Economic

My father offers some sound advice to President Obama today in this NY Times article . He still hopes that I will quit economics and go to medical school. It is true that UCLA's faculty salary cuts are lowering the price of making such a career transition.

"Doctors see a rise in cholesterol like Mr. Obama’s occasionally, said Dr. Martin L. Kahn, a professor of cardiology at New York University who is not connected with Mr. Obama’s case. “Usually that is a lever for the doctor to recommend more aggressive dietary changes and cigarette cessation to warn a patient, ‘Look what you are doing to yourself’,’ “ Dr. Kahn said in an interview.

“Nutritionists tell us that a very little extra food each day adds up to a measurable amount at the end of a year,” Dr. Kahn said.

Dr. Kahn said he might recommend an exercise stress test “as a baseline” for the future but would not do further procedures “unless he had a calamitous stress test.”

Mr. Obama showed no evidence of heart disease from an electrocardiogram and a test known as an electron beam CT scan that looks for calcified areas in coronary arteries that may be evidence of coronary artery disease.

“The CT heart scan findings are somewhat reassuring” because if it were positive, “it would be a worry,” Dr. Kahn said."

NOW --- permit me to boast. How many parents and their kids have been quoted in the New York Times in the same year in independent articles unrelated to crime or spatial shocks such as a Katrina event? Here is one of my quotes in that fancy newspaper. I'm still waiting for the NY Post to call me.