How best to remember Jeff Byers? Several people have asked me what charities would be best to donate to in Jeff’s name, and certainly Jeff had some causes that he cared deeply about. But I am very excited about a new scholarship endowment fund set up in Jeff’s name at the University of Texas at Austin through the efforts of Paul Zimmerman and Grant Willson. Below is a letter describing the fund and how to donate to it.

January 20, 2008

Dear Friends of Jeff Byers;

We are all struggling to come to terms with Jeff’s untimely passing on November 4th. Several of us have been discussing ways to serve Jeff’s memory. We have decided that our best idea is to set up the Jeff Byers Memorial Award through an endowment at The University of Texas at Austin. This award will be given annually to the UT Chemistry or Chemical Engineering graduate student that best typifies the qualities exhibited by Jeff during his lifetime. The award will have an academic excellence component and an equally important component based on the candidate’s selflessly helping his peers. We have all experienced Jeff’s generous nature, where he would put himself second to help a friend, student, or a colleague with their work or problem. We no longer can tell him how much we appreciate all he did for us on human and professional levels; however, this award, by small measure, will allow us all to memorialize Jeff’s enduring spirit.

We are hopeful that you will join us with any size contribution you see fit in order to help reach our goal and create a permanent endowment named for Jeff at $25,000. The University of Texas will administer the endowment, and all donations are tax-deductible. The endowment is a sincere commitment to honor Jeff with a very meaningful tribute, and will no doubt be considered prestigious by the students that receive it. The Jeff Byers Memorial Award in Chemistry/Chemical Engineering will forever be a testament to how he was a part of our lives while also providing support for future students in the Departments in perpetuity. This endowment will be used to directly support future generations of graduate students in Jeff’s name, building on his already deep legacy of giving and helping others.

To join us in creating this annual award in Jeff’s memory, checks and pledges can be sent directly to the University at the address below. Checks should be made out to UT Austin, with an important note in the memo field that the gift is “in memory of Jeff Byers,” and mailed to:

Attn: Tim Aronson
College of Natural Sciences, Office of the Dean
The University of Texas
1 University Station G2500
Austin, Texas 78712-0549

Gifts can also be made online at: https://utdirect.utexas.edu/nlogon/vip/ogp.WBX. Select “Natural Sciences” in step 1, and in step 2 write, “in memory of Jeff Byers” in the space provided.

Most importantly, we offer our deepest sympathies for our mutual loss. We also sincerely thank those many of you who already promised some donation to this, which helped motivate us to move forward.

Sincerely,

The Friends and Colleagues of Jeff Byers

I love the words “somnambulist” and “perambulator”. They are superb – sublime, even. I don’t know what they mean, but I still love them. I have looked them up many times, mid-sentence in a book by Gunter Grass or George Orwell, but I always forget their meaning. Nevertheless, whenever I read these words I immediately suspect the author of genius. Friedrich Nietzsche once said that all great ideas occur while walking (which just means that he must have spent a lot of time sitting down). While I walk a lot, I don’t have many great ideas. I am happy, though, when on a walk, to simply reflect on these words.

I’ve heard this complaint from doctors before, often echoed by Republican politicians: Growing medical malpractice jury awards are causing malpractice insurance rates to skyrocket, resulting in higher medical costs for everyone. I remember a recent speech by President Bush where he said the most important thing we can do to control medical costs is tort reform.

Really? I’ve always wondered how much truth there was to this malpractice hype, so I did what I usually do – take the macroeconomic view. A bit of research (thank you, Google) was all that was required to find out that in 2003 (the last year I found any data) malpractice premiums in the US totaled about $10B. That same year, the US spent about $1.7 trillion on health care. That makes malpractice insurance costs much less than 1% of health costs. Even if there was some sort of multiplicative effect (doctors practicing “defensive medicine”, etc.) there is little chance of total malpractice costs making up more than about 1% of health care costs. And since health care costs are growing at about 6 – 7% per year, there is just no way that controlling malpractice costs could have any noticeable impact on the rising costs of medical care in the US.

While doing this bit of internet research, I found that Tom Baker wrote a book in 2005 called The Medical Malpractice Myth where he makes this same basic argument. I think it is very important to look at how Americans can better control health spending. But harping on malpractice insurance just keeps us from focusing on a solution that might actually help.

