Category: economics

Bari Weiss interviews Roland Fryer

February 21, 2024 • 12:45 pm

A lot of readers and heterodox colleagues have sent me this link to Bari Weiss’s interview with Harvard economics professor Roland G. Fryer, Jr., often accompanied by big encomiums. Despite my unwillingness to watch long videos, I did watch all 77 minutes of it.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t mesmerized, or even much interested. There are interesting bits in it, but I can’t wholeheartedly recommend it. Readers who see it, or have seen it and feel otherwise, please weigh in below.

Fryer is famous for two things: his prize-winning economic and sociological work, which sometimes produced counterintuitive results, and also for his suspension from Harvard for two years for sexual harassment. (He’s now back again.) I have only a few comments, but here’s the intro from the Free Press on YouTube:

Roland Fryer is one of the most celebrated economists in the world. He is the author of more than 50 papers—on topics ranging from “the economic consequences of distinctively black names” to “racial differences in police shootings.” At 30, he became the youngest black tenured professor in Harvard’s history. At 34, he won a MacArthur Genius Fellowship, followed by a John Bates Clark Medal, which is given to an economist in America under 40 who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge.

But before coming to Harvard, Fryer worked at McDonalds—drive-through, not corporate.

Fryer’s life story of rapid ascent to academic celebrity status despite abandonment by his parents at a young age, and growing up in what he calls a “drug family” is incredibly inspiring in its own right. Because based on every statistic and stereotype about race and poverty in America, he should not have become the things he became. And yet he did.

He also continues to beat the odds in a world in which much of academia has become conformist. Time and time again, Fryer refuses to conform. He has one north star, and that is the pursuit of truth, come what may. The pursuit of truth no matter how unpopular the conclusion or inconvenience to his own political biases.

He’s also rare in that he isn’t afraid to admit when he’s wrong, or to admit his mistakes and learn from them.

Bari Weiss sat down with Roland at the University of Austin for this inspiring, courageous, and long-overdue conversation.

The parts I found most absorbing are these:

  1. Fryer’s rough upbringing, raised without a mother and with most of his acquaintances being killed. And, of course, working at the McDonald’s drive-though before college.
  2. His famous paper showing that although there is police bias against blacks for some legal infractions, there is no racial bias in the Big Issue: police shootings. Fryer describes how he had to get police protection for over a month after that paper came out, for its conclusion violated the Aceepted Narrative and angered many people.
  3. His suspension from Harvard and closure of his lab. Fryer appears to have taken it well, but does explain that the incident involved his failure to understand “power dynamics”, for which he’s apologized. It’s curious, and has been pointed out by many, that Claudine Gay, who was a dean at the time (and later President of Harvard), was instrumental in getting Fryer punished. This makes Weiss ask Fryer at one point, “do you believe in karma?”  I can’t say much more about this as I haven’t followed the controversy, but I know many people think Fryer’s punishment was unduly harsh.

A Q&A session begins 49 minutes in.

Stuff that’s too expensive

August 7, 2023 • 12:15 pm

If you do grocery shopping (and who doesn’t?), you may have noticed that a lot of stuff—and not just groceries—have skyrocketed in price since the pandemic.  I’m not sure whether this is gouging or a normal economic response (maybe they’re the same), but I’m pretty sure that people are charging what the traffic will bear and that somehow competition hasn’t kept prices down.

The other day, for instance, I bought a baguette on my way home, and the price at the local bakery (the Medici, if you want to know) had jumped from $2 to $3 in one go: a 50% increase. When I wrote to the bakery manager (or owner) complaining, saying that I could get just as good a baguette for $2 at Trader Joe’s, the guy wrote a stinging response saying that he’s just making sure that his workers get a living wage and I could shop at Trader Joe’s if I wanted a place where (presumably) workers don’t make good wages. In fact, Trader Joe’s gives the wages of its Chicago employees, and here they are:

Average Trader Joe’s Crew Member hourly pay in Chicago is approximately $17.79, which is 36% above the national average.

I won’t be going to that store any more, and I presume that the Medici didn’t hike all the employees’ wages 50%.

Here are other things that seem much more expensive than a few years ago, and for some of the price hikes there are good reasons (eggs, for example, skyrocketed because of a chicken shortage).

