About 6:30 this morning I was driving back to the house from swimming, listening to NPR’s Morning Edition on the radio. Renee Montagne did an interview on with superconductivity physicist Deborah Jin of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Jin is one of several government employees who, tonight in Washington, are to receive the Service to America medal for outstanding work by public servants.
Montange asked Jin what motivates scientists to do basic research; she pointed out that the potential payoffs could be years away. Jin responded that, to people like her, basic research for the sake of learning how the world works “is a whole lot of fun.”
That exchange got me pondering how humanity came to be blessed with people like this — and with a social system in which they can do what they love and do good for the rest of us at the same time.
Don’t get me wrong — I know that not everyone gets to have “a whole lot of fun” in their work, or even to work productively at all. We have tremendous room for improvement on that score, not just in this country but globally as well. (I’ve read that this is one of the major benefits of offshoring jobs — we’re giving people in other countries an opportunity to build better lives and better social systems for themselves.)
Even so, we should never take for granted how marvelous human society is in this regard: To one extent or another, different people, with widely-varying interests and talents, can do what they like and/or are good at, instead of each of us having to forage for food every day. Adam Smith pointed this out over two centuries ago in his example of pin-making, in The Wealth of Nations.
In particular, we should marvel at the fact that at least some human social systems are set up to support seemingly-unproductive people like scientists, artists, and the like. True, these folks’ individual efforts may or may not ever benefit the rest of us. But collectively, they “strike oil” often enough that over time, the rest of us do indeed benefit.
It’s reminiscent of the Parable of the Sower in Matthew 13:
Then he told them many things in parables, saying: “A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop–a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.
(Emphasis added.) So what, you say — scientists and artists and others do their work every day, and so do billions of other people. But stop and think: How was it that we humans came to be wired that way, to be able to collaborate with each other in such a productive manner, when no other species (at least on this planet) even comes close. That seems worth a psalm of praise and thanksgiving.
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