A questão da moral nos EUA

Morals: Our great moral decline | The Economist

ASKED to explain his support for Rick Santorum in Michigan's primary, voter Sandy Munro said, "Now what we need is a strong political leader to do something to get us out of the moral slump that we’re in."

Mr Santorum would agree, having noted that "Satan has his sights on the United States of America." As would Mitt Romney, who has attacked the decay caused by Barack Obama's "secular agenda". Newt Gingrich has gone the furthest, stating, “A country that has been now since 1963 relentlessly in the courts driving God out of public life shouldn’t be surprised at all the problems we have."

But what are these problems? When considering America's moral decline, my first instinct was to look at the crime rate. If Satan is at work in America, he's probably nicking wallets and assaulting old ladies. But over the past several decades the crime rate has fallen dramatically, despite what you may think. The homicide rate has been cut in half since 1991; violent crime and property crime are also way down. Even those pesky kids are committing less crime. There are some caveats to these statistics, as my colleague points out, but I think we can conclude that crime is not the cause of America's moral decline. So let's look elsewhere. Abortion has returned as a hot-button issue, perhaps it is eating away at our moral fiber. Hmm, the abortion rate declined by 8% between 2000 and 2008. Increases in divorce and infidelity could be considered indicators of our moral decay. There's just one problem: according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the divorce rate is the lowest it has been since the early 1970s. This is in part due to the recession, but infidelity is down too.

Other areas that might indicate declining virtue are also going against the perceived trend. For example, charitable giving is up after a decline during the recession. The teenage pregnancy rate is at its lowest level in 40 years. And according to Education Week, "the nation’s graduation rate stands at 72 percent, the highest level of high school completion in more than two decades." So where is the evidence of this moral decline? 

[continua. e bastante interessante...]

....

Quote of the Day: November 18, 2011

"[A]ny society... is at once a structure which can only be understood in terms of the interrelationship of its parts, and a process which can only be understood in terms of the cumulative weight of its past. The difficulty is to synthesize the two aspects in any actual study. Liberal history and formalist sociology represent extreme opposed attempts to divorce the two dimensions altogether.... The coexistence of the two in the Anglo-Saxon countries marks the limits of the penetration of Marxism in these cultures. For Marxism is the only thought which has rigorously united developmental and structural analysis: it is at once pure historicity (denial of all suprahistorical essences) and radical functionalism (societies are significant totalities). This synthesis remains unique…"

Perry Anderson

É. Pode vir a contrário da "sabedoria convencional", mas é mesmo assim...

A History Of Violence Edge Master Class 2011 | Conversation | Edge: What may be the most important thing that has ever happened in human history is that violence has gone down, by dramatic degrees, and in many dimensions all over the world and in many spheres of behavior: genocide, war, human sacrifice, torture, slavery, and the treatment of racial minorities, women, children, and animals.

Depoimento magnífico - este tipo é um conservador inglês e eu sou de esquerda, mas estou de acordo com aquilo que diz, nomeadamente, em relação ao que diz sobre a educação liberal - sejamos cautelosos, no entanto, com a extensão do acordo: pelo menos como base de partida de uma análise mais profunda, já que fica muito para explicar

ConservativeHome's Platform: Simon Marcus: Listen to the children

A while ago two of my students said they were going to 'turn over' a large house in a wealthy area near them. I asked why? They said they had it tough, they wanted a new TV, and it was something to do.

I listened, and then explained that just because they were poor they didn't need to rob a house. I told them that I didn't even have a TV, which amazed them. I explained to them how my Grandparents grew up in the East End during the great depression. There were few jobs, no money and no welfare. They went without food on occasion, suffered discrimination and had to deal with fascism, yet they emerged from poverty. I explained how they did it: They worked hard, sacrificed for the future, educated themselves, showed respect for the law and other people, had strong families and never gave up. The two boys looked thoughtful for a while and then one said: 'Yes, but I never had a father to tell me that'.

Mais uma posição sobre o que se está a passar em Inglaterra de um, presumo eu, "real conservative"

The moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom – Telegraph Blogs

David Cameron​, Ed Miliband​ and the entire British political class came together yesterday to denounce the rioters. They were of course right to say that the actions of these looters, arsonists and muggers were abhorrent and criminal, and that the police should be given more support. 

But there was also something very phony and hypocritical about all the shock and outrage expressed in parliament. MPs spoke about the week’s dreadful events as if they were nothing to do with them.

I cannot accept that this is the case. Indeed, I believe that the criminality in our streets cannot be dissociated from the moral disintegration in the highest ranks of modern British society. The last two decades have seen a terrifying decline in standards among the British governing elite. It has become acceptable for our politicians to lie and to cheat. An almost universal culture of selfishness and greed has grown up.

5 livros - escolha de Dan Ariely

The Browser é um site que faz jus à definição do que é um browser: A program that accesses and displays files and other data available on the Internet and other networks. Ele recolhe e referencia o que de mais interessante (na opinião dos seus autores) vai sendo feito, dito e visionado na internet, e isso em relação a diversas áreas. Um dos segmentos é uma entrevista onde se questiona o convidado sobre as razões da sua escolha de 5 livros. É um daqueles a ter como favorito.

Abaixo transcrevo a informação sobre o convidado; o início da entrevista e uma opinião no quadro do comentário a um desses livros. 

