DeSisto in 2005. They are real people in their early 50′s, living in a three-bedroom condominium in Newton, Mass. Ask them if their standard of living is rising and they say yes, indeed, it is – but not in the Rath family’s sense of the word. The DeSistos’ income made a U-turn last year, but they manage to live within its limits, even eking out money for extras. And that success lifts their spirits. “We are not really into boats and cars,” Mrs. DeSisto said, “but we are traveling more.”

Pushed into early retirement last year by his employer, Verizon, Mr. DeSisto’s salary plummeted from more than $100,000 as a manager to $36,000 as a first-year math teacher at Newton High School. His wife, on the other hand, has just been promoted to director of nursing in the Framingham public schools. Her salary rose by nearly $4,000, to $67,000 a year, but she is also adding eight working days a year to handle the additional responsibilities.

While the Raths moved up in income, home size and leisure time, the DeSistos sold their four-bedroom colonial home in Newton, pocketing a profit while cutting their property taxes and maintenance costs. “We planned carefully,” Mrs. DeSisto said, “and we downsized successfully.”

So, did the Raths, that quintessential 1950′s family, enjoy a higher standard of living than middle-class families like the DeSistos do today? In other words, can it be that living standards are actually slipping in America?

No economist, demographer or historian would make that case. Living standards, after all, almost never go backward, at least not in a material sense. Indeed, the economy today is growing, consumer spending is plentiful and new technologies – from the Internet to laparoscopic surgery – make life better than ever, as they do in every generation.

BUT for the DeSistos and their contemporaries, the trajectory is no longer the steadily upward line that the Rath family enjoyed. Instead, the line appears to be climbing erratically. That is certainly true of the traditional measures of standard of living. After 20 years of very small gains, the rate of improvement surged from 1995 to 2000 – only to fall back toward zero over the last four years, a reversal that puzzles analysts.

“When you talk about living standards, you have to focus on people in the middle,” said Robert Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University. “A lot of the goodies that we think of as raising living standards have gone to the people at the top at the expense of the broad mass of Americans in the middle.”

Kevin Hassett, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, argues that federal subsidies in the form of tax credits, mainly the earned income tax credit, are raising living standards for low-income families by more than many people realize. Those subsidies have risen by about $2,000 since President Bush took office in 2001, to just over $3,000 a year for a married couple with two children and a family income of $27,300, Mr. Hassett estimates.

“The standard income numbers don’t capture what is happening to people at the bottom,” he said. “So you have to look at their consumption, not their income, to gauge standard of living. And consumption has significantly outperformed income.”

While income and consumption are the chief measures of a nation’s standard of living, other, more subtle indicators also play an important role – and several of them are not doing so well. Life expectancy in the United States, while still rising, has fallen behind that in France, Germany and Japan. Home ownership is at a record high for the population as a whole, but it has dropped since the 1970′s for some groups – working families with children, for example, according to the Center for Housing Policy. In overwhelming numbers, Americans say they are satisfied with their standard of living, a Gallup poll reports. But 25 percent of the nation’s families also worry all or most of time that they won’t be able to pay their bills. That is up from 21 percent in the late 1990′s.

And in many cases, public services are not holding their own. “Thirty years ago a lot of public goods were free, and now they are fee-based,” said Michael Hout, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley. “Even the Grand Canyon charges, and many public schools are engaged in fund-raising. So public goods that contribute to living standards are more dependent today on family income.”

The good news for the nation is that productivity – a measure of output per worker that is the bedrock on which income and living standards are built – is rising. When it goes up, so does the revenue from the sale of the additional goods and services that each worker produces. In theory, some of that revenue feeds back into the income of the workers, financing improvements in their standard of living.

That symbiotic relationship worked very well for Tom Rath. From the late 1940′s through 1973, productivity grew at an annual rate of nearly 3 percent, and incomes rose almost as briskly. Then came a horrific slowdown: productivity fell back to an annual growth rate of less than 1.5 percent from the mid-1970′s to the mid-90′s, and median income hardly rose at all.

