Billie Holiday was born on this day in 1915

She's so sublime, words that I write of her rhyme.   Here she is with Lester:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3gXc1fybYs&list=PLBD0F7699C6BDF68F


Happy Birthday, Lady Day!

Revised Job Data Survey

Here is a revised version of the data interpretation survey. I have edited the graph and the survey to (hopefully) get rid of ambiguities. I would be grateful to anyone who anyone who completes the survey, which should take no more than ten minutes.

Create your own user feedback survey

North Korea, Iran, And Anti-Nuclear Weapons Policy

Probably the biggest foreign policy blunder of the second Bush administration after the invasion of Iraq was something few think about that happened within the first two months of Bush becoming president.  Against the advice of Sec. of State Colin Powell but at the urging of Cheney and Rumsfeld, when South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung arrived for a formal state dinner in March, 2001, he was given the cold shoulder on nuclear negotiations with North Korea, which had been going on since 1994.  The DPRK was a signatory to the NNPT and had shut down its nuclear weapons program.  Further negotiations were ongoing, and Kim wanted support for continuing them, support Powell had assured him the US would provide.  This was not forthcoming in March, 2001, leading to outbursts of anger in the ROK against the US.

The stated theory of Cheney and Rumsfeld was that the DPRK was on the verge of collapse like the USSR had been a few years earlier.  All that was needed to bring about regime change was to apply more pressure through sanctions and to abandon the nuclear weapons negotiations.  Easy as pie.

What then followed over several years was that the North Korea withdrew from the NNPT, expelled foreign observers, restarted all its nuclear reactors, and within a few years began producing nuclear bombs, which it has tested on several occasions since.  The nuclear aresenal of the DPRK may not amount to much, but they are now a bona fide nuclear weapons power, and their regime has not fallen, despite the pollyanna predictions of Cheney and Rumsfeld.  I can think of few foreign policy failures by the US bigger than this one in the last quarter century, although few talk about it.  But, it was a total flop, making a bad situation far more dangerous.

OK, so this approach of Cheney and Rumsfeld to North Korea looks to me prettty much like the current attitudes of most of the GOP critics of Obama's negotiations with Iran,  not to mention the views of Israeli PM BiBi Nethanyahu.  Oh, if only we apply tighter sanctions, we shall get a better deal than the one Obama has gotten (or nearly gotten, as important details apparently remain to be pinned down, but the opponents of the deal want to "blow it ups" (to quote Scott Walker) before ever that can happen).

Offhand, it looks to me that the outcome of following these critics will end up resembling what happened with North Korea.  Iran will not collapse.  If we "blow up the deal," our P+1 negotiation partners will end their sanctions, and the remaining US unilateral sanctions, which have been in place since 1979, will not do doodley-squat.  If Israel and the US insist on aggressing more actively against Iran militarily or however, Supreme Leader Khamenei may well withdraw his anti-nuclear wepaons fatwas, Iran might withdraw from the NNPT and expel all current observers, and, well, follow the path of North Korea and begin building nuclear weapons for which indeed they do have the capcity to do. Is there a stupider path out there to follow?   Oh yeah, we could start bombing them or invade them, thus replicating the one foreign policy blunder of George W. Bush that exceeded his ending of the nuclear weapons negotiations with North Korea.

Barkley Rosser

The Iran Nuclear Deal

OK, so there is not a final agreement, and we do not know all the details.  But I think in the face of various individuals and groups screaming that Obama is Neville Chamberlain and so on, let me note a few things that I do not see many out there stating.  I shall stay away from the reported details of the agreement other than to note that some commentators think that it gets more out of Iran in terms of concessions than many thought was possible in terms of limiting its nuclear weapons capability.

1)  For about the umpteenth time, not only is Iran a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, its supreme leader and commander-in-chief, Vilayat-e-faqih ("Supreme Jurisprudent") Ali Khamenei, has issued fatwas against Muslims owning nuclear weapons.  It must be admitted that these were only issued after Iran stopped having a nuclear weapons program when the US invaded Iraq (one of the few good things to come out of that invasion), a program that had started under the Shah with US support at the time.

