The Answer

In America, there is a time-honored solution to every new crisis. If you are unclear on the concept, it is called "throwing money at the problem." That is, one can short-circuit a lot of dickering and consensus-building in a democratic society by using the free-enterprise system of rewards to influence behavior. While this method is not always the most efficient, and is almost always not pretty, it can be effective. It may attract a lot of the wrong kind of peoplethose interested in making a fast buck, not in solving the problembut it will also redirect a lot of the "right" kind of people.

Now, the people who needed influencing were not the young people who were my age. Sure, some of us would get caught up in the glamour, mystery, and intensity of science for the right reasons. Some of us might become interested out of some patriotic streak. But by and large, hormones dictated that for most of usI'm speaking for the adolescent males herethe main "problematic" issues for the next few years revolved around the opposite sex. For the geeks among us, this loomed much larger and more daunting than getting to the moon. Seeing those attractive young girls hanging off athletes' shoulders was a motivator at least as powerful as atomic energy, believe me. Sputnik didn't change that.

No, the people who needed to be influenced were our parents, because the late fifties and early sixties were the last time kids even pretended to listen to them. The timing was perfect; within 10 years, the rebelliousness of the sixties' generation would make parental influence de minimus. So the first bit of fortuitous timing was that we were literally the last generation who paid any attention when our parents spoke. It is hard to imagine the teenagers of the seventies and eighties being anything like those of the late fifties and early sixties. Think "Father Knows Best"^[1] and a middle-class culture in which marijuana was something only jazz musicians smoked to get high.

^[1] "Father Knows Best" was an American television situation comedy of the day that presented a "typical American family" in which everyone was perfect and all problems were resolved in 30 minutes, less time out for commercial announcements.

Of course, we had no idea it could be any other way.