The revival that started in 1995 brought productivity growth back to its old rate of increase, and for five years incomes also rose smartly. What happened next is tough for economists to explain. The productivity growth rate has stayed strong – rising at an average annual rate of just under 3 percent since 1995, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But starting in 2000, median income, adjusted for inflation, has grown more slowly every year – and this year the increase is almost imperceptible.

“There is no question that a huge gap has opened up between productivity and living standards,” said Jared Bernstein, a senior labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute.

Not since World War II have productivity and income diverged so sharply, yet that phenomenon barely registers in public opinion surveys. Nearly 9 in 10 people surveyed by Gallup say they are satisfied with their standard of living, a higher proportion than in the 1960′s. In answering that question, however, those surveyed make no comparisons with the past, said Lydia Saad, a senior editor at Gallup, “so they don’t know whether they are falling behind on some treadmill of life.”

Richard A. Easterlin, an economic historian at the University of Southern California, has a different take. Satisfaction is always relative, he says. If a family’s debt rises, that is not a negative as long as other people’s debt is increasing at roughly the same pace.

The parity helps to explain why consumption has risen 40 percent faster than income since 2001, and why people are able to focus on the amenities they acquire – the cellphones, the bigger homes, the cars and the digital cameras – without feeling weighed down by rising debt or by income that is rising more slowly.

TOM RATH’S generation, having experienced the Depression, expected more hard times after World War II. When the economy boomed instead, the aspirations of his generation rose and so, eventually, did their sense of well-being. All of that changed in the 1980′s, when globalization infected public attitudes and people told pollsters that they expected their children’s living standards to decline.

That shift in expectations soon gave way to a new norm. In the age of layoffs, tens of thousands of families have done what the DeSistos have done: adjusted to a decline in income after a job loss. The DeSisto family’s income is still more than twice the national median of nearly $53,000, and Mrs. DeSisto’s eight additional days of work are not really eight additional days, as she sees it.

“I always worked those extra days,” she said. “I just didn’t get paid for them in my old job as supervisor of nurses.”

While the glass may be half full in the eyes of many beholders, living standards certainly are not improving for everyone. Productivity, as it rises, throws off more and more income, which is then distributed to capital in the form of profits, and to labor in higher wages, more paid hours and benefits.

Labor’s share, which has historically represented 60 to 65 percent of the total, has fallen in the last five years to the low end of that range. But for Mr. Gordon at Northwestern, that is only part of the story. Capital’s share, he says, has increasingly found its way to upper-income families as stock options, dividends, special bonuses and the like.

“We had much less income inequality in the first couple of decades after World War II because of strong unions, restricted trade and a decline in immigration,” Mr. Gordon said. “Then all three reversed, which means that the income from productivity falls to the bottom line and for the time being stays there.”

To him and others, living standards cannot be truly rising if the improvement is so unevenly distributed; in addition, they say, earning a living has become increasingly stressful.

Job security, which Tom Rath took for granted, has deteriorated. “People talk of the new economy and of reinventing themselves in the workplace, and in that sense most of us are less secure,” said Daniel Kahneman, a Princeton University economist who shared a Nobel in economics for his contributions to behavioral economics.

People approaching the age of 65 face a different uncertainty: smaller retirement incomes than their parents enjoyed. That is happening as the nation shifts from a system of fixed monthly pensions to 401(k)-type accounts, in which people save what they can for their own retirement. In the process, retirement income is falling from 93 percent of preretirement pay for today’s retirees to 80 percent, on average, for the next generation, according to an Urban Institute projection.

Some retirees cannot afford the pension hit, and they continue to work. The portion of the 65-and-over population that is employed has risen to 14 percent from less than 12 percent in 1995, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. The option to retire is slipping away, and that damages living standards.

“People who have a choice experience a greater standard of living,” said Richard T. Curtin, director of the University of Michigan’s Surveys of Consumers. “They are not constrained from choosing what they prefer.”

