Well Dressed Coaches

West Virginia University mens basketball coach, Bob Huggins (left) has begun appearing courtside wearing what can best be described as casual/athletic gear rather than the traditional coat and tie which other coaches seem to wear. Watch any college or professional basketball game these days and you'll see the coach dressed as if he's just come from a nice restaurant. But Huggins seems to be changing that.

We saw the same thing happen in professional (American) football. Coaches today wear sweats and windbreakers with their team's logo on it but prior to about 1975, most coaches dressed like they were working in an office. I'm thinking of Vince Lombardi, Hank Stram, Tom Landry and Dan Reeves among others. They all wore jackets with a dress shirt. Even John Madden who frequently appeared in short sleeves, at least wore a collared shirt. But today most NFL coaches wear athletic gear. New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick wears a sweatshirt with cut-off sleeves. Redskins' Mike Shanahan wears a Washington Redskins windbreaker with maroon pants, turf shoes, etc.

But college basketball hasn't deviated from the semi-formal dress code--at least not until Bob Huggins started going casual. I won't say that it's good or bad, only that it is. My prediction is that this trend will catch on and we will start to see basketball coach fashion trend toward the casual-athletic and away from the Sunday best just as it happened in professional football.

Democratization of Investing

Before about 1980, if a man was described as having stocks and bonds, most of us would immediately think of him as rich. More than 30 years ago, only the wealthy seemed to have enough surplus income to buy these kinds of securities. "Stocks and bonds," was a code-phrase for well-to-do.

But that changed sometime in the 1980s. Mutual funds lowered their initial investment requirements and other retail investing services emerged that allowed people to participate in stocks and other investments that had previously been reserved mostly for the rich among us. Today a large part of Americans own such investments in the form of 401K or other workplace retirement accounts. [In fact many people who invest in this way are unaware or have forgotten about their account and are sometimes embarrassed when they criticize the capitalist class and stock holders of corporations guilty of malfeasance when they themselves are involved, too.]

But I think that when the financial industry became widely available on a retail basis to a mass of U.S. consumers some 25 years ago, the wealthy for whom the party had been invitation-only, began to look for other ways of making their money work for them. By adopting almost a, "there goes the neighborhood" sentiment, these wealthy folks turned to financial service providers who were ready with sophisticated investment vehicles, many of which required very high initial investment amounts, thereby assuring the same exclusivity of a gated community neighborhood.

Increasing the American workers stake in the U.S. economy was probably good, at least on the surface, but the tricks to which the wealthy and their financial advisers stooped in order to distinguish themselves from the "unwashed" investors ultimately led to a financial collapse early in the 21st century. Professionals in the financial services industry dreamed up all sorts of sophisticated investment products that excluded the nickel and dime players and which (it became clear) the U.S. government regulators charged with reviewing the industry could neither keep pace with nor understand.

Mental Health's Second-Hand Smoke Equivalent

In the 1980s, a singer named Joe Jackson released a song called "Cancer." The line repeated throughout the song was "everything gives you cancer." It was a parody on the seemingly endless list of everyday products and practices that in laboratories has resulted in carcinoma cell development among mice. I'm exaggerating but only because the song itself was an exaggeration.

However, I do believe that sometime in the near future we are going to hear from scientists who find that the electronic audio and video that are so pervasive in our lives and that form a background of sounds to an increasing portion of our days is the mental health equivalent of second-hand smoke. In other words, published findings will demonstrate that passive listening to this noise leads to one of several neuroses like anxiety, insomnia or some more serious threat to mental health.

Popular media undoubtedly aim to cultivate a sense of dissatisfaction among viewers and listeners and are interspersed with advertisements purporting to fulfill those unmet desires. So the question for laboratory or field research will be what are is the net outcome of this dissatisfaction among the populace. Tranquility and acceptance? Unlikely. I can't help but think of teen suicide and cyber-bullying as the result of this sense of dissatisfaction which advertisers want to inject into a younger and younger audience.

In fact, it is so widely published in popular news accounts that watching television before bedtime does contribute to sleeplessness that I have no doubt the harm of electronic media will become common knowledge soon. We hear from a national pediatrics group that children under 2 should not be exposed to television as it might interfere with cognitive development.

I can only wonder whether lawsuits will ensue, asserting that television producers and advertisers knew the dangers but still pushed the medium in an attempt to downplay the effects or even spin them into some positive outcomes.