I’ve just finished reading an essay written by George Orwell called Notes on Nationalism. It is brilliant (which is expected – it was written by George Orwell after all). Here is my favorite line: “Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, since their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties.” And this was written in 1945! He could have been taking about any (or all) of the talking-head commentators on TV or talk radio today. Some things never change.

And now to the core of our debate on Social Security. With sufficient prodding, my conservative friends came out with the real reason they are against social security: “Social security is not an ‘insurance’ program, it is an entitlement program.” To a conservative, “entitlement” signifies everything that is wrong with America: government programs that encourage bad behavior because people are not forced to live with the consequences of their bad decisions.

Certainly, any program that encourages bad behavior, or incentivizes bad decisions, is misguided. But is that really what Social Security does? Are the 40% of retirees that rely on Social Security to survive really just a bunch of lazy good-for-nothings on the government dole, laughing all the way to the bank while real, hard working Americans suffer to pay for their vices? The image is ludicrous. The problem with this cartoonish characterization of “entitlement” programs is that it makes a very significant (and self-serving) logical fallacy: that the outcomes in one’s life are solely a result of the choices one makes.

There are three predominant factors that impact outcomes in life: one’s natural abilities, the effort and choices one makes, and the circumstances of one’s life that are outside of one’s control. Is it right to blame someone for lack of natural ability, or bad luck? There are plenty of people that have worked harder in their life than me and have barely gotten by. The formula that poor = lazy is so full of exceptions that it is more likely an exception to the rule that poor = hard work.

[So why is this “entitlement” logical fallacy self-serving? People who are successful in life want to take credit for their own success.]

Of course, the liberals have their own entitlement fallacy: people’s failures are predominantly a result of a life stacked up against them. Like the conservative entitlement fallacy, it simplifies the complex reality of consequences to the point of cartoonish caricature: the rich aligned together in a vast conspiracy to keep the poor down.

But my opinions as to the value of Social Security go beyond the simple statement that the vast majority of people that receive Social Security are not being rewarded for bad decisions. Consider the man (or woman) who really did make bad decisions throughout his life – never considering what it would take to survive at 70. Suppose he now has reached that age without friends or family able to help him, and without the means to help himself. Some people may be OK with watching him slowly starve to death, or die from lack of simple, basic medical care. I am not.

I believe that every human being has intrinsic value independent of how much that person contributes to a market economy. This belief alone is enough to justify a “safety net” social policy – providing a collection of programs that work to prevent death due to extreme poverty. Social Security is one such program – and arguable an exceptionally successful one. For those opposed to Social Security on philosophical grounds, don’t kid yourself: without it, many people will die, old and desperate.

A few weeks back I posted an optics limerick that a friend had recited for me. I think that post received more comments (in the form of other limericks) than any other blog posting I have made. Well, for all of you limerick-loving nerds out there, here are some collections of optics limericks from a 1977 contest held by Optics News:

http://www.osa-opn.org/Blog/post/Optics-Limericks.aspx

http://www.osa-opn.org/Blog/post/More-Optics-Limericks.aspx

Now, thirty years later, Optics and Photonics News is holding another optics limerick contest. Send your entries to Christina Folz at opn@osa.org.

In conversation, I mentioned to someone that I considered myself a libertarian. He immediately (and rightly) challenged me to explain what I meant by that, since many politicians whose policies I despise also embrace that label. I decided that the best way to answer the question was on the personal level. The result is a short essay that I have just posted: Am I a Libertarian?

I thought I had come up with a great analogy for Social Security: It is a ship rushing towards an iceberg, but that berg is very far away and a simple and small course correction is all that is required to avoid disaster. But, as expected, the fundamental disagreement with my conservative friends is not tactical, it is strategic. I got a response that went something like this: “The Social Security fund is projected to run out of money in my lifetime, and I don’t have any faith that I will be able to collect anything close to what I put in. If they would give me my actuarial benefits today, I would ever so gladly take them and invest them myself.”

We haven’t yet gotten to the core issue, but nonetheless it is useful to address this common complaint. Social Security is an insurance program, not an IRA. My friend doesn’t want insurance, he wants an IRA. Fair enough. But let’s not say that Social Security is broken because it is insurance, not an individual retirement account.

I have fire insurance on my house. I will be very, very happy if I live out my days never having to collect on that policy. Does that mean all those premium payments have been a waste? No. That’s the nature of insurance. Likewise, Social Security is insurance against poverty in retirement. I hope that I will never need it. That will be success for me. But for 40% of people in this country aged 65 and older, social security is their only income. They need it. I’m glad they have it. My friend and I may be better off with an IRA, but they wouldn’t be.