Choosing not to work is no longer an option for many families who need two incomes to pay what they consider basic expenses. Two of those expenses – health care and education – have risen faster than incomes, says Elizabeth Warren, a bankruptcy specialist at Harvard Law School and co-author of “The Two-Income Trap.”

“Half of all people who file for personal bankruptcy do so in the aftermath of a serious medical problem,” she said, noting that the number of Americans without health insurance has increased in recent years. As for education, the rising cost is mostly in the purchase of expensive homes in upscale areas known to have good public schools. “A generation ago,” Ms. Warren said, “the majority of American parents believed they could buy whatever home they could afford and send their kids to a good school down the street.”

There is a problem with this argument. The quality of public school education, measured by test scores, is in fact holding up quite well, on average. The National Assessment of Education Progress, a federally sponsored testing program that started in the 1960′s, periodically measures the skills and achievements of students at the ages of 9, 13 and 17. Scores have risen slightly since the early 1980′s, on average, but so, too, has the disparity in school performance.

“The variation is extraordinary across school districts and even across schools in the same district,” said Richard Murnane, an economist at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, “so when you ask about how good the schools are, the measure of central tendency is less interesting than the variation around the average.”

HEALTH problems also undermine living standards. Life expectancy at birth is one symptom. At 69.7 years in the late 1950′s, life expectancy in the United States was slightly ahead of that of Germany and France, and well ahead of Japan’s. Now Japan is far ahead at 80.5 years, compared with 78.5 in France, 77.5 in Germany and 76.5 in the United States.

Infant mortality, at more than six deaths per thousand live births, similarly trails the rates in France, Germany and Japan, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Height, too, is no longer an American hallmark. Average height has been stuck at less than 6 feet for a decade or more while Europeans have grown past that mark, suggesting that they are somehow healthier.

Obesity is now a distinguishing feature. The percentage of obese American adults has doubled in the last 15 years, to 30 percent, said Kenneth E. Thorpe, chairman of the department of health policy management at Emory University’s School of Public Health.

The way we live makes that happen, he argues: the lack of exercise, the marketing of foods high in sugar and fat, the over-large portions. As a result, weight-related illnesses – diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, asthma – have risen sharply.

“Once you are sick, we are doing a better job in treatment,” Dr. Thorpe said. “The pace of technological development has probably accelerated since 1980 more than in previous generations. That’s the good news. The bad news is that we have larger shares of the population who are sick.”

For Dr. Thorpe, the much better treatment is clearly a big improvement in standard of living – offset, however, by the big increase in the incidence of illness. He estimated that the additional health care cost resulting from the decline in healthiness would total $70 billion this year.

“You can’t have a rising standard of living,” he said, “if you have people getting less healthy.”

The Rath family had no such misfortune. In Sloan Wilson’s hands, the man in the gray flannel suit enjoyed an ever more prosperous life – a happy ending that many middle-class families can’t seem to match today.

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July 8, 2005
With Characteristic Fortitude, Britons Carry On
By ERIC PFANNER International Herald Tribune

LONDON, July 8 – Helicopters hovered overhead, and security cordons remained in place today near the sites of four bombings that killed more than 50 Londoners. But many people returned to work with a display of the renowned British stiff upper lip – a bit anxious, they acknowledged, but grimly determined not to let the bombers get the better of them.

Matter-of-fact announcements over the public address system in the London Underground informed commuters that five subway lines affected by the “incidents” remained closed or disrupted. Though trains on the remaining lines were running normally, traffic appeared relatively light. Buses were running a “near normal” service, according to Transport for London.

Though some businesses gave employees the option of working from home or taking the day off, financial markets, offices and shops throughout London were open for business – if not business as usual, at least up and running. And for many Londoners, at least those not directly affected by the attacks, “getting on with it” carried an important symbolic meaning.