Bread It’s a crime to pay more than $1 a loaf for decent sliced white bread (that’s what Aldi’s charges), but you’re lucky if you find a loaf for under three bucks in a grocery store.

Eggs (see above)

Toothpaste  I don’t know how the manufacturers get away with charging four bucks per tube when Pepsodent (now almost impossible to find) cost $1 per tube for years. It’s as if adding a bit of potassium nitrate (to reduce sensitivity) to the common stannous fluoride suddenly boosts the price to the stratosphere. Do you know what potassium nitrate costs if you buy it in the lab? Almost nothing! In my view, products like Sensodyne, which is just regular toothpaste with those anti-sensitivity ingredients added) are huge ripoffs. But I use them anyway, as there’s no alternative.

Cereal.  I occasionally used to buy “healthy” cereals like Raisin Bran or Shredded Wheat, but now they’re uber costly. My breakfasts now consist of a latte and two slices of toast. Speaking of which:

Fancy coffee.  I know what it costs to make a latte, because I have a good one every day, made in my Breville espresso machine from good French roast beans from Trader Joe’s (I have a good grinder, too). I’ll estimate the the price of the coffee is about 20 cents and the milk about 25 cents. That makes the latte cost 45 cents.  If you get one in Starbucks, it’ll be about ten times that high. I know there’s overhead and decent wages for the employees, but that is a big profit margin. And if you favor those fancy coffees that are really liquid desserts (peppermint lattes and the like), you’re getting ripped off more, not to mention ingesting a lot of unhealthy calories.

Cars. I haven’t bought a new or used car in years; I’m happy with my 2000 Honda Civic that I keep upgraded by installing stuff as it wears out. (It has only about 78,000 miles on it.) But the reports on the news about the hikes in prices of both new and used cars are scary. Imagine paying 50,000 for a new car!

Airfares.  I won’t kvetch at length about this, but as service goes down, and lots of extra fees get tacked on (e.g., checking luggage, which I never do, mainly because of the bag-loss factor), the airfares go up.

What prices curl the soles of your shoes these days? Now’s your turn to kvetch.

Fairness as justice: income inequality versus income unfairness, and what Democrats need to do about the distinction

April 21, 2022 • 10:15 am

Eric Protzer and Paul Summerville are coauthors of a recent book, Reclaiming Populism: How Economic Fairness Can Win Back Disenchanted Voters, and the Persuasion site we’re discussing today gives these IDs:

Eric Protzer is a Research Fellow at Harvard’s Growth Lab. Paul Summerville is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Victoria’s Gustavson School of Business.

The article below is clearly a summary of part of their book, and makes the point that it’s not income inequality that makes people so disaffected as much as “economic unfairness”: the sense that the deck isn’t stacked against you and that you, too, could have a shot at becoming a billionaire. Protzer and Summerville contend that if the Left is going to start winning elections, they have to enact policies that people see as fair.  One of these is decent healthcare initiatives, another is ceasing the campaign to cancel all student loan debt. In the former case there’s a sense of fairness of everyone being able to get decent healthcare (even if the rich can get super-expensive health care); in the latter people grouse that others shouldn’t get their loans canceled if they themselves had to pay off.

This does seem to have some truth in it. Do Americans really want equal incomes or drastic income distribution, or do they just want to know that they can work hard and be able to live decently? I for one don’t find that the “eat the rich” rhetoric resonates, as the billionaires that people despise generally made their dosh by providing a good or service that people want. (Yes, I think there should be a graduated income tax, but not the kind of equity that “progressive” seem to call for. At any rate, I’m neither a political nor financial pundit, so read and decide for yourself (click screenshot below):

The distinction between economic unfairness and economic inequality:

The fundamental problem with the left’s political program, currently centered around identity-based social justice and economic redistribution, is that it misunderstands the causes of this populist frustration. As our new book demonstrates, the left would do well to reorient itself around the true wellspring of populist anger: a scarcely-understood phenomenon called economic unfairness.

Economic unfairness is distinct from what we typically think of as economic inequality. It is characterized by low social mobility rather than inequalities of income or wealth. It’s not that the rich have too much, it’s that success depends on family wealth and status, when it should depend on good ideas, effort, and merit. It’s anger at this rigged system, rather than anger at inequality, that drives contemporary populist movements.