The whole discussion about Social Security as a sinking ship is a ruse. The course corrections required to avoid disaster are simple and relatively painless – and such corrections from time to time are inevitable for all such insurance programs. But by saying we need to get rid of Social Security because it is broken, one avoids having to debate the true issue: My conservative friends want to get rid of Social Security even if it is not broken. The philosophical/policy issues involved are fundamental and worthy of debate (properly balancing individual versus shared risks and needs), but instead we argue around the core issue. That’s a shame.

I recently got into an argument (I mean, a discussion) with some conservative friends of mine about Social Security. And, as such discussions are wont to go, rather than dive into the core philosophical differences that divided us we argued over the economic viability of Social Security. Very quickly, analogies to sinking ships and the Titanic were brought up by my friends. Imaginary conversations of the captain refusing to acknowledge reality were proposed: “All we need is more paying passengers…”

My friends have a pretty bizarre idea of what constitutes a sinking ship. Social Security has a surplus (surplus!!) of $2.2 trillion. Not only is it floating, it is also helping to float the US government since that $2T was used to pay a fair portion of the $9T national debt.

Yes, yes, we can all make the forecasts 40 or 50 years into the future and see trouble ahead. But the conversation on the deck of the ship would be something like this:

Captain: (sorry there is no captain, this ship is piloted by committee)
Committee member 1: Look – there is an iceberg 800 miles in front of us. We’ll need to change course at some point.
Committee member 2: Turn right!
Committee member 3: Turn left!
Committee member 2: Right!
Committee member 3: Left!
Committee member 2: Right!
Committee member 3: Left!
……

Well, you can guess what might happen if our committee members remain stubborn. But if we do keep heading straight and plow into the iceberg in 40 years, I would be hard pressed to blame the ship or the iceberg.

At Jeff Byers burial service, John Petersen shared these thoughts:

I first met Jeff at SEMATECH. He first struck me (and later my wife Rae) as impish and that brought to mind:
“What revell rout
Is kept about,
In every corner where I goe,
I will o’er see,
And merry be,
And make good sport with a ho, ho, ho!”

These words about Shakespeare’s Puck well describe my first impressions of Jeff.

Story: For instance, we had a great time doing stuff, I mean science, in the lab. One time we made videos of wafers developing in attempt to extract the dissolution behavior. It kind of worked but it was mostly fun setting up our movie studio.

Another time I will always remember: We were in Jeff’s cubicle working on his computer. The guy across the hall (who maybe is here today but I don’t know) was ease-dropping on our work. All of sudden Jeff while typing madly turned and watched the guy while continuing to talk to me (and typing). During this time, he hacked into the guy’s computer, took it over and typed in no uncertain terms to mind his own business. (This impressed me at many levels: the ability to do the hacking; the ability to touch type and send commands without looking – I’m just a hunt-and-peck kind of guy; the ability to talk normally and intelligently about the project during all this other activity.)

This view (of the imp) was never lost.

+ Jeff loved life
+ Jeff loved friends
+ Jeff loved his family
+ Jeff loved Carita

He loved to share and to collaborate.

As Jeff and I grew from colleagues, to friends, to brothers. I learned, like Puck, Jeff’s prerogative to utter the TRUTH that no one else will speak.

It was the collaborative search for these truths that endeared him to me and to the people who knew him. It is what made him great!

Hand-in-hand with his fierce Love he had hate. He railed against all forms of tyranny, rejecting all dogmas: religious, economic and corporate (all things that inhibited thought and created hurt).

Story: For instance, I would come to his office and he would bring up the web page showing the profits and money in the bank for his employer. Stabbing at the page he would say four billion in the bank and they are laying people off. I quit! And he did!

+ Jeff sought knowledge
+ Jeff sought community
+ Jeff sought justice
And in the end I believe Jeff ultimately sought peace.

It is this pursuit that made him a tireless man of action:
Jeff was
+ Scholarship in-action
+ Mind in-action
+ Justice in-action
And I would say, though he would (probably) deny it:
+ Grace in-action

We can all be happy, proud and humbled to know Jeff.

I urge you all to look at Jeff’s legacy:
+ Look to Yak Farm
+ Look to his community
+ Look at his work.

I grieve our loss, my loss.

Jeff I Love you.