“I think the idea is to get back to normal as quickly as possible,” said Paul Batty, 58, manager of the Book Warehouse, a discount bookseller at Russell Square, just down the street from the site of the explosion on a bus, and not far from the King’s Cross subway bombing. “That’s the best way to show them it isn’t going to work,” Mr. Batty added, referring to the bombers. “We’ve been warned for several years that something like this would happen. So now, when it does, maybe there’s a certain resignation.” Though the Book Warehouse closed its doors a few hours before its normal 10 o’clock close on Thursday night, it was open as usual this morning, despite the police tape separating a busy sidewalk from an empty street outside.

At the London offices of UBS, the Swiss banking company, “all of our systems, operations and trading activity are up and running, and we have the staff here to operate them,” said Sarah Small, a spokeswoman. The bank employs 6,000 people in London, most of them at a building next to Liverpool Street station, not far from the first of the bombings Thursday morning, at Aldgate station.

UBS told “non-essential” staff members that they could stay at home today. But Ms. Small said it appeared that many employees had decided to turn down the bank’s offer.

“There are a lot of people milling around downstairs in the lobby area, so I think it’s pretty much back to normal,” she said.

Some callers to talk radio shows grumbled about hotels and other businesses that they said raised prices in order to profit from people stranded by the bombings.

For a second day, Transport for London waived the normal congestion charge for drivers entering central London, which recently had been raised to £8 from £5, in an effort to help commuters who live along subway lines directly affected by the bombings. The Piccadilly, District and Metropolitan subway lines were disrupted, operating only on some parts of the lines. Two lines, the Circle line and the Hammersmith and City line, were shut entirely.

While other subway and mainline train lines were running, there appeared to be more than the usual number of security alerts. Liverpool Street station, along with another mainline train station, Euston, was briefly evacuated. At Liverpool Street, the cause of the alarm turned out to be a journalist’s bag.

Gemma Sandland, 25, an account director at the Ogilvy & Mather advertising agency, was traveling on the Underground’s Jubilee Line, from her home in the Kilburn area of Northwest London to her office at Canary Wharf, in the east.

Ms. Sandland decided to wait until after the rush hour, when the bombings had occurred Thursday, and travel to work after 10 a.m. today. She said her employer had told her she could stay home, but she decided to go to the office anyway to “deal with a few important things.”

“They aren’t that important, actually, in the scale of things, but it’s important to act like this,” she said.

She acknowledged that she felt a bit jittery riding the London subway, which known as the Tube.

“Everybody’s kind of looking around to see who else is there,” she said, casting a sideways glance.

Leaving the Tube at the Canary Wharf station, Ms. Sandland said she was struck by the calm demeanor of an Underground employee as he read off the list of subway delays and closings.

“It’s strange – when we get bad weather, this country grinds to a halt,” she said. “Then we get bombed. I thought there was no way the Tube would be running.”

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Carl De Souza/Agence France-Presse–Getty Images

A construction worker bowed in prayer at the Kings Cross station in London.

July 8, 2005
Timers Used in Blasts, Police Say; Parallels to Madrid Are Found
By DON VAN NATTA Jr. and ELAINE SCIOLINO

LONDON, July 7 – Investigators searching for clues in the attacks here said Thursday that the three bombs used in the subway apparently were detonated by timers, not suicide bombers, and that a fourth device may have been intended for a target other than the city bus that it destroyed.

Senior police officials said they had not received a message claiming responsibility for the attacks from any group, and had made no arrests. But officials immediately drew parallels between the London bombings and the ones that struck commuter trains in Madrid 16 months ago, which were carried out by a Qaeda-inspired cell.

By Thursday night, there were far more questions than answers confronting Scotland Yard. One official said none of the scores of suspected terrorists being watched closely in England appeared to be involved.

Police and intelligence officials acknowledged that they were taken completely by surprise by the coordinated bombings, even though they had been anticipating a terrorist attack for years.

The officials said there was no warning or even a hint that an attack was imminent among the blizzard of intelligence accumulated in recent days by the Metropolitan Police and by MI5, the domestic intelligence services.