Why it hurts Democrats to confuse these concepts:

Unfortunately, the global left remains deeply confused about the distinction between economic fairness and equality. Consider, for example, how Democrats have often found that healthcare reform is an enormously popular issue with swing voters. This in fact makes a lot of sense: medical debt is the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the U.S., and can unfairly shut down a person’s life chances regardless of how hard they’ve worked. Better, more affordable healthcare is a key missing input to equal opportunity in America. But the left flank tends to misinterpret this trend as a blanket indicator that “progressive policies do not hurt candidates,” including far more questionable measures to equalize outcomes.

Figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have vocally excoriated income and wealth inequality and promoted policies, such as a universal job guarantee and eliminating all student debt, that expressly aim to equalize outcomes instead. Republicans eagerly frame the entire Democratic message in this way, and even specifically referred to these politicians in advertisements during the 2020 Presidential Election. The electoral consequences have been devastating. Latino voters swung heavily toward Trump in 2020 on the fear that the Democratic equalization policies were “socialist,” and polling indicates a top concern among this segment of the electorate was that people would ultimately become “lazy and dependent on government.”

What’s more, Democrats have further alienated potentially-populist voters by embracing an identity-based approach to social justice that frequently dismisses the problem of economic unfairness. Too often, the social justice movement assumes that anyone who might consider voting for a right-wing populist must be motivated by spurious and malignant cultural concerns. It labels populist voters as racist and stupid, hoping that with enough condemnation or a resultant change in the political scene their views will somehow evaporate. This framing fails to acknowledge that when populist voters complain about a rigged system, they could actually have a point.

What we can do about this? (By “we”, I mean liberals):

The left needs to decisively pivot away from its current political dead-end, and toward the real predictor of populist disruption: economic fairness. Rather than focusing on cutting down the successful, the left should ask how it can give more citizens a fair chance to get ahead. Instead of enlarging government in every possible respect, it should ask where the state can intervene to expand opportunity and where it must avoid meddling. How, then, can it realize this vision?

A handful of countries stand out as role models, with the highest rates of social mobility in the world—like Canada, Australia, and the Nordics. These countries pair strong state support for equal opportunity through public goods like education and healthcare with competitive private markets. These factors combine to create an economy where many people can get ahead in life with talent and hard work, regardless of family origins. In turn, this creates best-in-class social mobility, the perception of a meritocratic system, and high levels of trust. Thus when populists run for office, their claims that the system is rigged do not resonate with most voters.

If the left cannot reconfigure itself toward economic fairness it has no hope of winning back disenchanted populist voters. Social justice platforms of defunding the police, open borders, and enforced anti-racism indoctrination communicate condescension and dismissal to the very citizens who already feel unfairly treated. Proposals to unfairly equalize outcomes, so that people largely get the same reward regardless of how hard they work, are not just irrelevant but actually antithetical to what these voters want.

This is why the notion of “equity” bothers so many of us. It conveys the message that there must be equal outcomes—outcomes proportional to the distribution of groups in a population—rather than equal opportunities. Inequities need not reflect “structural bigotry” in the present.

Now I’ve discussed this at length, for some inequities do reflect historical lack of opportunity: racism against African-Americans is a lingering reason why they’re not represented in higher proportions in measures of “success”. (This is one reason I favor some affirmative action, as a form of present reparations.) But everyone knows that the ultimate solution is indeed equal opportunity beginning at birth. It’s just that that permanent solutions are lot harder than striving to achieve equity by dismantling traditional standards of merit or representation. It would take tremendous societal will and resources to eliminate inequality. A good society—a just society—would make those changes, as the societies listed above have tried (as well as Scandinavia).

But harping endlessly on “equity” also creates a sense of unfairness among voters: Asians who feel they’re discriminated against in college admissions and so on, and a disenchanted voter will vote for Republicans.  To me, the solution is not to eliminate affirmative action (at least for a while), but to raise the bar to achieving so that at least people feel that it’s high enough to be fair (i.e., those who achieve are “qualified”), but still allows more equity than we have now. And that must be coupled with de-racializing rhetoric, realizing that it’s not just race that holds people back, and that we have to deal with issues like poverty and class. The desire for equity right now is intimately coupled with the dissolution of the meritocracy, as instantiated in getting rid of standardized tests and grades. But the meritocracy—the sense that if you have the right stuff and work hard, you can achieve—is intimately coupled with “the American dream.”