2)  Given that he is a major religious leader, I do not think Khamenei is lying when he issues these fatwas.  He really means it.  If there is a danger, it is that a successor to him might undo those fatwas.  But I view that as more likely if there is no agreement with Iran on these matters that provides them with economic and other benefits, as so many seem to want.  In any case, I think as long as he is in power, there will be no further active nuclear weapons program in Iran with or without this agreement, even if Iran did once had one and remains somewhat unwilling to fully disclose what went on with it (the main area that Iran has still been secretive about).

3)  While many outsiders continue to be thoroughly convinced that Iran is deadset on acquiring a nuclear weapon as fast as possible, this is not supported by the population.  I do not have a recent poll, but one in October 2013 by a Gallup poll (sorry, link to it not working but can be tracked down by google) found that while 34% supported getting a nuclear weapon, 41% opposed that, even as 56% support Iran having a civilian nuclear energy program.  And, while democracy is somewhat limited in Iran, it is not completely nonexistent, and the current president, Rouhani's election reflects these sentiments pretty well, and I think that even the theorcratic leaders like Khamenei do not want to get too far away from popular opinion (and Khamenei has already forbidden nuclear weapons anyway, as noted above).

4) While Netanyahu and his cabinet, along with a lot of US politicians, have roundly and fiercely denounced this agreement as threatening the existence of Israel, it has long been the case that both the entire US intelligence establishment as reported in official National Intelligence Estimates, as well as most of the Israeli military intelligence establishment, agree that Iran is not in fact currently actively pursuing nuclear weapons.  It has also been the case that many former Israeli intel people have openly criticized Netanyahu on this issue, even accusing him of lying, and some supporting this agreement, if cautiously, one just a few hours ago, General Amos Yadlin, a former military intelligence director who among other things was one of the pilots bombing the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq.

5)  Finally, while powerful elements in Iran have certainly supported various foreign terror groups, Iran itself has not invaded a neighbor without having first been attacked since 1765.  Those suggesting some Hitlerian drive to conquer neighbors by the Iranians are simply ignorant of history.

Barkley Rosser

Economists Discover the World!

Jared Bernstein exclaims : "The macro blogosphere is on fire, as Bernanke, Summers, and Krugman are having a fascinating discussion... we've made important diagnostic progress here by bringing the international dimension... into the discussion."

You mean to tell me that up to now economists have left out the international dimension? If only these New Keynesians had read Keynes, they would have known that Keynes was on to this dilemma in the early 1930s. "National Self-sufficiency," 1933:

"...I have become convinced that the retention of the structure of private enterprise is incompatible with that degree of material well-being to which our technical advancement entitles us, unless the rate of interest falls to a much lower figure than is likely to come about by natural forces operating on the old lines. Indeed the transformation of society, which I preferably envisage, may require a reduction in the rate of interest towards vanishing point within the next thirty years. But under a system by which the rate of interest finds, under the operation of normal financial forces, a uniform level throughout the world, after allowing for risk and the like, this is most unlikely to occur. Thus for a complexity of reasons, which I cannot elaborate in this place, economic internationalism embracing the free movement of capital and of loanable funds as well as of traded goods may condemn this country for a generation to come to a much lower degree of material prosperity than could be attained under a different system."

Guy Standing Out In His Field

Guy Standing on basic income:

A basic income would help people be more rational, more long-term in their outlook, and more prepared to take entrepreneurial risk. 

It would not reduce labor supply. This was shown by our pilots in India, in which we were able to provide over 6,000 men, women and children with a basic income for 18 months and monitor what happened by comparison with a larger number not provided with one, through a randomized control trial. It has also been shown in experiments in the US, Canada and several European countries.

The simple fact is that people with basic security work harder and more productively, not less

A commenter:

NO. I don’t know how you set up that experiment in India, but common sense says the conclusion is wrong. 

Proof (if any was needed) that "el mayor necio es el que no se lo piensa y a todos los otros define."

Guy Standing on a lump of labor:

There is an adage in economics known as ‘the lump of labor fallacy’. It is that technological change is destroying jobs and generating rising unemployment. It rests on an image of a finite number of jobs.

This is nonsense. What is happening is more subtle and potentially liberating, but also potentially generating a dystopia of socially unsustainable inequality, in which a growing share of the population will be mired in chronic insecurity, through no fault of their own.

