Most Recent Posts

The Senate is considering legislation to prevent a global helium shortage from worsening in October. That's when one huge supply of helium in the U.S. is set to terminate. The House overwhelmingly passed its own bill last month to keep the Federal Helium Program going.

That was a relief to industries that can't get along without helium. The gas is used in MRI machines, semiconductors, aerospace equipment, lasers and of course balloons.

Perhaps the easiest way to understand the helium shortage is to talk to people like Stacie Lee Banks, who owns a flower shop in Washington, D.C. She is one of the go-to people in the city for filling large orders of party balloons.

Banks says she started noticing a problem about half a year ago. Her supplier used to send her two tanks of helium every time she was running short. Now he only sends one tank — if that. When she called him recently, he said he was completely out.

In a bind like this, Banks would normally pop over to the CVS pharmacy next door to fill up balloons.

"They're saying we can't use any of their helium anymore either," Banks says. "So it's like, I don't know where we're gonna get helium."

There's a global shortage of refined helium, and it could get worse if the federal government doesn't stay in the business of selling helium.

To understand how we got here, we need to go back to nearly a century ago to World War I. Germany started building huge inflatable aircraft, and to keep up, the U.S. started stockpiling helium. That federal helium reserve is located outside Amarillo, Texas.

Sam Burton of the Bureau of Land Management helps manage the supply. Burton says "he lives and breathes helium," adding that he's a "total helium geek."

Burton says there are now 10 billion cubic feet of the gas stored in this federal reservoir — enough to fill about 50,000 Goodyear blimps. And it's all kept under a wide-open prairie dotted with coyotes and jack rabbits.

"Imagine a layer cake being several thousand feet thick, layers of rock several thousand feet thick, you'd get an idea of how the gas has been stored in one particular layer," Burton explains.

Over the decades, private companies learned how to extract helium too. But they weren't extracting that much of it, partly because the government was selling helium so cheaply.

Then in 1996, Congress decided it was time to get the federal government out of the helium business so it wouldn't compete with private industry. Congress passed a law that would effectively end the helium program this October. The problem is: Private companies haven't caught up with demand, and a big hole would be left in the market if Washington suddenly cut off supply as scheduled.

Salo Zelermyer is lobbying to keep the government operating the reserve: "Certainly if you take half the domestic supply and a third of the global supply off the market just like that, you're going to get a lot of volatility in the system. You're going to have a lot of end users that aren't going to be able to meet the needs of both taxpayers and regular folks who go in to get MRIs or go out to buy high-end electronics."

So industries are nervous.

Carolyn Durand of Intel Corp., which makes semiconductor chips, says they're already learning to limit their use of the gas.

"Where we've been able to replace helium with another inert gas like argon or nitrogen, we have," Durand says. "Where we've been able to conserve, shut off things instead of keeping continuous flow, we will do that."

If legislation to head off the shortage passes, it would buy private companies time to find reliable domestic sources of helium.

A while back, Max Kornblith sent the following email to Tyler Cowen, an economist who blogs at Marginal Revolution:

1) As a fairly recent graduate of an Ivy League institution (with a bachelor's degree), most of my classmates seemed to have some idea that career and life path choice should be driven by a "passion" such that the right choice is self-evident to the chooser. What does this belief mean to you as a social scientist?...

For question two, then, you may sense where this is going...

2) Assume I have no such passion. Furthermore, I am a fairly well-qualified young generalist.* What paths should most appeal to me if my goal is to maximize doing "interesting" work? Doing meaningful work? Achieving social status? (Which of these goals should be primary?) Need I try to develop a passion before selecting a life path/career, and if so how do I do it?

All the best, Max

*Two years out with a BA from an Ivy League school. Top 10% of the class but not an academic rock star. A record of primarily reading/writing-intensive courses, as well as basic to intermediate economics, calculus, statistics, a proofs course. Time spent abroad in study and travel, though no foreign language fluency. Two years in the private sector with a decent amount of analytic and management experience, but without a big name behind it.

Anne-Marie Slaughter had been the director of policy planning for the State Department for two years — commuting from Princeton, N.J., where her family lived, to Washington, D.C., where the job was — when she realized something had to give.

"It was a fabulous job, but at the end of two years I simply had to recognize that I needed to be at home," Slaughter tells Morning Edition's Renee Montagne. Moreover, she adds, "I wanted to be at home, and there was no way to do that and to do the kind of job that Secretary Clinton needed me to do."

Join The Conversation

The Changing Lives Of Women

She Works: Having It All

Hundreds of people died when a garment factory collapsed last month in Bangladesh. The tragedy is a reminder of the unsafe working conditions in overseas factories that produce so much of the clothing we buy.

Some people want more clothing to be made in the United States. A new website is connecting American designers and American manufacturers who want to produce high-quality fashion.

There's a scene in the movie Batman Begins where Bruce Wayne has to order 10,000 Batman masks from a company in China — but they all come back with defects.

This is actually a common problem with outsourcing fashion. And if you're not a billionaire crime fighter — if you're just a small businessman in Brooklyn like Matthew Burnett — you can't write off 10,000 defects.

A few years ago, Burnett was making fancy designers wristwatches. He thought the only way to manufacturer them was to use foreign companies. It turned out to be a nightmare.

"There were the language barriers," Burnett says. "There was the time zone differences. So I would be waiting up at 1, 2 o'clock in the morning to respond to emails."