But I’ve said enough. The article speaks better than I on this topic, so do read it. It’s not very long. As you see, I’m concerned with things Democrats can do that are both acceptable and will help us in this fall’s election.

Paging James Carville! Here he talks about focusing on Dems’ economic accomplishments in fixing society—showing fairness towards “the little guy.”

Stuff that’s gotten more expensive

May 31, 2021 • 9:15 am

There’s not much news to post about during this Memorial Day weekend, so here’s a small kvetch about consumer prices.

We all know that gas has gotten more expensive, and in Chicago, City of the Big Gas Prices, petrol is inching up towards $4 per gallon (yes, I know that sounds cheap to Europeans). Gas prices in May were up 22% from a year ago. (I remember fondly when gas was 19¢ per gallon; but of course I couldn’t drive then.)

Here are a few other things that I notice have risen substantially in price during the pandemic:

a.) Meat (this is reported on the news as due to a shortage of meat-plant workers and truck drivers). I don’t eat much meat these days, but I do like my weekly or once-every-ten-days steak. (Duke Ellington had steaks every day, and often tucked a steak sandwich in his pocket.) The small T-bone I bought yesterday was normally $16/pound for choice grade, but it was on sale for $6.99.

b.) Grocery prices in general. As CBS News reports:

Demand for groceries rose 11% because people hunkered down at home, putting pressure on suppliers, which drove up food prices.

“This’ll start changing as people shop less at grocery stores and as they go out more to restaurants,” said Feler, who doesn’t think it’s the start of an inflationary period. “This is very different than 1970s. Consumers have a lot more power these days.”

But consumers can still expect basics like toilet paper, diapers and toothpaste to cost more. Procter & Gamble, Kimberly-Clark and Coca-Cola announced that they are increasing prices because they’re paying more for raw materials in short supply.

As I’ve said before, toothpaste is one of the great ripoffs for the American consumer. If you can get Pepsodent for $1 per tube, which you can, then equivalent toothpastes, which can cost three or four times as much, are true ripoffs. Now, of course, I use a special and expensive prescription extra-fluoride toothpaste for my aging choppers, so the days of Pepsodent are gone.

Bob Vila gives a list of ten grocery items with the biggest price increases during the pandemic, with some suggested alternatives. Among the overprices goods are canned tuna, dairy products, cereal, and fruit & veg. Can you believe that I paid 88¢ for a single green pepper yesterday? I wouldn’t have done that if I didn’t have a hankering for tortilla, refried beans, and sauteed green pepper.

c.) Haircuts. Before the pandemic I would pay $22 for a haircut and $20 if I got it on Tuesday (“cheap day”). When I got one yesterday, it was $30. That is at least a 36% increase in price. (The tip was correspondingly increased as well.) I’m not sure why the price increase, unless it’s to make up for money lost during the pandemic when barber shops were closed. Is this true for other readers who visit the tonsorial parlor? (Yes, I know that women have to pay more for haircuts, which I regard as a reprehensible act of shaking down that sex.)

But at least I look reasonably unshaggy:

d.) Stamps. The U.S. Postal Service is about to increase the price of a first-class stamp from 55 cents to 58 cents, an increase of 5.5%. Stamp prices keep going up faster than the cost of living, despite the increasingly poor quality of USPS delivery. Were I smart, I’d buy a few hundred dollars of “forever stamps”, which have no printed value and are good for first-class letters forever.  But something seems wrong about spending so much money on stamps at one time. The Post Office seems to be run by a bunch of chowderheads and I’ve noticed that for some reason Post Office employees seem to be mean.

What have you found that is overpriced these days? I can understand some explanations as reasonable, for example the rise in meat prices, but other stuff, like my haircut, seems like simple price-gouging, with the pandemic being a reason to raise prices in the hopes that people will ascribe it to the virus.

Bad news for the economy, perhaps good news for the Left

August 5, 2019 • 3:50 pm

According to the article below, the escalating trade war between the U.S. and China, which involved China’s devaluing its currency relative to the dollar today, and Trump threatening to escalate with more tariffs, has led to the year’s worst day on Wall Street.

