But I’d like to see more explanations of past events (for instance, “Why did Youtube (or Twitter, or Facebook) become so successful, when similar services failed before?”) that have the following property:

If presented with the explanation prior to the event, it would have convinced me that the event would indeed occur.

E.g., presented with an argument why Twitter would succeed, prior to Twitter becoming so popular, would I have been convinced (by that argument) that Twitter would indeed eventually become popular, even when mixed in with all the other contradictory opinions and analyses of that time?

Most explanations of past events I see, across the spectrum of interesting topics, don’t have this property. In general, “hindsight is 20/20″ seems more apropos of the way we tend to be more accepting of arguments and explanations when we already know the underlying premise is true. It’s easy to nod along when reading an article describing why Google or Amazon or Facebook became so successful, after the fact. It’s much harder to accept as truth those same arguments when we don’t already know the final outcome. And that’s what I think they really mean by “hindsight is 20/20.”

I find this quite believable; back in 2003 Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation, which is supposedly harder-right than AEI, proposed a health care reform consisting of … drumroll … an individual mandate coupled with subsidies to make insurance affordable. In short, Obamacare.

via David Frum, AEI, Heritage And Health Care – Paul Krugman Blog – NYTimes.com.

What is ironic about the health care bill (and indeed, even the proposed cap&trade legislation) is that they are at heart conservative ideas.  The stereotypical “liberal” idea would have been to have government-run healthcare, with doctors working for the government.  Instead, this health bill expands private health care to everyone.

In fact, from a purely conservative standpoint, the health care reform means we’ll have less “socialism”, not more.  Currently, everyone already has healthcare, just not everyone has to pay for it.  It’s called the ER.  It doesn’t matter whether you have insurance or not, you get to go.  How is that not “socialism”?  Expanding healthcare (and enforcing the individual mandate) just means having everyone pay their fair share for the implicit guaranteed (albeit highly inefficient) universal health care system that already exists.

The bottom line is, no one likes the crappy “pre-existing condition” exclusions that currently exist in insurance policies.  But (as conservative pointed out years ago) to get rid of those exclusions in any sensible way, there must be an individual mandate so that people get health insurance before they get sick.  There is really no way around that in order to have a functioning, privately-run health care system.

All 3 reform efforts involve addressing problems that at their root are caused by well known and long-studied economic problems.  Health care is no exception.  Perverse incentives, information asymmetry, moral hazard,  special interests, externalities… the whole gamut of market-destroying forces seem to be at work in distorting the modern health-care system from its ideal form.

Furthermore, the push for health-care reform is revealing in classic fashion the failings of the political system itself that I discussed in my previous post.  The “town hall meetings” that were supposed to add to the debate have instead devolved into circus acts.  Active misinformation campaigns about supposed “death panels” and a media complicit in giving airtime and weight to totally illegitimate claims have made a reasoned national debate on the very pressing issues facing us nearly impossible.

Without understanding in detail the economic principles in play, there is no hope for any kind of sensible solution.  Everyone knows and admits that health-care costs are gobbling up an ever-increasing share of our resources, with nearly 20% of GDP currently going to medical expenses.  But in today’s climate,  it is difficult to see how we will collectively be able to engage in a rational, subtle, and detailed discussion on the issues at hand, much less implement rational reform.

A recent article in The Atlantic by David Goldhill covers many of the problems underlying the health-care system from an economic and business perspective; an excerpt follows:

Indeed, I suspect that our collective search for villains—for someone to blame—has distracted us and our political leaders from addressing the fundamental causes of our nation’s health-care crisis. All of the actors in health care—from doctors to insurers to pharmaceutical companies—work in a heavily regulated, massively subsidized industry full of structural distortions. They all want to serve patients well. But they also all behave rationally in response to the economic incentives those distortions create. Accidentally, but relentlessly, America has built a health-care system with incentives that inexorably generate terrible and perverse results. Incentives that emphasize health care over any other aspect of health and well-being. That emphasize treatment over prevention. That disguise true costs. That favor complexity, and discourage transparent competition based on price or quality. That result in a generational pyramid scheme rather than sustainable financing. And that—most important—remove consumers from our irreplaceable role as the ultimate ensurer of value.

via How American Health Care Killed My Father – The Atlantic September 2009.