“There was no intelligence in our possession that these attacks were going to take place today,” said Brian Paddick, deputy assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. “We were given no warning from any organization that this was going to happen.”

Since Sept. 11, 2001, senior police officials have warned that a large-scale terror attack in Britain was not a matter of if but when, a prediction repeated by a senior police official late last month.

The Joint Terrorist Analysis Center even reduced the threat level of a terrorist attack from “severe-general” to “substantial” early last month. There are seven levels to the security scale, with severe-general the third most severe and substantial the fourth.

The threat levels are not made public, but they reflect the intelligence on potential attacks and help officials to make decisions about staff levels. The alert level was not raised to coincide with the opening of the Group of 8 summit meeting in Scotland, officials said.

Mr. Paddick and other police officials denied that the lower ranking affected the level of the emergency response to the bombings on Thursday. He also rejected the suggestion that the ranking reflected a conclusion that the terrorist threat had eased here.

“We felt it was appropriate, bearing in mind all the intelligence that we were in possession of,” he said. “We are content that the security system was appropriate, notwithstanding the G-8 summit that was happening in Scotland.”

Michael Mates, a senior member of Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee, said, “There was certainly a heightened awareness this week, although it’s likely that resources were a bit more focused on the G-8 summit.”

Upon his return to London on Thursday afternoon, Prime Minister Tony Blair vowed that the authorities would mount “the most intense police and security investigation to bring those responsible to justice.”

Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said the explosions bore “the hallmarks of an Al Qaeda-related attack,” but police officials stopped short of assigning any blame to a particular group.

A group calling itself the Secret Organization of Al Qaeda in Europe announced on a Web site that it was responsible for the bombings. The announcement also threatened Italy and Denmark, which have provided troops to the American-led coalition fighting in Iraq.

The authenticity of the message could not be confirmed, and several experts said they strongly doubted that it was authentic.

American intelligence officials said they had begun a detailed review of data gathered in recent weeks to search for possible clues. “Everybody’s going back and looking over their reporting to see if we overlooked anything or failed to share it,” one senior intelligence official said.

Counterterrorism officials in London said they were still trying to determine the type of explosives that were used. One official speculated that the No. 30 bus whose roof was blown off at 9:47 a.m. in Bloomsbury was demolished accidentally by a suicide bomber. But another theory gaining momentum was that the bomb exploded prematurely as a bomber was carrying it to an intended target, several American and British counterterrorism officials said.

The officials said that the three subway bombs appeared to have been detonated by timers, not cellphones or other remote triggers. The bombs on the trains were believed to be package bombs and are believed to have been left by the attackers who fled before they went off.

Officials refused to confirm or deny reports that two unexploded package bombs were recovered from trains. A senior American intelligence official said the British had conducted “at least one controlled explosion” of a suspicious package found after the attacks, but he said he could not confirm that the package was another bomb.

The bombings in Madrid and London were separated by 16 months, and the ones in Madrid were set off by cell phones. But the attacks bear eerie similarities and grim lessons for counterterrorism officials.

“Madrid carried terror to the heart of Europe, but we never believed we would be a lonely, unique case,” Jorge Dezcallar, who was the head of Spain’s foreign intelligence service at the time of the Madrid attacks, said in a telephone interview. “We just had the bad luck of being chosen as the first target, but not the last. London, like Madrid, proves how vulnerable we are.”

Like Madrid, the attacks on London were aimed not at symbols of power like Big Ben or Westminster Abbey but at the mundane: ordinary workers making their way to work at the busiest time of the day. In Madrid, 191 people were killed by the 10 bombs that ripped through four commuter trains during the morning rush hour.

The effect in both cities was to paralyze the ordinary workings of the city. British authorities announced that every inch of every subway train in London would be examined to insure that no more explosives had been planted, just as the Spanish authorities examined every commuter train.

“The explosions were designed to elicit panic among the people,” Gen. Hamidou Laanigri, Morocco’s chief of security, said in a telephone interview. “That is always the logic of terrorism: to get the maximum attention and impact.”