Who is the greater fool: smart Guy with his condescending "subtlety" or stupid guy with his anti-evidence "common sense"? My middle-sized facts post the other day started out a couple of weeks ago with a somewhat different meditation on Dr. Pepper's inquiry into the limits of unknowing.

What I was thinking about was the practice of attributing "assumptions" to people based on hypothetical models that they are unlikely to have ever entertained. The proverbial "image of a finite number of job" -- whether fallacious or not -- would only be meaningful in the context of some kind of a simple theoretical model of the job market with interactions between supply and demand. As rudimentary as one might imagine such a model, it is likely to be as alien to "the common man" as Fred Flintstone's car would to prehistoric Homo sapiens.

The image of a finite number of jobs contains an amusing substitution. Someone must have thought a fixed amount of work to be done sounded too unbelievable to attribute to people and figured that finite would add credibility. What then is the meaning of an infinite number of jobs? If that is subtle, the Sandwichman is a brontosaurus-burger.

Guy standing on top of an airplane:

CCI. Son tontos todos los que lo parecen y la mitad de los que no lo parecen.

Alzóse con el mundo la necedad, y si hay algo de sabiduría, es estulticia con la del cielo; pero el mayor necio es el que no se lo piensa y a todos los otros define. Para ser sabio no basta parecerlo, menos parecérselo: aquel sabe que piensa que no sabe, y aquel no ve que no ve que los otros ven. Con estar todo el mundo lleno de necios, ninguno hay que se lo piense, ni aun lo recele.

Endogenous Growth on Tin-Pan Alley

I was talking to a class about the growth of knowledge, and the trade-off , in protecting intellectual property, between creating incentives for new discoveries, and  maximizing the effect of new knowledge as input for further knowledge. As an example of this last, "standing-on-shoulders" effect, I mentioned the astonishing number of great jazz compositions that have been based on the chord changes of "I Got Rhythm." But instead of attributing the song to Gershwin, correctly, or even to Irving Berlin, who is at least a songwriter, I attributed it to ISAIAH Berlin. Oy! You don't know about Berlin's residence on Tin-Pan Alley? Well, who do you think wrote

Two Concepts of Blue Skies
A Pretty Girl is Like a Hedgehog - Unless She's Like a Fox
Alexander Herzen's  Ragtag Band,

inter alia?

Middle-Sized Facts vs. IS-LMist Fundamentalism

"So I don't care whether Hicksian IS-LM is Keynesian in the sense that Keynes himself would have approved of it, and neither should you. What you should ask is whether that approach has proved useful -- and whether the critics have something better to offer." -- Paul Krugman, "Unreal Keynesians"

The issue, of course, is not whether 'the master' would have approved of the IS-LM gadget but whether it represents an analytical advance or a regression from the insights that Keynes achieved. In a 1980 "explanation," Hicks conceded that "as time has gone on, I have myself become increasingly dissatisfied with it." In a commentary on Hicks's explanation, though, G.L.S. Shackle was less ambivalent. I have selected and re-arranged passages from Shackle's commentary to highlight his central point -- that uncertainty and equilibrium are fundamentally incompatible concepts.

The one big thing in Keynes' ultimate conception is our unknowledge of what will create itself in time-to-come. "We simply do not know." The author of A Treatise on Probability expressly rejects the notion that probability can turn this unknowledge into its opposite. When we accept this view, the possibility of involuntary unemployment becomes self-evident. 

Sir John Hicks' paper was the first presentation of IS-LM and has been for forty and more years the most famous and the most influential interpretation of Keynes. Central and essential to its argument is a notion of equilibrium. 

Sir John still does not seem to me to acknowledge the essential point: the elemental core of Keynes' conception of economic society is uncertain expectation, and uncertain expectation is wholly incompatible and in conflict with the notion of equilibrium. 

In the literature of economics the word equilibrium covers a multitude of ideas and of vacuous substitutes for thought. Its pervasive presence and the ascendancy its serious meanings have exercised show plainly that it "does something" for the economic theoretician. What does it do? It enables him to exhibit the economic world as determinate, explicable, calculable, and even predictable. Equilibrium is orderliness, harmony, the advancement of one's own interest by serving that of others. Equilibrium is interactive rationality, the recognition that society is an organism. Above all, it is the necessary condition, the basis and sanction of proof. Pride in proof is legitimate. Proof is certainty, an end to debate, and it is more, in the scale of values and sensibilities of many of us. Proof is beauty. If economic theory is to validate its claim to be a deductive system, a science, then the equilibrium idea is indispensable. But proof can exist only in a closed world. It depends upon "givens." If we are not supplied with "givens," and if we are not defended from things not given, of which we were not told, things which can blow in on us in the cold draught from time-to-come, there is no proving things.