The article highlights a number of issues plaguing health care today, and traces most of them back to market failures caused by the current setup in which medical providers cater to insurers and Medicare, rather than to the patient.  Most of the participants in the system are genuinely trying to fulfill their role in providing us with quality care.  But the system itself in this case is horrendously flawed.  A few of the points raised in the article follow (along with some of my own thoughts):

• Health care is emphasized over health: The incentives in the current system reward treatments and care, not promotion of health itself.  Your doctor might suggest you exercise or you lose weight, but at the end of the day, the financial incentives at least don’t promote overall health.
• The concept of insurance has been misappropriated: Insurance is not the proper vehicle for delivering routine, expected care.  The author makes an analogy with car insurance: would it be sensible to have a system where car insurance is expected to pay for our gas?  What would happen to gas prices in that scenario?
• The patient is not the customer: Market forces drive industries to cater to the customer.  That is why Walmart is cheap, why everyone is nice to you at Disney World, and why your car has a cupholder.  But in the modern health care system, the patient is not the customer, and keeping the patient happy (or healthy) is not what helps the industry’s bottom line.  There is virtually no transparency in the health-care system with respect to quality and costs, so there is no in-built mechanism nudging the system towards a state of greater efficiency.
• The cost of the uninsured is hidden by bookkeeping tricks: What people often forget is that we already have a universal health care system, albeit highly inefficient.  Ever seen anyone critical get turned away at the ER?  Of course by the time someone makes it to the ER with a preventable condition, the cost of care becomes much higher.  Many other distortions take place in the health-care system because of the constant need to hide and shuffle around costs to keep the whole system politically palatable.  For instance, many hospitals are subsidized in a highly inefficient manner (through anti-competitive regulations and other means) because they are the only place it is politically expedient to provide health care to the uninsured (via the ER).  Hospitals get regulatory favors, and in turn they treat everyone who walks through the ER door.  If we were simply explicit about providing universal coverage, instead of burying it into ER costs with bookkeeping tricks (ever wonder why a Tylenol should cost $10 on a hospital bill?), the health-care system could be be greatly streamlined, increasing quality and decreasing costs.

Goldhill discusses several other problems underlying health care in a way that avoids the simple-minded, purely emotional reasoning so many in the debate are engaging in. “Intuitive,” feel-good proposals will help no one.  A hard look at the facts and figures, and the incentives at work, are necessary to make headway. I don’t necessarily agree with all of Goldhill’s specific proposals for reforming health care, but I do agree with his approach to thinking about the issue.

Health care reform is a vexing problem, and it remains to be seen whether the modern political system is capable of solving it.  But unlike ignoring climate-change (where we are shortchanging our unborn great-grandchildren), in ignoring the problems underlying health care, we are shortchanging ourselves.  Perhaps our instinctive need to act in our own self-interest will finally kick in and we can all get the health care we could so easily afford.

If more politicians would call out lies for what they are, maybe there’s hope.

For three long years, from 2004 to 2007, he virtually stopped making or buying loans. While the credit markets were roaring and lenders were raking in billions, Beal shrank his bank’s assets because he thought the loans were going to blow up. He cut his staff in half and killed time playing backgammon or racing cars. He took long lunches with friends, carping to them about “stupid loans.” His odd behavior puzzled regulators, credit agencies and even his own board. [...]

But he wants to exploit their recklessness to amass his own fortune. Not much next to the trillion-dollar balance sheets of the nation’s troubled banks, but the lesson here might be revealed in the fact that this billionaire is not playing with other people’s money–he owns 100% of the bank and is acting accordingly.

via The Banker Who Said No – Forbes.com.

The key here is that Beal owns 100% of his bank — the principal-agent problem we discussed in a previous post does not apply. Because he wasn’t subject to the same kind of perverse incentives as other bankers, he made significantly different decisions than his peers.  His decisions were based on long term profits, not short term gain that relied on passing the buck to some future chump.  Not to downplay Beal, but it was the incentives of his situation more than anything else that led to his seemingly prophetic decisions.

