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When the fed is spending $7.4 trillion to clean up the wreckage, you know someone’s gotta take the blame. So who should shoulder it? Scientific American thinks at least some of the fault belongs with the physics and math whizzes who built the risk models that dug our grave.

In a byline-free editorial, the magazine traces our woes back to a 2004 meeting in which the SEC agreed to lift a rule specifying debt limits and capital reserves “needed for a rainy day.” This move provided the requisite billions that banks pumped into mortgage-backed securities and derivatives. And who created the structures for these impossibly complex schemes that caused the mass bank implosion? Wall Street’s band of “lapsed physicists and mathematical virtuosos,” also known as “quants,” who “both invented these oblique securities and created software models that supposedly measured the risk a firm would incur by holding them in its portfolio.”

Given that hindsight is 20-20, we now realize that all these models are really only accurate for a limited period of time, at a very narrow confidence level—meaning that whenever those conditions aren’t fantasy-scenario optimal, the actual risk can be enough to incite a global meltdown. Good to know!

So should we be tarring and feathering the brains who built the beam we used to hang ourselves? It’s hardly that simple, a fact that Sci Am acknowledges while still laying on the heavy guilt:

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Not only are doctors becoming increasingly, frighteningly scarce, but they’re also hating life. A recent survey of 11,950 primary care docs and specialists done by the Physicians’ Foundation found that 60 percent would not recommend medicine as a career, while 42 percent said professional morale is either “poor” or “very low.”

The reasons for all this depression can be boiled down to insurance companies and policy headaches:

“The reported reasons for the widespread frustration among physicians include increased time dealing with non-clinical paperwork, difficulty receiving reimbursement and burdensome government regulations. Physicians say these issues keep them from the most satisfying aspect of their job: patient relationships.”

Food for thought, Obama? As for all those Medicare cut proposals being thrown around, 82 percent said their practices would be “unsustainable” if pay cuts were made. A whopping 94 percent reported that the time they spend on non-clinical paperwork has gone up in the past three years, with 63 percent saying the paperwork leads to less time spent on each patient.

And of course, there’s the shortage, which is already alive and well: 78 percent of the physicians surveyed believe there’s an existing dearth of primary care doctors, while 49 percent say they plan to reduce the number of patients they see, or even stop practicing over the next three years. Yikes.

Related:
RB: Get Thee to Medical School!

If you’ve picked up a newspaper, watched a TV, or checked your 401K in the past few months, there’s a near-perfect chance that you’ve experienced the full miasma of fear, anxiety, and helplessness that accompany loss of control. We hate that feeling—it’s a trait embedded in the human condition. And we’ll go to any lengths—including “developing” the ability to talk with the dead, see invisible patterns, and read the stars—in order to avoid it.

Sharon Begley at Newsweek writes that a whopping 90 percent of Americans either think they’ve experienced a paranormal event, or believe that they can happen. And when occurrences—like oh, say, worldwide financial crises—remind us just how futile our desire for order and control really are, our “ability” to see the future in tea leaves by no coincidence begins to rise. As Begley puts it:

Historically, such times have been marked by a surge in belief in astrology, ESP and other paranormal phenomena, spurred in part by a desperate yearning to feel a sense of control in a world spinning out of control.

There’s also the study in this month’s issue of Science finding that lack of control directly increases our “invisible pattern-seeing” ability (or perception of one). People primed with a sense of powerlessness saw more images in static, found more conspiracies in written stories, and imagined more patterns in financial markets than those who were left alone.

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The American health care rule for prescription drugs is generally: Ask (or just go online) and ye shall receive.

But with an economic meltdown comes serious resource reallocation, and lost jobs and slashed earnings/net worths mean less money to pay for all those Trazodone and Ativan refills. Consequently, as the New York Times reports, consumers are cutting back on prescription drug use in an effort to curb spending. And the effects are already hitting drug companies: Pfizer says that sales of Lipitor, the world’s largest-selling prescription med, has seen sales drop 13 percent in the third quarter, and Merck just announced it’s slashing 7,200 jobs.

Of course, there are plenty of reasons why this is bad:

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There’s a lot of talk about “green jobs” in this election. But for all the questions raised by the phrase—just how many jobs will be generated, where will they come from, how fast will they get here—so far we’ve had few definite answers.

Which is why it’s helpful to have at least one state paving the way as an example of how to incorporate energy efficiency and “greening” into the economic scheme, and save money and create jobs in the process. The state in question is California, and according to a new study out of U.C. Berkeley, its planned investments in fighting global warming and improving energy efficiency will create as many as 403,000 jobs and jack up household incomes by $48 billion in the next 12 years. These results are a big jump even from the state’s own estimates, which were around 100,000 new jobs and $14 billion in personal income.

The key to the mystical “green job,” according to the Berkeley study, is reallocation: When people use less energy, they spend less on energy bills, and thus have more cash to spend on other things, like consumer products. Cue economic growth and job creation.

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Everyone is losing this year. Whether it be the Lehman CEO or the evicted homeowner or the aging employee with a napalmed 401K, no one—not even the supercalifragilistamega-rich— is coming out of this unscathed. But given the present and future of across-the-board pain, it’s worth looking at which industries and interests should be salvaged, or at least partially shielded from damage.