Shackle doesn't go far enough. Well, he probably goes far enough in outlining the incompatibility of the notion of equilibrium with the conception of uncertain expectations. But I think it is possible to go a further step in comprehending the incompatibility of the notion of equilibrium with itself. That is to say, the essential incongruity of the notion of equilibrium. 

In an appendix to Significance and Basic Postulates of Economic Theory, T.W. Hutchison admonished, "It is high time to put these theories [laissez faire and equilibrium doctrines] firmly back in their place as Utopian constructions." He cited S. Bauer's 1931 article, "Origine utopique et métaphorique de la théorie du “laissez faire” et de l’équilibre naturel."

Prominent in Bauer's discussion of the origins of the notions of laissez faire and equilibrium is the role of Baltasar Gracian's Oráculo Manual -- which was translated into French by Amelot de la Houssaie in 1684 -- in popularizing both the notion and the term, laissez faire. Pierre le Pesant Boisguilbert is credited with introducing the term into political economic thought in a book published in 1707. Below is the maxim extolling the art of leaving things alone:

Where this story of equilibrium starts to get convoluted is in the Spanish Baroque's philosophical tradition of radical skepticism that Gracian exemplified. In the introduction to his English translation of Gracian's Pocket Oracle, Jeremy Robbins describes the "world of deception and illusion" central to Baroque thought:

Gracián posits a world of deception and illusion, in which appearances predominate and malice and cunning are omnipresent. Hence the distrust, pessimism and misanthropy that characterize his world-view. The key concept here is deceit (engaño): this covers, for Gracián, not simply the deception of one individual by another, but our self-deception as to the true nature and value of the world, and hence our deception by the world. It is a term at once moral and epistemological: to fail to know the world for what it is condemns us to moral error and to failure. Because of our tendency to accept appearances and to follow our desires, passions and emotions, we are mired in a world of deceit. There is consequently an urgent need for disillusionment (desengaño), the other key concept of the Spanish Baroque, For Gracián and his contemporaries, disillusionment means the realization of the true worth of things, seeing them as they really are: in essence, that this world and all within it is worthless. For many writers, this means explicitly viewing things not from a human or worldly perspective, but from the perspective of eternity, on the grounds that the here and now, being transient, amounts to mere appearance, true reality being what awaits us after death.

Robbins is the author of an introduction to seventeenth century Spanish literature titled The Challenges of Uncertainty, in which he argues that Spanish literature, "creatively responded to the unprecedented sense of uncertainty fostered by developments across Europe... it was above all this scepticism which led Spaniards to employ literature and art to question the boundaries of reality and illusion." 

Something weird is going on here. An aesthetic response to uncertainty about the bounds of reality and illusion has been adapted and transformed into a fundamental assumption about the nature of the the world. Uncertainty has been overcome by... an imaginary Utopia,

In "The Quest for Ignorance or the Reasonable Limits of Skepticism" Stephen Pepper argued that "Utter skepticism -- a skepticism void of all knowledge -- could not know itself and stands refuted in its very utterance." There are limits to what we cannot know. The Utopia of equilibrium is not simply incompatible with uncertainty -- it is an inevitable symptom of unreasonable uncertainty. Pepper asked, "How little can we know? What is the maximum of a reasonable unbelief?" His answer relied on the acknowledgement, first, of what he called "middle-sized facts":

These middle-sized facts are the matrix of all knowing. We are so immersed in them all the day long that we ordinarily miss their significance. The common man does not think about them, because he is moving among them; and the specialist does not think about them, because he has made assumptions that raise him above them. They get left out in most discussions of knowledge and fact. But they constitute the lowest limit of skepticism.