Another similarity is that politics may have played a role in the timing. Thursday was the first day of the Group of 8 talks, led by Mr. Blair at Gleneagles, near Edinburgh. The bombings in Madrid came three days ahead of a close national election.

Both Spain and Britain sent troops to aid the American-led war in Iraq and the military attack in Afghanistan, although it is not known whether support for American foreign policies played a role in the London attack.

British and Spanish intelligence services are operating on the assumption that a network with allegiance to Al Qaeda, either Arabs or one of the emerging Pakistani groups in Europe, was responsible for the London attacks, several intelligence officials said.

“It is still too early to definitively say who carried out these attacks,” said Matt Levitt, a former F.B.I. agent and now a senior fellow and director of terrorism studies at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “But as the investigation into the London bombings proceeds, authorities should not be surprised if the evidence reveals a more critical link to the Madrid attacks.”

Senior counterterrorism officials say Al Qaeda had evolved from a structured, hierarchical group to a decentralized organization that relies on small independent groups to carry out “Al Qaeda-inspired attacks.”

“There have been a lot of attempts” in London, said Baltasar Garzón, a Spanish judge who has investigated Al Qaeda for years. “And in this case, they finally hit some of the easiest targets with these trains. Their only real obstacle to this kind of action is getting the explosives. Once they have them, it’s very easy to attack targets like Sunday trains.”

Mr. Mates, of the Intelligence and Security Committee, said it had been only a matter of time before a coordinated attack struck London. He said the authorities had thwarted at least three coordinated attacks in London since 9/11. “We’ve caught and prevented those who were trying to get through and stopped them,” he said.

Britain has considerable experience investigating bombs and identifying those responsible, based on years of attacks in London and in Northern Ireland by the Irish Republican Army.

Since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Osama bin Laden and other groups have threatened to attack Britain in retaliation for its support of the United States. Last April, Mr. bin Laden demanded that Britain and other American allies pull out of Iraq by July 15, 2004. The deadline passed without incident.

Counterterrorism officials have said they worried that the prime target was the 122-year-old Underground, the world’s busiest subway system, which ferries three million people each day. The subway and most public streets are monitored by a vast network of closed-circuit television cameras, whose images were being reviewed Thursday by investigators.

Officials said they were confident that the forensic investigation collected at the four sites would yield clues that might help them identify and arrest those responsible for the attacks. They also hoped to recover DNA samples from bombs and body fragments. All those arrested in Britain must provide DNA samples even if they do not face criminal charges.

Don Van Natta Jr. reported from London for this article and Elaine Sciolino from Paris. Reporting was contributed by David Johnston, David E. Sanger and Scott Shane from Washington, Stephen Grey from London, Tim Golden from New York and Souad Mekhennetfrom Frankfurt.

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Keith Richards to play Depp’s dad
July 7, 2005 – 12:34PM

Keith Richards … set to be a pirate dad.

Johnny Depp has persuaded Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards to play a cameo role in the sequels to Pirates of the Caribbean, even though filming will clash with the Stones’s US tour.

According to reports, Depp personally convinced Richards to take the role of his father in the sequels, which are being shot back-to-back by director Gore Verbinski.

He also arranged for special filming sessions beginning in February to work around the tour dates.

“It looks like it’s going to happen,” Depp told reporters at a news conference in Nassau, Bahamas, where the films are being shot.

“But I don’t know when. It’s all going to depend on where we are and where he is, because he’s got a little thing called the Rolling Stones tour to do.”

Alexander Chadwick/Associated Press

Passengers evacuating a subway tunnel


July 7, 2005
The Scene: Typical Rush Hour Turns Into Chaos
By SARAH LYALL
LONDON, July 7 – The subway was being evacuated at this point and Jasmine Gardner didn’t know why, so she did the next best thing. She tried to take the bus.

It was the No. 30 bus, a double-decker that runs through central London. Moving slowly in the heavy traffic of the morning rush hour, it stopped at Tavistock Place, not far from the British Museum. It was packed.