For many people, the only thing Trump has going for him is that the economy has been relatively strong. If Trump continues his stupid trade war and his idiotic tariff increases, things could well change. And when Americans get hit in the pocketbook, they tend to want a change in the ruling party.

It’s ironic to wish for a tanking economy so we can get rid of the authoritarians who rule us, but so it goes. Am I a bad person to think that?

Democratic socialism: sounds good, but is way too expensive, and not the future of the Democratic party

August 8, 2018 • 12:30 pm

Bernie Sanders and now the upcoming Democratic candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an American-born of Hispanic extraction who may well sit in Congress this fall, have gotten a lot of airplay espousing “democratic socialism”, which proposes an expansion of social programs funded by the government. While I’m in favor of some of these in principle, nobody really asks—and candidates avoid talking about—how much they will cost. Well, Vox did a survey of what the programs Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez would cost the government (and that means the taxpayer); the sources used to estimate the costs were liberal organizations, so there’s not much anti-progressive bias in the numbers. Many of the numbers come from the Urban Institute, which is a leftist organization often in favor of government interventions.

Read the Vox story by clicking on the screenshot:

Here are the costs that Vox author Brian Riedl came up with:

Medicare for all (Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez): $32 trillion over the next decade

Social Security expansion (Sanders): $188 billion over the next decade

Paid family leave of 12 weeks for new parents (Sanders): $287 billion over the next decade

Free college for all (Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez): $807 billion over the next decade

Guaranteed jobs for all at $15/hr plus benefits (Ocasio-Cortez): $6.8 trillion over the next decade

New infrastructure (Senate Democrats): $1 trillion over the next decade

Payoff of all student loan debt (House Democrats): $1.4 trillion over the next decade.

As Vox notes, this is a huge sum (my emphasis):

Total cost: $42.5 trillion in new proposals over the next decade, on top of the $12.4 trillion baseline deficit.

To put this in perspective, Washington is currently projected to collect $44 trillion in revenues over the next decade. And the Republican tax cut, decried universally by Democrats as irresponsible (and by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi as “Armageddon”) will cost less than $2 trillion over the decade.

The 30-year projected tab for these programs is even more staggering: new proposals costing $218 trillion, on top of an $84 trillion baseline deficit driven by Social Security, Medicare, and the resulting interest costs.

What would be the effects of such an unprecedented spending binge? Federal spending, which typically ranges between 18 and 22 percent of GDP, would immediately soar past 40 percent of GDP on its way to nearly 50 percent within three decades. Including state and local government spending would push the total cost of government to 60 percent of GDP by that point — exceeding the current spending level of every country in Europe.

. . . These numbers are not partisan. They come from the Congressional Budget Office, top liberal think tanks, and the lawmakers themselves. They are the left’s own figures. (And note that we included an absurdly low-cost estimate for the jobs guarantee.)

Vox notes that single-payer health insurance is not going to fix government health spending (e.g., Medicare), nor would the moving of money from private citizens (spent on their own healthcare) to government healthcare (via taxes); that has “serious economic and redistributive side effects.” And engineering the $26 trillion tax hike needed to cover this would be nearly impossible, as it would set the payroll tax at 29% (now 15.3%).

The rest of the Vox article tries to figure out how to pay for all this social engineering, and author Riedl concludes that there’s just no way to do it in an acceptable fashion. He concludes like this:

Mix and match these tax policies and it still represents an unfathomable and impossible tax burden. American taxes would be higher than most of Europe because its spending levels would also be higher. (Our health care system would still cost more, and Europe does not have an expensive government job guarantee.)

Taxing the rich is not enough. America would need to match, or even surpass, Europe’s enormous tax burden on the middle class. There is no evidence that American voters will accept this level of taxation.

Democratic socialists are disingenuously cagey about the exorbitant tax burden they require. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently offered a list of tax increases — such as a 28 percent corporate tax rate, a “Buffett tax” on millionaires, and carbon tax — that collectively add up to just $2 trillion over the decade, according to the CBO.