In a previous post on incentives, I described how compensation structures at financial (and other) firms can create perverse incentives that lead to unsurprising outcomes — firms seek short term profit and take excessive risks at the expensive of long term profits and sustainability.  A recent New York Times article, in discussing this principle, cites a 16-year-old academic paper, “Looting”, that describes how the implicit belief that the government would bail out any sufficiently critical financial firm from going under, led to excessive risk taking by investors at those firms.  They kept the gain, sticking the government with the pain.  In the case of financial firms and other public companies, the deleterious decision-making can generally be traced to perverse financial incentives.  In the case of politics, however, the problem is even worse: perverse incentives tightly coupled with adverse selection.

Consider for a moment the incentives driving a politician.  They are numerous, but certainly include:

• Civic duty – the politician wants to do what is best for his constituency and the country
• Money – the politician wants more money (or it’s equivalent in the form of perks)
• Power – the politician wants power (to secure money/perks for his friends and family)
• Desire to get reelected – the politician wants to do what it takes to ensure he gets reelected, so that he can continue to benefit from the other incentives above

That last incentive — the strong desire to get reelected — is often times the worst offender in terms of distorting a politician’s decision-making process. Ideally, we want politicians to only be driven by the first incentive above — we (the principals) want our politicians (our agents) to be aligned with our collective interests.  The desire for money and power for personal gain are unavoidable, and as long as they are kept in check (through transparency), perhaps not too unwieldy.  But the desire to get reelected is extremely powerful, since it is effectively basic survival as a politician, and causes the politician  to seek large contributions from special interests and wealthy companies and industries, thus becoming at least partly beholden to them. Although this effect is obvious to everyone, and leads to completely undesirable (from the perspective of the public good) policies at times, it is very hard to fix.  We have no way of knowing for sure which incentives are driving a particular politician’s decision making.

A politician with strong “moral” convictions may draw boundaries as to what they are willing to say and do to get reelected, and may continue to have their decision making dominated by their sense of civic duty.  They might seek and accept large campaign contributions, but remain steadfast in voting based on what they think is best for their constituents.  But any “moral” restriction a politician places on his behavior with respect to getting reelected disadvantages him.  (Consider that the truly amoral politician has more tools at his disposal to get reelected — even mimicking a moral politician is a tool open to him).  And now we see the perfect storm underpinning the subtle yet pernicious corruption that results in the dysfunctional political system: the very people most affected by the perverse incentive caused by the desire to get reelected are the ones who actually do get reelected.  The high-minded politicians with strong ethics and morals are the ones weeded out of the system, because they can not raise enough money, or make enough friends, or manipulate public opinion with enough half-truths and misdirection.  If the only problem with politics in Washington was the existence of perverse incentives, we might still expect to reach some workable equilibrium, where politicians got their fixed cut of money and power, in return for (mostly) working for the public interest.  If the selection were decoupled from perverse incentives, then we would still hope to see common sense rather than demagoguery permeate the halls of political power.  But with perverse incentives coupled with adverse selection, we end up with a one-way street to the bizarre state of affairs we see in Washington today.

In the interest of brevity, I’ve glossed over a number of subtle, yet significant points.  I hope to revisit them in future posts, but they include:

• What exactly is civic duty?  In an ideal world, whose interests should the politicians’ interests be aligned with?  His local constituency?  The country as a whole?  What are the tradeoffs between the two?  (Game theory can shed some light here on the pitfalls and solutions for aligning incentives)
• Although we only touched on the negative aspect of the wanting to get reelected, the desire for reelection is supposed to be a positive incentive.  It is supposed to keep politicians in check and is supposed to be the tool to actually align their interests with our interests.  (That’s the whole point of democracy.)  How can we achieve the positive aspect of this incentive, and avoid the perverse effects? (Is transparency the key?)
• How do term-limits factor in?  Is a lame-duck president for instance more able or less able to advance the public’s interests?

Jeff Howe speaking at BRITE 09

Jeff Howe and Seth Godin’s talks appealed to me the most.  Jeff  spoke about the increasing use and reliance on communities to produce things, giving as a canonical example iStockPhoto, which began as an amateur photography site by Bruce Livingstone who simply needed photos for his own site, and found them hard to obtain at reasonable cost.  He began iStockPhoto using the gift economy model, in which users who uploaded images could download them.  He then migrated to the micropayment model, where images could be bought, royalty free, for less than a dollar.  iStockPhoto became very popular, and eventually was acquired by Getty Images.  According to Howe, the key to making a crowdsourcing project successful is to ensure the task at hand is made very modular, with each module simple enough to do in 15 minutes.  That ensures that people will participate, and make meaningful contributions that when aggregated can lead to a useful end product.

