Steve & Anita Shevett From left: Jeremy McCarter, Richard Nelson, Carl Bernstein, Kurt Andersen and Alec Baldwin.

A new play by Richard Nelson, “Sweet and Sad,” opens today at the Public Theater in New York. The play takes place on Sept. 11, 2011 in Rhinebeck, New York, and explores one family’s struggle to find meaning in the attacks, ten years later.

After a preview of the play this week, actor Alec Baldwin hosted a public forum that included Nelson, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Carl Bernstein, and journalist Kurt Andersen. While the play largely focused on grief, mourning and the unanswerable questions in the wake of 9/11, the public forum dealt mostly with political questions such as how foreign policy has changed in the past decade, and predictions for the next presidential election.

When Baldwin was asked what he would do to help society if he woke up tomorrow and found himself in charge, he said, “I have the same unshakable view that there are two issues that are linchpins of the problems in this country: campaign finance reform is the linchpin of all domestic problems in this country. We need public funding of campaigns… In terms of foreign policy, energy independence. If we can have not a Manhattan project, which talked about bombs and destruction, but a power project, a positive rallying cry for this country to have real energy independence.”

Nelson, however, echoing his play, steered clear of mixing art and politics. In the program notes to “Sweet and Sad,” Nelson said that the theater is the artistic form that uses the entire live human being as its form of expression. As such, the human is always at the center of the play, and gives the theater experience a point of view that is more moralistic or humanistic than political.

“Art must be a parallel world to politics,” Nelson said in the forum. “Politics often want to use art and there are some artists that push into politics. But I would be passionate that it is a parallel world that is a necessary world. That is why in times of great humanism, you have had great theater. That is why under Totalitarianism and dictators, the theater is often perceived as the greatest threat.”

Most people exposed to the 9/11 terrorist attacks didn’t develop post-traumatic stress disorder or other types of mental illness, underscoring people’s general psychological resilience in the face of trauma, according to Sandro Galea, chair of the epidemiology department at Columbia University’s public health school.

Galea spoke today at a Columbia conference discussing science, policy and public health a decade after the attacks that occurred Sept. 11, 2001. He said there doesn’t seem to be much of a mental-health “anniversary effect,” citing a study that examined affected individuals for years afterward and that showed “no convincing evidence of reactivating” traumatic memories on 9/11 at least for each of the first three years after the attacks.

But the minority of people who did have problems tended to have clustering of mental illnesses, so those who reported symptoms of PTSD also tended to have more depression or other psychological symptoms, he said.

And, those with more PTSD symptoms also reported more problems with asthma and made more visits to the doctor or emergency room. Why this link exists is controversial, said Galea. One possibility is that “you’re having a flood of people to the ER because of asthma symptoms when in fact the underlying issue is PTSD,” which emphasizes how physical and mental health are often intertwined, said Galea.

Though it’s still unknown what factors might make someone particularly vulnerable to PTSD, it’s likely a combination of genetics and environment. And, non-traumatic, on-going life stressors, like financial or marital difficulties, contribute “quite a bit” to psychological problems, said Galea.

With another Friday in the books for the nation’s small businesses, here’s a look back at the week that was, from Pennsylvania Avenue to Main Street.

The workweek after Labor Day began, appropriately enough, with a report showing more small firms plan to hire new workers in the next six months. Forty-one percent of 7,502 owners polled by Pepperdine University’s Graziadio School of Business and Management and Dun & Bradstreet Credibility said they will expand payrolls, compared to 38% who said they won’t.

See “More Small Firms Plan to Hire”

President Obama this week unveiled a $447 billion economic growth package offering payroll tax cuts for small employers, among other measures aimed at spurring job growth. While supported by some Republican lawmakers and small-business advocates, others have attacked temporary tax breaks for creating longer-term uncertainty. At the same time, some Democrats fear tax cuts will reduce support for Social Security.

See “Small Business Is Focus of Tax Cuts”

The volatile economy has a growing number of small-business owners worried about a double-dip recession, though many say they’re prepared for tougher times, according to a survey released this week by Citibank.

See “Small-Business Owners Prepared for Double Dip”

On Wednesday, the Small Business Administration said it had approved the first disaster loan application stemming from damages caused by Hurricane Irene, which went to a small-business owner in North Carolina. By midweek, the agency said it had received some 60 loan applications from businesses and residents in counties declared disaster areas by President Obama after the storm.

See “Demand Grows for Disaster Loans”

Erskine Bowles, a former SBA administrator and co-chair of President Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, joined Facebook’s board of directors, the social-networking site reported Thursday. Bowles, who ran the federal small-business agency under President Clinton in the early 1990s, said he’s looking forward to helping the company “however I can.”

See “Former SBA Chief Joins Facebook”

Despite India’s rapid economic growth, why are more and more women opting out of the workforce?

A recent study casts light on this important and potentially worrying development in the Indian labor market. “Gender Diversity Benchmark for Asia 2011” by Community Business surveyed 21 large multinational companies in six countries in Asia — China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Malaysia and Singapore — to see how women are doing at junior, middle and senior levels of management.

Here’s the “good” news, such as it is. The percentage of women in the companies’ workforce is of a similar magnitude to the national female labor-force participation rate in each country. In India, just under 25% of the total workforce in the companies surveyed are women, a bit below the national female labor-force participation ratio of 29% as measured in 2010. The top performer was China, with comparable statistics of 46% and 50%, respectively.

Women are best represented at the junior level, less so at the middle level and are least represented at the senior level, which is consistent with trends in developing and developed countries.

But here’s the bad news: India’s the worst performer in terms of the percentage of women at the junior and middle levels; China and Hong Kong are the best performers. At the senior level, India performs slightly better than Japan, but far below Malaysia, the top performer.