Famed paleoanthropologist and conservationist Richard Leakey is already on the offensive, telling reporters during a speech the University of Arkansas at Little Rock that the economic crisis would be “just devastating” to scientific research. He fears that as the philanthropists, foundations, corporations, and governments that fund scientific research watch their coffers empty, money for grants, endowments, and other research efforts will fizzle. Starting in 2009, donations for research and exploration will be “hugely hit,” he predicts.

Environmental researchers and activists are already worried that climate work could be tossed aside in favor of more immediate (but not necessarily less worrisome) concerns. It’s not a stretch to predict that other scientific fields will be hit as well—and that the halting or delaying of research could be as big an aggregate loss as the mortgage crisis and Dow immolation combined.

Related:

Reality Base: High Gas Prices = Good; High Gas Prices = Bad
RB: Lose Your House, Lose Your Vote, Lose Your Self-Esteem
RB: DISCOVER’s Science Policy Project

So we’ve been driving a lot less, which is good. We’ve also been shifting attitudes about oil as a resource and adjusting our lives to consume less of it, which is even better. And we’ve been lavishing more time and attention (and money) on alternative energy, which is best of all.

But now oil prices are plummeting as fast as they rose, and analysts are worried that all those silver linings will be ripped out and tossed aside. As the economy grinds to a halt and the government doles out $700 billion checks, Time’s Bryan Walsh wonders if alternative fuel initiatives—and, for that matter, any climate change legislation—might be shoved to the back of the line behind our bubbling economic woes.

Even if the gas price dip is temporary and/or U.S. consumption habits remain changed, the credit and spending slashes that are already underway could put the kibosh on funding for many alt-energy projects, as Walsh points out. Plus there’s the matter of gas prices as a source of political leverage: The Warner-Lieberman bill, Congress’ first real attempt to pass cap-and-trade legislation, was defeated when Republicans throttled it with the charge that carbon caps would lead to even higher oil prices.

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You may recall that nerves were jangled this summer over the appearance of a recent Hindenburg Omen—the mathematical formula that measures the probability of a stock market crash, and has reportedly predicted every crash since 1985. Granted, the appearance of an omen didn’t necessarily mean a crash was incoming—though a “confirmed” omen, such as the one in June, substantially upped the chances of the market tanking.

Well, it looks like the numbers didn’t lie.

• Ticked off about the bailout? Luckily there’s Offsetthebailout.com, a social network for angst-filled consumers to post their anti-bailout rants.

• Continuing the presidential technology lovefest, the Obama campaign launches an iPhone application.

• Schwarzenegger cracks the whip on California’s urban—and gas-guzzling—sprawl.

• Jenny McCarthy for president? America’s favorite anti-vaxer hits the political scene.

• And in other anti-vax news, the Florida Institute of Technology publishes the first national survey of attitudes towards autism and vaccines—and it ain’t pretty.

• The BBC reveals its version of the Stanford Prison Experiment (hint: They got the same results).

• And where oh where can we turn for informed and accurate advice about the economy? MIT’s a pretty good start.

EcoGeek’s Hank Green notes that while nothing could touch the 500 mph freefall of bank stocks last week, the stocks that took a surprising second-worst hit were solar. Green’s reasoning for this, which we agree with, is that the solar industry was a victim of seriously bad timing: Just as renewable energy tax credits—which have been floundering in political quicksand for months—were finally passed in the Senate, a host of mega-banks decombusted, leaving the House with the small task of saving the American economy from collapse.

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While the gas price spike has already reduced the amount of miles Americans drive and perhaps even jump-started a bicycling movement, could it really put a dent in America’s seemingly-unstoppable obesity rise?

Charles Courtemanche, an economics professor at the University of North Carolina, certainly thinks so. According to his latest research, a permanent one-dollar rise in gas prices is associated with a seven percent drop in overweight Americans and a nine percent drop in obesity rates—the equivalent of about four to five pounds (1.8 to 2.3 kilograms) in lost weight across the entire U.S. population. His analysis was based on gasoline prices in several states from 1984 to 2004, which he compared with each state’s average body weight and obesity rate.

Granted, these results seem to fly in the face of the obesity epidemic’s steady rise, which also began around twenty years ago—if gas prices were so steadily increasing and leading to weight loss, why were obesity levels simultaneously skyrocketing? Still, maybe some further data could bolster Courtemanche’s theory. While his paper was originally published in May of 2007 (when gas was at a “record high” of $3.22 a gallon), it was revised this summer—with gas prices already $1 a gallon higher. Perhaps incorporating the last four (crucial, unstable) years of data into his model could shed some light on whether his four-pounds-a-person theory is accurate. If so, we’re all going out for a burger.

Image: iStockPhoto 

The Wall Streeters are buzzing about a possible mathematical sign of economic apocalypse. Called the Hindenburg Omen, it’s a formula that measures the probability of a stock market crash (defined as a 15 percent or greater decline). Hindenburg Omens have reportedly predicted every crash since 1985—though of course, the old correlation v. causation problem means that a Hindenburg Omen occurring doesn’t necessarily mean a crash is on the way.

The five criteria for a full-fledged omen—called a “confirmed” Hindenburg Omen—are as follows:

[T]he daily number of NYSE New 52 Week Highs and the Daily number of New 52 Week Lows must both be so high as to have the lesser of the two be greater than 2.2 percent of total NYSE issues traded that day…The traditional definition had two more filters: That the NYSE 10 Week Moving Average is also Rising, which we consider met if it is higher than the level 10 weeks earlier (condition # 2), and that the McClellan Oscillator is negative on that same day (condition # 3)…

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