Seth Godin speaking at BRITE 09

Seth Godin was the keynote speaker on the second day of the conference.  He discussed his book, Tribes, which discusses the modern notion of tribe in the internet age.  His driving argument was that companies or organizations that want to be successful must cater to a tribe, and adapt to the tribe rather than trying to impose their vision on the tribe.  Because of the increased transparency afforded to us by the internet, it is much harder for companies to convince us to want something, and instead, they should focus on helping members of a tribe to stay connected.

He also talked about the qualities of a tribe leader.  Generally they are outside of the mainstream, since the mainstream itself is usually not exciting enough to create or inspire a tribe.  And generally, the tribe leader is seen as charismatic, although Godin emphasized that charsima is not something your born with, it is something that results when leading a tribe whose convictions you feel strongly about.  He gave Al Gore as an example.  As a presidential candidate, he was considered quite boring and uninspiring.  He symbolized the status quo and exuded almost no charisma.  But Al Gore the Climate Change activist was outside of the mainstream, pushing a controversial agenda.  Suddenly he transformed into a charismatic and inspiring figure who was able to have a big impact on the climate change discussion.

Several other speakers were interesting as well, although I won’t describe them here.  A few of the cooler websites that popped up during some of the talks were:

• Innovid – a technology for adding product placement into videos post production
• Sundaysky – a technology for automatically generating a snazzy video from a normal text/image-based website

I went to Tavis Smiley‘s book signing for his new book, Accountable: Making America as Good as its Promise.  He was a very engaging and passionate speaker. He positioned himself as an important, transformative, and influential figure in the African-American community, and the audience was largely African-American.  I used to watch his interviews with politicians and famous figures, and always thought he had a balanced and entertaining style.

Smiley spent the first part of his talk putting his new book into context.  It is essentially the third book in a trilogy; the first two were (loosely) targeted towards African-Americans, although he makes the point that their appeal is more general (otherwise, he claims, they would not have become New York Times Bestsellers).  The second part of his talk honed in on the specifics of his new book, which focuses on how we can hold our politicians (including President Obama) accountable for their words and actions.

Accountability, in addition to being the central theme of his new book, is the central theme of his career as a talk-show host.  Smiley stressed this point repeatedly — promoting accountability among public officials is what he claims to have always been the focus of his career.  It is something that says he applies consistently, even (or especially) to politicians he likes, such as Obama.  He talked about how sticking to his guns on accountability can get him into trouble, but that is no excuse for him to back down.  In particular, he recounted how last year, he ended up in a controversy over taking Obama to task for not attending his State of the Black Union event in New Orleans; to summarize the controversy, Obama at the time was campaigning in other states during the Democratic primaries, and thus couldn’t attend Tavis’ popular yearly conference.  (Hillary Clinton did attend the conference.)  Tavis took this as a sign that Obama was not giving due importance to Black issues.  Because of Obama’s extreme popularity among the Black community, Tavis’ perceived “disloyalty” led to substantial backlash against him, to an extent he did not expect.  Smiley pointed out that he tries to hold every politician accountable, whether he personally supports them or not, whether they are friends of his or not.  For instance he said how he had taken his friend Bill Clinton to task over the Sister Souljah moment, and Al Gore to task for the way he avoided recounts in certain Black districts in Florida during the 2000 election, to avoid tinging the recount effort with “race”.

Smiley recounted numerous entertaining anecdotes.  Among them was one about just how unknown Obama was only a few years ago.  During the 2000 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, Obama, who was just an unknown state senator from Illinois, was not allowed into the convention — he had to cajole his way just to get into the building.  Four years later, he was the keynote speaker at the DNC in Boston.  Four more years and he was nominated Democratic candidate for President of the United States.

One of Smiley’s strong beliefs is that if you love a candidate, it becomes all the more important to hold him accountable.  Great presidents are not born, they are made, he claimed.  In particular, he feels that politicians must be pushed and escorted into greatness by holding their feet to the fire.  He was emphatic that the current state of the world is fertile ground for achieving greatness — all of the chaos and crises facing the world gives Obama the chance to shine.  It is only a chance though, and there is no guarantee that he will succeed. But if he does, then he will have secured his status among the Great Presidents.  Tavis mused that Bill Clinton probably regrets not having had the opportunity to prove his greatness, not having been faced by global crises of the sort facing us today.  He ended by reminding us that it is up to all of us to hold our politicians accountable, and in doing so, perhaps elevating some to greatness.

