Dr. Kent

Icky Dick: I want to bounce off of our discussion last week of the TED conference, and ask you a silly question. If you didn’t have the amazing abilities you have now, but had the ability to fix one thing in the world, big or small, what would it be?

Superman: Hmm. That is a silly question, though it’s kind of TEDish in its myopic grandiosity… but it’s also a sly attempt to keep me within the realm of fickle politics. Do you play chess? You should try playing Bruce sometime…

ID: I’ve been known to lose at chess on more than one occasion. But I’d be happy to play chess with Bruce, so long as our conversation was on the record.

S: I don’t know that I’d hold my breath on that- even if I don’t really technically need to breath.

But to answer your question… I’m tempted to stymie you and say “farm equipment,” which would only partially be a joke. There is something almost spiritual about using your hands to fix something that will help feed people- there’s an uncommon nobility to that, and I think it would send you scrambling for further topics to this discussion. But I have trouble accepting the smallness of that- it would be too selfish, too personally rewarding while bearing limited good for everyone else, the fed people notwithstanding. And I like to think I’m a practical person- a pragmatist. So the real question, then, is what’s the most important problem in the world right now- or perhaps, rather than importance, the one problem in the world that has the best chance of being addressed.

There are a lot of problems mankind’s butting up against: war, pollution, famine, poverty, clean water, disease- to name just a few. So maybe my answer is simply cheating, since it touches on all of them, but I suppose, while we may not often think of it in these terms, it is a pretty basic necessity, and that’s health.

ID: Hmm. So what do you think of Obama’s plan, then?

S: I wasn’t done- but I’ll indulge you for a moment. I think, like most of the public, I can agree that one, our health care system doesn’t work like it should, and two, I have no idea what the impact of Obama’s plan is going to be. I think the truth of it is that neither can he- what he’s doing is tackling the mammoth industry in this country, and the one where all of us stand to lose or gain depending on the outcome. Health reform is necessary and worth attempting- I just hope that politics and the necessary uncertainty of change don’t get too much in the way.

But American health care is really too small- and that’s not to disparage my countrymen, merely pointing out that we’re less than 5% of the world’s population, and not everything revolves around us. Though, I suppose, at the center of this is the fact that Americans are disproportionately disadvantaged as Western nations go, so health reform would disproportionately advantage us, too.

But let me explain first what I mean about health tying into everything. Solid health reform would focus on the really easy things to fix first. As an example, more than enough food is produced in the modern world to feed the population, but it is used in such a way that food produced is more costly, less healthy, and spread less efficiently than it should be. Health reform would include better nutrituional planning in terms of what we put into our bodies and how we get it there. Health reform should also include access to clean drinking water, and some form of sewage system. These are really just part of the foundation of good health reform- and the most basic kind of preventative medicine.

And to bring back TED for a moment, providing research into cheaper eyewear, to the end of eventually supplying eyeglasses to that billion people without them- imagine how many geniuses we might be missing out on simply because they cannot see. Germany at the start of World War Two had about 80 million people, but Hitler’s policies ended up driving out some of the world’s greatest minds, Einstein, Felix Bloch, Max Born, Hans Bethe, and physicists including what would eventually become the core of the Manhattan Project. Imagine if that figure held, that once in every eighty million we got an Einstein, a Bloch and a Born- now imagine there’s a one in six chance that they wouldn’t be able to see well enough to change the world. That’s basic visual care- a pair of eyeglasses, for God’s sake, and the benefits could be incalculable.

Sorry, I was getting tangential for a moment, there. Anyway, I’ve never been one to argue green technology from a karmic standpoint, or even from a global warming one. I remember a conversation I sort of stumbled into between Bruce [Wayne] and Ted Kord, and while they were both arguing the practical and economic reasoning, I just said, “It’s poison- industry is making the planet a little more hostile to human life every single day.” Ironically enough I followed that with, “I don’t know about the two of you, but I plan on living a very long life, and it would be nice if the planet were still pretty and teeming with life for the duration.” And I don’t take any credit, in fact, if anything, I think they were both just trying to figure out how to implement green strategies, but Kord and Wayne Industries are two of the greenest companies on the planet- and just maybe pollution isn’t causing more asthma and other breathing related diseases, but it’s still several birds with one very self-serving stone.

The connection to poverty’s admittedly a little shakier, and I don’t think that health reform will fix bad economies, or even resuscitate good economies going through a bad streak, but it will help. Health costs are strangling virtually every first world nation, and lead to rationing in others. And it’s also possible we could eliminate some of that poverty by spreading out production into other nations where production costs would be lower, which would create some better paying jobs in poorer countries, and as an added side-effect, the carbon-footprint of medicines and equipment would shrink as well.

Conflict- war, violence- is one of the biggest problems on the planet, but what does conflict tie into? Disparity and inequality. Someone believes someone else has something they should, so they’re willing to fight for it- that’s in a nutshell. Of course, that dynamic is distorted by the fact that most of the time the people benefiting in a conflict are no longer those in the line of fire, so there’s really not the same cost-benefit at play. The people who fight wars in the last fifty years have usually been the poor and disadvantaged.

But in a world where people are going to live 70 years, and they’re going to be healthy and relatively happy, that comes into consideration. If I’m twenty and have AIDS in a country I can't find work let alone afford antiretrovirals then I’m more likely to make poorer, rasher decisions than someone looking at another 50 years of life and prosperity. War doesn’t end, but the pool of proxy soldiers available for pennies or vulnerable to idealogic posturing gets shallower- and you start seeing those greedy people who try to manipulate others into fighting for their benefit actually having to risk for what they’re trying to take- it becomes a different game.

The thing is, if you add up the amount of people who are suffering because of war, or even poverty, even if you could address the underlying social and economic issues, you’ll only help them incrementally, because this one issue looms so large- because the cost of healthcare and its subsequent rationing in poorer countries distorts everything else. Even if you increased global wealth per capita to the level of the American middle class, you’d still have a health crisis. But if you can drive down costs- then healthcare becomes cheaper for everyone- and as industrializing nations’ economies develop, they’ll be grandfathered into a more efficient health care system.

ID: Wow, you’ve gotten knee-deep into this and we’re already through our allotted time. Um, we’re going to keep recording, but I’m going to stop it here so I can start transcribing, and we can try and get this thing out sort of on time (since regular on time isn’t in my otherwise robust vocabulary).

We’ll be trying to bring you a new section of the interview every Tuesday. Some of the questions have already been prepared by the interviewer, but to ask Superman a question, leave a comment or send an email to DeathofSuperman@gmail.com.