And then it exploded.

“One minute the bus was there; the next minute it seemed to dissolve into millions of pieces,” Ms. Gardner, 22, said in an interview. “I was showered with bits of metal and bits of the bus. I was shielding myself with my umbrella, and it all landed on my umbrella.”

But the explosion was only one of four to strike central London this morning. The others went off in the subway, on three different trains coming in to some of the busiest stations in the city: Liverpool Street, King’s Cross and Edgware Road. All were crammed full of commuters on their way to work and tourists trying to get an early sightseeing start on a drizzly London summer day.

The first went off at 8:51 a.m. local time on the Metropolitan Line as it went through a tunnel between Aldgate and Liverpool Street, in London’s financial district.

Robert Andrews, who was on the train, said that the explosion blew doors off the train and left its roof “twisted, mangled mess.”

“We saw a flash and heard this massive bang,” Mr. Andrews, a 28-year-old sales manager, told the Evening Standard newspaper. “Suddenly, smoke and soot filled the carriage through the air vents.” When he got off the train, he said, he saw two people lying on the tracks, one of them a man, face down with a jacket covering his head. It was not clear whether they were dead.

Witnesses spoke of chaos on the dark trains, of bodies strewn on the tracks, of people staggering out gasping for breath, covered in soot and blood. For a time, it was not clear what had happened. Transportation officials initially attributed the explosions to a “power surge” through the system this morning, but it became increasingly clear that what had happened was a coordinated terrorist attack.

The third explosion took place at 9:17 a.m., on a train headed for Edgware Road. It struck when the train was about 100 yards away from the station, and it was so powerful that it blew through a wall and blasted through another train on a nearby track.

Passengers on those trains said that the force of the explosion also ripped holes in the train’s carriages, blowing people through the doors.

“The carriages filled with smoke,” Ben McCarthy, who was one of the trains, told ITV News. “Everything was black.” The passengers remained on the train for nearly half an hour before being escorted off, all the while listening to the screams of a man who had been blown off the train and was lying on the tracks beneath it.

The last explosion took place at 9:47 a.m. on the bus, at the intersection of Upper Woburn Square and Tavistock Place. Witnesses said its force sheared off the top half of the bus, leaving it looking like an opened sardine can. Hours later, blood and bits of metal and glass were still splattered across the road, and the headquarters of the British Medical Association, an imposing Victorian building across the street, was covered in blood from the bus’s passengers.

“The scene was just carnage,” said Tony Tindall, an Australian steel erector who has lived and worked in London for about five years. He was around the corner when the explosion took place and came to within 15 meters of the damaged bus . “There was blood and guts everywhere, washing all over the pavement and spattered all over the walls of the buildings nearby,” he said in an interview.

“I saw bodies everywhere and bits of bodies,” Mr. Tindall continued, describing how one man was hanging out of the back of the bus and another seemed to be cut in two. “It was so mixed up I couldn’t work out how many were dead. There were big bits of people. And the whole of the top of the bus had disappeared.”

A large area was soon cordoned off, and no one – not people who had left their cars nearby, and not people staying in the main local hotels, which had suddenly become inaccessible – was allowed in.

Although shaken and scared, many Londoners seemed to take the bombings in stride, or at least to want to take them in stride. In some ways, London has been bracing for such an attack since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States. And this is a city, after all, that withstood constant bombing during the Blitz in World War II, and a city that for some 30 years was the target of regular terrorist attacks from the Irish Republican Army.

“We’ve seen all this before, in a way,” Sgt. John Burnett, a police officer stationed near the scene of the bus explosion, said in an interview. ” “We’ve been fighting the I.R.A. for years in London. So bombs are nothing new.”

But, as Sergeant Burnett pointed out, the I.R.A. almost always took care to provide a telephone or other warning before an attack. That is not the case now. “It seems the hallmark of these attacks,” he said, “is we get no warning whatsoever.”

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