“I believe that people react to incentives, that incentives matter, and that prices reflect the way things should be allocated. But I also believe that market economies sometimes have market failures, and when these occur, there’s a role for prudential — not excessive — regulation of the financial system. The two things that Greenspan got totally wrong were his beliefs that, one, markets self-regulate, and two, that there’s no market failure.”

via Nouriel Roubini Says Nationalizing the Banks Is the Market-Friendly Solution – WSJ.com.

Roubini makes the point that incentives matter.  And indeed, incentives get at the heart of the current fiasco, and there may lie the long term solution as well.  Paradoxically, the short term fixes that might be needed to claw our way out of the crisis might end up creating all kinds of perverse incentives (i.e., the problem of moral hazard that occurs by rewarding destructive behavior through bailouts).  But for the moment, let’s step back though and think through a few of the perverse incentives that helped cause this problem.

Executives at large financial firms (and indeed, at many companies in general) are largely compensated through stock options.  The goal of stock options is well intentioned — they’re meant to align the incentives of the executives with the interests of the company.  If the company does well, then the executives profit, which seems like a good thing.  But as they say, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.  The reason that some scheme needs to be setup to align incentives is because of what’s known as the principal-agent problem.  In this context, the company (which is essentially the collection of shareholders) is the principal, which hires the executives, who are the agents, to run the firm.  The executives want to act in their own self-interest, so we need a scheme to align their self interests with those of the company.  Stock options seem like a good way to do that.  Unfortunately, any incentive scheme is imperfect, and it is generally not possible to perfectly align the interests of the agent with that of the principal.  What are the imperfections of stock options?  Well there are many, and they’re not exactly secret; for instance:

• The agent is incented to increase short term performance of the company to drive up  the stock price,  just long enough for him to sell his shares.  Since options generally vest within 4 years, the long term health of the company is irrelevant to the agent.
• The agent is incented to be risk seeking because of the asymmetry of his exposure to the company’s performance — if the company does well, the agent gets lucratively rewarded; but if the company does poorly, the agent doesn’t suffer losses (assuming our starting condition is when the strike price of his option is the market value of the share).

Just these two fairly obvious flaws in the incentive schemes for Wall street executives goes a long way towards explaining the current financial crisis.  The execs at Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, Countrywide, … ad naseum were all acting in their self interests by taking on undue risk, and profiting heavily.  But the principals (namely the companies themselves) suffered.  And how can you really blame the executives, when they were doing exactly what the company was incenting them to do?  (By the way, railing at the current Wall Street execs is somewhat pointless; the people behind this mess cashed out long ago.)

As a side note, consider the fact that stock options are heavily used in the tech industry as well.  It’s interesting that the largest and most prominent of the tech companies don’t suffer the same kinds of problems.  Isn’t it curious though that at highly successful companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, the “principal” is to a large extent the founder(s) of the respective companies?  In other words, if Jeff Bezos is running the show at Amazon, he does care about the long term health of the company, since not only is he the founder, he’s by far still the largest stakeholder.

It seems clear that companies should develop incentive schemes that reward executives and employees for long-term rather than short term performance.  In some sense, pre-IPO companies are like that, in that it could be several years before an employee’s shares are even tradable.

Game theory provides a framework for understanding incentives and how people react to them.  Several other key aspects of the current crisis can be understood in that context, which I’ll post about later.  But bailouts, restructuring, and masses of regulation won’t really fix the problem until we think about better ways to improve the incentive structures at the key points of our economy.

Is the solution to just keep re-inflating bubble after bubble to recapitalize our consumer driven economy or is it time for a huge systemic paradigm shift away from consumerism? What type of shift would you envision and would it destroy the economy as we currently know it?
Robert Singer, Oregon, USA

NR: For the last 30 years the US has been growing fast only during periods of asset bubbles that eventually burst with significant economic and financial costs.