Ocasio-Cortez, only 28, is often touted as “the future of the Democratic Party,” but I haven’t been impressed by her. She’s young, for sure, and that may be why I don’t see her as ready for prime time, but she’s also a new face, a Hispanic woman, and a socialist, which appeals to Sanders fans (note: I voted for him in the Illinois primaries). She’s the social justice warrior that Democrats think, unwisely, is the person that can defeat the Democrats.

But she hasn’t seemed to grasp the difficulties with her proposals, and she doesn’t look especially thoughtful in interviews. RealClear Politics analyzed her statement that unemployment is low only because everyone has two jobs, and found that it, along with much of she said, was a big “pants on fire” whopper (note: I don’t think it’s necessarily a conscious lie). Here she is with that proposal, and a prediction that we are (and should) be marching toward socialism and against capitalism. Much as some socialistic programs appeal to me, there’s still a lot to be said for the retention of some capitalism in the private sector.  And let’s face it: America isn’t going to buy a completely socialistic society, and espousing it is political suicide.

Here’s her not terribly well thought out stand on Israel on Palestine, with several professions that she’s not an expert in geopolitics. Well, I agree with the two-state solution, but she needs a more eloquent response.

As I said, she’s young and I won’t hold this against her. But I do hold her adamant and unthinking socialism against her, and that’s exactly what makes her popular.

Like every Democrat, I am desperately looking for a viable Leftist to contest Trump (or, if he’s out, his Republican replacement) in 2020.  Ocasio-Cortez isn’t even close, though of course I’d rather have her in Congress than almost any Republican. But I don’t want the future of the Democratic Party to be ignorance and untenable forms of socialism.

 

What’s the point of a trade war?

June 1, 2018 • 8:30 am

My dad was trained as an economist, and one thing he taught me when I was very young is that tariffs never benefit the country that levies them—or anyone else save perhaps a few people in “protected” industries. Yet Trump promised to engaged in trade wars, and people voted for him. Now they’ll get to see what happens.

Yes, yesterday The Donald just levied tariffs on steel and aluminum imported from three major trading partners: Canada, Mexico, and the European Union. The duties are 10% on imported aluminum and 25% on steel, and took effect at midnight last night. These three areas provide, according to the New York Times, half of the metal imported into the U.S.

Predictably, these countries are threatening to levy, and almost certainly will levy, duties on products imported from America, products like blue jeans, cigarettes, bourbon, and so on. People here will lose their jobs, prices will rise, and everyone loses except—perhaps!—some in the steel and aluminum industries.

After all these years, I still can’t see that what my dad taught me was wrong. The principle of comparative advantage, with each country producing what it produces best and cheapest, and selling those products worldwide without the impediment of duties, seems eminently reasonable from the viewpoint of both economics and employment.

Mexico, the EU, and Canada are fighting back, and rightfully criticizing this stupid move. Why on earth would any American favor it?

What’s wrong with capitalism?

April 1, 2018 • 12:30 pm

Before I’m thrown into the basket of alt-right deplorables because of the headline, what I’m asking is this: “Is there any better economic/governmental system than free-market capitalism combined with appropriate government regulations against its excesses?” The reason I’m asking this is because I’ve seen many Leftist bloggers attack capitalism as if it were the root of all Western evil, something to be ruthlessly expunged. (These are the same people who get their overpriced macchiatos from Starbucks.)

The kind of capitalism I don’t find problematic is that in Scandinavia and Western Europe, and the kind that we could have in the U.S. were the government a bit more compassionate.  Now I’m not an economist, and can’t rattle off every danger of an unregulated free market lacking government safety nets, but surely we need regulations that will help those who can’t survive in that system, or who fall through the cracks. We need government medical care, taxes, help for old people, and a variety of social services beside the free market. We need regulations to prevent unethical business practices, the purveying of misrepresented or dangerous products, the creation of monopolies, and so on. This is pretty much above my pay grade.

But I ask those of you who are constantly harping on capitalism, indicting it as evil, and calling for its destruction: what alternative do you propose?   As I believe Steve Pinker pointed out in his latest book, any society that has eliminated capitalism but has tried to be democratic—or maintained the pretense of democracy—has failed. Capitalism is, after all, a form of economic freedom.

Well, you weigh in. What alternatives are better than a humanely regulated form of capitalism in a democracy?

This is an extreme example, but there are many other non-loons who espouse pretty much the same sentiments.