Monetary Policy: Bernanke and Yellen v. Taylor

The economist bloggers should all rejoice the fact that Ben Bernanke has joined us. His first post is excellent and I will present a key quote shortly. But let me express my main frustration with how some people are using the Taylor rule versus something that Janet Yellen recently noted:

Even with core inflation running below the Committee’s 2 percent objective, Taylor’s rule now calls for the federal funds rate to be well above zero if the unemployment rate is currently judged to be close to its normal longer-run level and the “normal” level of the real federal funds rate is currently close to its historical average. But the prescription offered by the Taylor rule changes significantly if one instead assumes, as I do, that appreciable slack still remains in the labor market, and that the economy’s equilibrium real federal funds rate–that is, the real rate consistent with the economy achieving maximum employment and price stability over the medium term–is currently quite low by historical standards. Under assumptions that I consider more realistic under present circumstances, the same rules call for the federal funds rate to be close to zero

Taylor has been arguing for some time that monetary policy is keeping interest rates too low for too long. OK, if one believes were are near full employment and one believes that Wicksellian natural interest rate is still 2 percent, this follows. But many of us – including Yellen - reject both premises. What is Taylor’s response?

So the main argument is that if one replaces the equilibrium federal funds rate of 2% in the Taylor rule with 0%, then the recommended setting for the funds rate declines by two percentage points. The additional slack due to a lower natural rate of unemployment is much less important. But little or no rationale is given for slashing the equilibrium interest rate from 2% percent to 0%. She simply says “some statistical models suggest” it. In my view, there is little evidence supporting it, but this is a huge controversial issue, deserving a lot of explanation and research which I hope the Fed is doing or planning to do.

Might I suggest Taylor start his research by reading Bernanke’s first blog post:

Low interest rates are not a short-term aberration, but part of a long-term trend ... The real interest rate is most relevant for capital investment decisions, for example. The Fed’s ability to affect real rates of return, especially longer-term real rates, is transitory and limited. Except in the short run, real interest rates are determined by a wide range of economic factors, including prospects for economic growth—not by the Fed. To understand why this is so, it helps to introduce the concept of the equilibrium real interest rate (sometimes called the Wicksellian interest rate, after the late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Swedish economist Knut Wicksell). The equilibrium interest rate is the real interest rate consistent with full employment of labor and capital resources, perhaps after some period of adjustment. Many factors affect the equilibrium rate, which can and does change over time. In a rapidly growing, dynamic economy, we would expect the equilibrium interest rate to be high, all else equal, reflecting the high prospective return on capital investments. In a slowly growing or recessionary economy, the equilibrium real rate is likely to be low, since investment opportunities are limited and relatively unprofitable. Government spending and taxation policies also affect the equilibrium real rate: Large deficits will tend to increase the equilibrium real rate (again, all else equal), because government borrowing diverts savings away from private investment.

The converse is true as the unwise fiscal austerity evidenced both in the U.S. and Europe is driving down the Wicksellian natural rate. Has John Taylor not been paying attention to the real world over the past several years? Fortunately for us, Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen have been.

Is the Economic System Self-Adjusting?

"Second — and this plays a surprisingly big role in my own pedagogical thinking — we do want, somewhere along the way, to get across the notion of the self-correcting economy, the notion that in the long run, we may all be dead, but that we also have a tendency to return to full employment via price flexibility." -- Paul Krugman, June 2, 2013

JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES, from a 1934 BBC radio address*

I was asked recently to take part in a discussion among English economists on the problem of poverty in the midst of potential plenty, which none of us can deny is the outstanding conundrum of today. We all agreed that, whatever the best remedy may be, we must reject all those alleged remedies that consist, in effect, in getting rid of the plenty. It may be true, for various reasons, that as the potential plenty increases, the problem of getting the fruits of it distributed to the great body of consumers will present increasing difficulties. But it is to the analysis and solution of these difficulties that we must direct our minds. To seek an escape by making the productive machine less productive must be wrong. I often find myself in favor of measures to restrict output as a temporary palliative or to meet an emergency. But the temper of mind that turns too easily to restriction is dangerous, for it has nothing useful to contribute to the permanent solution. But this is another way of saying that we must not regard the conditions of supply -— that is to say, our facilities to produce -— as being the fundamental source of our troubles. And, if this is agreed, it seems to follow that it is the conditions of demand that our diagnosis must search and probe for the explanation.