The 1980s real estate bubble went bust in the late part of that decade leading to a severe banking crisis for the Savings and Loan banks, a credit crunch and a severe recession in 1990-91; next the 1990s tech/internet bubble went bust in 2000 leading to the 2001 recession; massive monetary and credit easing – as well as lax supervision/regulation of mortgages and credit – led to another housing and credit bubble that has now gone bust creating a severe financial crisis and recession.

The current monetary easing may lead to another bubble but we are somehow running out of bubbles to create.

Housing, credit, equities, commodities, hedge funds, private equity bubbles: they have all gone bust now. We need to create an economic system that is less prone to bubbles and more likely to lead to sustainable stable growth.

For the last few years the US has overinvested in the most unproductive form of capital – residential housing stock that increase utility but not labor productivity – and not enough into physical capital that increases the productivity of labor.

Also we overinvested in the financial sector, a corollary of the housing boom: when the S&P500 market capitalization of financial firms was 25 per cent of the market and when over a third of the profits or earnings of S&P500 constituents came from financial companies, that was an excess of finance.

And having a country where there are more financial engineers than computer engineers or mechanical engineers means a misallocation of human capital as well.

So we need to create a growth model relying less on housing/real estate, less on finance and less on having the brightest minds of the country going into financial services rather than into the production and innovation of new and improved goods and services.

via FT.com / Markets / Ask the expert – Nouriel Roubini on prospects for 2009.

The above discussion by Roubini gets at the heart of what is often not given enough importance in the discussion on the government’s role in helping fix the economy.  Propping up bubbles is akin to a kid on a candy binge — a euphoric sugar rush followed by a crash.  Talking heads often assert that falling housing prices are at the epicenter of the current crisis, and then proceed to say the only way to fix the economy is to prop up housing prices.  The most insightful statement Roubini makes above is that

For the last few years the US has overinvested in the most unproductive form of capital – residential housing stock that increase utility but not labor productivity – and not enough into physical capital that increases the productivity of labor.

More investment should go to sectors of the economy that increase productivity, so that in future the economy can produce more of what we all want.  The economic growth of this past decade was largely an illusion — rising home prices led people to believe they had more wealth, causing them to spend more.  But excessive growth in housing adds nothing to the productive capacity of the economy.

Facebook is great for putting up photos you want your friends to see, and is the first place I’ll upload my photos.  But Facebook scales the images down and their rescaling causes a noticeable degradation in quality.  So for fun pics its great, but the loss in quality is too high.  Also, there’s no practical way to then make certain albums world visible to non-Facebook users (sure, there’s those public urls, but they expire and you can’t provide a convenient public url for a collection of albums.

Flickr is popular and I used it a bit, but it’s hard to customize the layout to anything close to what I think I want my photo albums to look like.

Smugmug makes promises about beautiful albums, but I found it to be buggy and could never get things the way I wanted there.

PicasaWeb comes close to what I’m looking for, but it’s robots.txt excludes all search engines, which seems rather odd.  Also, there’s no way to really customize anything.

After bouncing around from site to site (I’ve also tried Snapfish and Shutterfly, which also weren’t quite what I wanted), I decided to host my photos on my own server, running Gallery.  (Again, which photo gallery software to use presents another series of choices, made easier by the fact that only Gallery and Zenphoto had “easy install” options on my webhost.  Coppermine-Gallery is supposed to be another good choice.  I ended up going with Gallery (partly after realizing a former coworker is the one that wrote it).

One tool I found useful when I was comparing all of the above choices against their peers was Google Trends, so that I could measure their relative popularities (e.g., what’s more popular, Shutterfly or Snapfish?  Just make sure to look at websites data, not searches).  I don’t want to be stuck with either a service or software that isn’t popular enough to show up in the Trends data.  Sometimes going with the flow is best if you want to minimize ongoing maintenance and setup hassle.

My public albums are at http://photos.aquva.com/

I had to fiddle with the css and template files, but it wasn’t too hard to get close to the look & feel I wanted.  I’ll have to fiddle with it more to get it how I want, but it’s close enough, and certainly closer to what I want than any of the online photo websites I looked at.  Note that I am not the kind of person (anymore) that wants to fiddle around with installing custom apps — I would much rather have just used picasaweb or flickr and have been done with it.  It’s just that for some bizarre reason, there just weren’t any photo album websites out there that didn’t have at least one showstopper.