Why would anyone get a Ph.D. in geography?

I've been around academia for, well, a long time, but for some reason I never heard of graduate programs in geography until a few months ago. At the time, I thought that geography was something that you studied in grade school, so that you would remember where Uganda is on the map, in case you ever wanted to go there.

But in reality, geography is one of those hybrid social sciences that tries to get at the relationships among geographical place, environment, economics, and culture. It seeks to understand—in a general sense—how human life happens on earth and, drawing from this understanding, make practical proposals about how humans can live on earth in more sustainable ways.

People who study geography are interested in many things. The University of Iowa, for instance, has specializations in environmental studies (which blends the harder research of environmental sciences and economics and public policy), geographic information science, health, and international development.

Clark University in Massachusetts offers a broader set of offerings, including feminist geography (how the environment shapes the experiences and needs of women), global economic change, the relationship between the environment and development, urban development, political and cultural ecology (how cultures and political systems interact), and sustainability and natural resources, among other things.

I started thinking again about geography this morning, as I started to read Jeffrey Sachs's Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet. Sachs works at The Earth Institute at Columbia University. Perusing the site shows geography in practice. The discipline of geography is more than finding blotches on a map; it is one of the most important, and perhaps neglected, fields today.

They don't call it SUNY Stoner Brook for nothing

Apparently, a Ph.D. candidate somewhere at a division one research university has found that marijuana use is necessary, if not essential, for the successful completion of a doctorate.

I'm an analyst of imaginative literature instead of a producer of it. But I would lay claim to a modest form of drug-induced insight. For example, I took a demanding seminar in my first year of graduate school and wanted to impress my professor with a stellar paper.

Naturally, I came down with a bad case of writer's block shortly before the paper was due. For two hours I did nothing more than use the cut-and-paste function, treating my essay like a Rubik's Cube: "If I just move this section here, it will all make sense."

Finally I thought, "Screw this." I decided to shelve the project for a few hours and toked up instead. Of course I immediately began thinking about my paper again. But now it seemed like a privilege to consider economic globalization and its relation to British poetry. Instead of frantically rearranging sections of text, I started to imagine the theoretical basis of my essay in holistic terms, and saw a connection between arguments that I hadn't noticed before.

Now, I do remember that some of my best philosophy papers sounded as if I had dropped acid. (The first line from one of them: "Sometimes, when I'm watching television, the Gordon's Fisherman comes to visit me." I got an A.) But is marijuana really a study aid? Admittedly, the author has a point that, in some ways, his recreational drug use is perhaps less problematic than, say, binge drinking or ectsasy-fueled raves. Yet, he still seems just as neurotic:

I'm an insomniac who averages four to five hours of sleep a night. The best way to deal with a sleeping problem is with regular exercise. But it's nice to have a secret weapon to knock me out on days when I can't make it to the gym. I'm certainly better off than peers who have flirted with Xanax addictions, or who waste their stipends on genuinely worthless stuff like Ambien or Lunesta.

Is this really what it takes to "make it" in academics? If it is, doesn't that mean that academic life is somehow fundamentally broken, dysfunctional, and unhealthy? If so, what can be done to make academia more suitable for human habitation?

Another day, another rupee

When I see photos like this, as I saw last week in the New York Times, I get nervous. No, the image isn't from the latest Batman or Indiana Jones movies but from Pakistan, which also happens to be on the way to something of an economic meltdown.

A key ally in the region, Pakistan is a desperately poor country—the story in the New York Times quotes a man who had just lost his life savings, which for him was about $4,175—but it has been growing steadily since a recession in 1951, most recently rate of about seven percent per year. However, the political dischord surrounding the government of Pervez Musharraf and the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in 2007 rattled the economy greatly.

In January, Reuters reported that Pakistan's central bank downgraded its yearly projections for the country's economic growth from a robust 7.2 percent to somewhere between 6.6 and 7 percent. But the problem isn't simply short-term political termoil, because Pakistan's economy, like ours, is a consumer economy driven by credit. A few weeks after the Bhutto assassination, the Voice of America reported that:

Economist Qaisar Bengali says the strong performance was not sustainable, partly because on the consumer side of things, it was the result of easier bank credit. That made it possible for more people to borrow to buy big items such as cars. Bengali says when consumer financing is removed, bank profits decline, automobile sector growth declines, and gross domestic product growth declines.

Such reliance on credit means that the Pakistani economy is open to the same pressures that the American economy is. Even in January, Reuters reported that "the central bank also sounded a warning about the country's widening current account deficit and fiscal shortfall, saying they exposed the country to funding risks at a time when the U.S. subprime crisis was troubling global credit markets."

This suggests, once again, that the pocketbook issues of the American economy have implications for international security. But Time reports that for Pakistanis, the troubled economic forecast also suggests a staggering level of incompetence within the country's fragile coalition government.

Since the new government took office, there have been alarming levels of capital flight. Foreign investors began to pull out in the days after former prime minister Benazir Bhutto's assassination. "But mainly it has been due to the weakening of the rupee," says M. Ziauddin, a specialist writer on economic affairs for Dawn newspapers. "People clearly wanted to save their dollars." "Right now there seems to be a crisis of confidence," says Nazar, the economic commentator. "There are serious questions about the leadership. The president is disinterested, and the political leadership [Zardari and Sharif] is out of the country. But it is also a question of competence. The crisis over the sacked judges [which sped protests that led to Musharraf's downfall] and the coalition's internal disputes have left the economy ignored."

As Musharraf clung onto power, I remember his saying that he mistrusted civilian governance because of the high levels of incompetence and corruption that were associated with the regimes of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif. At the time, his comments were dismissed. But what if he was right?