Another potentially disturbing finding is that India is unique in having the biggest percentage of women dropping out of the workforce, known as the “leaking pipeline,” between the junior and middle levels. In other countries, the biggest drop-off takes place between the middle and senior levels. The earlier the drop-off occurs, the smaller the base of people who could move up the ranks, and therefore the fewer women there will be in senior positions.

At the junior level, women comprise just under 29% of the workforce in these companies in India, which drops off to just under 15% at the middle level, an attrition rate of almost 50%, and to under 10% of the workforce at the senior level. Whichever way you look at it, India fares poorly in the results of this study.

These results are not outliers but in line with several recent reports which document a decline in women’s labor-force participation in India, which is at its lowest since 1993-94.

In the wider context, employment creation in India has been stagnant altogether, and the labor force has shrunk as discouraged workers — both men and women — have withdrawn from the workforce. Strikingly, between 2004-05 and 2009-10, less than a million new jobs were created despite the nation’s rapid economic expansion.

India may be unique among developing countries in featuring this U.S.-style “jobless growth.” Of course, these statistics do not capture work in the informal sector or unpaid work, such as at home, which is estimated to use a large proportion of women’s time in India.

At a basic level, poor continuation rates by women in corporate India reflect the low national female labor-force participation ratio. Digging deeper, Harvard economics professor Claudia Goldin famously argued that women’s participation in the workforce follows a U-shaped pattern. She originally had in mind the U.S., but the concept has been widely applied even to developing countries. Women’s participation first falls and then rises with income, according to this theory.

In the case of women working for multinationals, one reason for the falling part of the “U” may be that in two-earner families, enough income is being earned by the male partner. As female workers face the transition to middle management, with the additional time and responsibilities involved, a significant number decide to drop out of the workforce altogether to focus on household responsibilities. Their partner’s income provides the necessary financial cushion.

Women face the additional pressure of “daughterly guilt” — the family and social pressure to take care of elderly parents or in-laws. In India, domestic help and extended family typically help with child care and institutional options for elder care are considered culturally unacceptable. So the benefits of child care for a mother are often largely negated by the burdens of elder care.

However, at the very highest levels of management, career-minded women who’ve stuck around respond to the incentives that the higher income and greater responsibilities afford, which accounts for the rising part of the “U”. Taken together, this would seem to suggest that India indeed fits the Prof. Goldin’s U-shaped pattern.

And the reason it seems to be more pronounced in India than elsewhere in Asia may reflect the extent to which cultural patterns, and the associated societal pressures on women, are more engrained here than elsewhere, or at least one of the co-authors of the Community Business study believes.

As Prof. Goldin has rightly noted, “gender equality and economic development share a synchronous existence,” which is to suggest that they go hand-in-hand.

The presence of such a leaky pipeline in India suggests a failure of gender equality, in particular when one considers that India fares so much more poorly than the other countries in the study. It might just be that at India’s current level of economic development, which is yet to catch up to China’s let alone wealthy developed countries, the forces of economic and social change that will empower women have yet to be fully unleashed. Rupa Subramanya Dehejia writes Economics Journal for India Real Time. You may follow her on Twitter @RupaSubramanya.

FedEx Corp. Latest from The Business Journals High bids to delay GTCC’s Cameron CampusProposed high school sparks debate about industrial land useFedEx launching new ad campaign during NFL season opener Follow this company chief economist and vice president Gene Huang has been elected president of the National Association of Business Economics.

Huang, who served as the organization’s vice president over the past year, will begin his tenure as president Sept. 13, following NABE’s annual meeting in Dallas.

He joined FedEx (NYSE: FDX) in 1999 and leads a team that focuses on corporate economics, enterprise risks, strategic affairs and the tracking and monitoring of all industries and countries FedEx serves.

NABE is a professional association for business economists and those who use economics in the workplace.

Huang’s list of professional accomplishments is long. From a company press release:

“He chairs the Economic Advisory Committee of the Council on Competitiveness. He is a member of the Bretton Woods Committee, the Blue Chip Consensus Panel, the Wall Street Economic Panel, BusinessWeek Magazine’s Business Outlook Panel, and ABC News’s Economic Panel. He is also an elected member of the Conference of Business Economists (which he served as chairman from 2009-2010), the National Business Economic Issues Council, the European Council of Economists, and the Harvard Industrial Economists Group. The author of two books on business economics and many articles published in economic and policy journals, he is an honored professor at the School of Management at Fudan University in Shanghai, China. A former NABE director, he is currently on the board of the NABE Foundation. He received his MA from Yale University and his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. He also holds a law degree from Fudan University.”

Will Wilkinson points to an interview with the Yale professor George Loewenstein—whose work lies at the border of economics and psychology—in which Loewenstein argues that the much-ballyhooed “behavioral economics” has become a crutch for timid politicians:

I’ve come to the view that behavioral economics solutions are often being used as a substitute for more fundamental efforts. British Prime Minister David Cameron is a big fan of behavioral economics and gave a talk in which he said, “The best way to get someone to cut their electricity bill is to show them their own spending, to show them what their neighbors are spending, and then show them what an energy-conscious neighbor is spending.”

Indeed, there is some evidence that people respond to this kind of peer pressure. (For a summary, see this piece, by me.) But Loewenstein says that fundamental economic precepts still should get their due:

showing someone their neighbor’s bill is not the best way to get them to cut their own bill. The best way is to charge an amount that reflects the true cost of the electricity, including social costs from importing oil, pollution, climate change, and so on. Behavioral economics has a lot of great insights to contribute to public policy, but it will be unfortunate if it substitutes [for?] tried- and-true approaches involving taxes and regulation.