George Will on Free Trade and the Price of a Starbucks Latte

Dean Baker reads George Will so we don’t have to:

Will seems to think that we could not get people to work hard to master skills or to be great innovators if they didn't have the prospect of earning billions or tens of billions of dollars. But if we look back through history we can identify an enormous number of tremendously talented and creative individuals who did not get fabulously wealthy or even have any plausible hope of getting fabulously wealthy.

Dean is more patient than I am as I could not get past Will’s first paragraph:

Every day the Chinese go to work, Americans get a raise: Chinese workers, many earning each day about what Americans spend on a Starbucks latte, produce apparel, appliances and other stuff cheaply, thereby enlarging Americans’ disposable income. Americans similarly get a raise when they shop at the stores that made Sam Walton a billionaire.

Ah yes – the canard that all Americans benefit from free trade with China. It is true that we get lower prices for apparel but has Will ever heard of the Stopler-Samuelson theorem? As prices fall for imported products, the wages of workers in the importing competing sector fall even more. And such not everyone gains from free trade. Also - is Will unaware that the wages of Chinese workers have risen considerably from the days when they made only $0.60 an hour? Table 1 of this excellent discussion of how apparel wages internationally evolved from 2001 to 2011 noted how Chinese workers were getting $114.86 per month in 2001 but their real wage rose to $324.90. Of course, these figures were in 2001$ and the consumer price index has risen by 34% since then. So either Mr. Will is unaware of the real wage growth for Chinese apparel workers over the past several years or he does not know how to shop for coffee.

What is a "Thought Experiment"?

This is a thought experiment.

A new take on the gold standard?

Keynes, in his Treatise on Money, in a footnote at the beginning of Chapter 35, referring to the love of money, as a footnote pointing to the work of the Hungarian psychoanalyst, Sandor Ferenczi, who was famous for his work on that subject. Ferenczi argued that the love of money was a continuation of infants’ fascination with their own feces.

 

Ferenczi, Sandor. 1914. “The Ontogenesis of Interest in Money.” In Sex in Psycho-Analysis (Contributions to Psycho-Analysis) (NY: Basic Books, 1950): pp. 319-31.

 

I turns out that Keynes and Ferenczi were up to something.

 

Devlin, Hannah. 2015. “Gold in faeces is worth millions and could save the environment.” The Guardian (25 March). http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/mar/23/gold-in-faeces-worth-millions-save-environment.

 

“Sewage sludge contains traces of gold, silver and platinum at levels that would be seen as commercially viable by traditional prospectors. “The gold we found was at the level of a minimal mineral deposit,” said Kathleen Smith…

 

Adam Davidson NYT Magazine Argument Clinic: Lumps of Straw

Correcting "Debunking the Myth of the Job-Stealing Immigrant" by Adam Davidson:

And yet the economic benefits of immigration may be the ­most ­settled fact in economics. A recent University of Chicago poll of leading economists could not find a single one* who rejected the proposition.... Rationally speaking, we should take in far more immigrants than we currently do. 

So why don’t we open up? The chief logical mistake we make attribute to our opponents is something called the Lump of Labor Straw Fallacy: the erroneous notion well-worn straw man that [they think] there is only so much work to be done and that no one can get a job without taking one from someone else. It’s an understandable unmitigated   assumption red herring. After all, with other types of market transactions argument, when the supply goes we make something up, the price falls it's true. If there were suddenly a whole lot more oranges, we’d expect the price of oranges to fall or the number of oranges that went uneaten to surge. If Adam Davidson was an orange, we'd expect stale boilerplate canards to be high in vitamin C.

I guess that settles it. More leading economists smoke Camels than any other cigarette. The logic is impeccable:

1. Put your argument here.
2. Replace with a lump of straw.
3. Knock down straw.
4. Q.E.D. your argument is wrong.
5. My argument is right.
6. Economists agree.
7. Therefore, it's a fact!
8. Publish findings in New York Times Magazine.

* Four is "not a single one"? Well, I suppose technically... Or perhaps Davidson meant those who rejected the proposition were married? Several of the "uncertain" economists left comments indicating the question was too vague to answer but suggesting disagreement if the question was clearer. The same number of economists, four (or "not a single one"?), disagreed with question B, that "many low-skilled American workers would be substantially worse off..."

S.H.A.M.E. on Adam Davidson.