Dan Ariely is an Israeli American professor of psychology and behavioural economics at Duke University. He is the author of two New York Times bestselling books, Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality, and a popular blog

I have just read some of the books you’ve chosen, and I found them almost impossible to put down. It’s fascinating how people behave in these experimental situations – whether they’re eating huge quantities of soup without realizing it, or failing to see a gorilla. I was wondering, more broadly, what you are trying to get at with this choice of books?

For me, it’s very interesting to try to figure out where we go wrong. In my general approach to life, I think of myself as a social hacker. Life has been designed around us in a way that is not necessarily the best way to maximize our health, our well-being or our prosperity. If we understand where things are going wrong, we can also figure out how we can fix them. That’s my first concern.

Social science is incredibly interesting because it’s the science of everything we do. We used to think that the big mysteries in the universe are the stars, or maybe molecular biology – things that are outside our reach. But the more we get into it, the more we realize how little we know about the things around us, which can include eating a bowl of soup or what’s happening to us at work. So there is an element of self-improvement in these books, but there’s also a fascination for its own sake about what’s going on around us. Each of us can become more of a social scientist by being a bit more aware and a bit more thoughtful.

[....]

"What struck me about these books is that they’re describing weaknesses in us that companies and individuals selling insurance, popcorn or used cars have been exploiting for a long time. The whole market is acting against us in a way, so who is going to help us make the right decisions?

You can think about the market economy in this way – almost nobody wants you to do something that is good for you in the long term. The incentive of everybody else is to do something that is good for them in the short term. It’s important that we as individuals understand this, and that we as individuals demand something better. I also think it’s important that we have regulators that understand these problems, and can help us."

Desigualdade versus disfuncionalidades sociais

UnderstandingSociety: Income inequalities and social ills

Clicar para aceder a uma versão maior. 

Leitura do artigo recomendada - aliás, o Blogue Understanding Society deveria ser de acompanhamento obrigatório. Obviamente ter em atenção o posicionamento de Portugal

Cidades

Sustainable cities must be compact and high-density | George Monbiot | Environment | guardian.co.uk

[....] An ethnographer I know who worked among peasant communities in the Amazon found that many of the people he met were obsessed by the idea of moving to the cities. In view of the hellish nature of many Brazilian favelas – especially in the booming Amazonian towns – he wanted to know why. "You have a wonderful life here: the rivers are teeming with fish, your gardens are crammed with food, you work an hour or two a day to meet your needs. You can't read or write: if you move to the city, you'll have to beg or steal or sell your body to survive," he pointed out. "What you say is probably true," they answered, "but in the city you can dream." [....]

 O artigo deve ser lido.

Outro tipo de notícias do futuro

A questão é uma velha questão: de como a automatização se repercute no emprego. Mas tem um aspeto novo: como a informatização do processamento da informação potencia os efeitos da automatização de trabalhos fora da área fabril, do domínio de profissões altamente especializadas. Isso tem implicações sociais incontornáveis quanto à educação, à desigualdade, à integração, ..... A experiência histórica demonstrou desde o início da Revolução Industrial que a automatização nunca se traduziu na diminuição, muito pelo contrário, do volume do emprego agregado, independentemente, no entanto, dos processos de ajustamento para as pessoas deslocadas (por esses processos) poderem ser dolorosos  (caso dos tecelões no início do século XIX....) e marginalizadores. Questiona-se é se, no momento atual, esses processos não possam ser potenciados de modo negativo por outras evoluções sociais recentes.

As referências abaixo referem-se à discussão da questão iniciada por Krugman. A última não se insere nesse debate mas contextualiza-o.

Falling Demand for Brains? Paul Krugman - NYTimes.com: [....] Anyway, I decided to write the piece around a conceit: that information technology would end up reducing, not increasing, the demand for highly educated workers, because a lot of what highly educated workers do could actually be replaced by sophisticated information processing — indeed, replaced more easily than a lot of manual labor. [....] So here’s the question: is it starting to happen?

Degrees and Dollars | Paul Krugman|  NYTimes.com: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that education is the key to economic success. Everyone knows that the jobs of the future will require ever higher levels of skill. That’s why, in an appearance Friday with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, President Obama declared that “If we want more good news on the jobs front then we’ve got to make more investments in education.” But what everyone knows is wrong. [....]

Technology and employment: Pity useless men | The Economist:Are people less necessary to the operation of the economy than they used to be? I don't think so. As far as I know, people currently represent 100% of final demand; machines aren't yet out there purchasing goods for their own consumption. Without people there is no economy. That's as true as it's always been. The problem is that people are less necessary on the supply side but as important as ever on the demand side. How could this happen? There are several potential explanations [....]

Leituras sobre tópicos de economia e afins

Estratégia da direita norte-americana quanto ao Estado:

• Op-Ed Columnist - The Bankruptcy Boys - NYTimes.com

Quem paga?

• Economist's View: Who Pays the Costs of the Recession? 

Economistas a analisar outras coisas:

• Premarital sex: An economic model of its rise and de-stigmatisation | vox - Research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists: "Attitudes to sex have changed dramatically over the last hundred years. This column presents a model where socialisation – the passing on of norms and ideologies by parents and institutions such as the church or state – is determined by the technological environment in which people live. Contraception has reduced the chance of unwanted pregnancies from premarital sex, and this in turn has changed social attitudes."

Hum, ... a ver melhor, mas fica como referência:

• Price, Scarcity, and Malthus - Grasping Reality with All Six Feet

Pais, filhos, e mobilidade social

Clicar para aceder a uma versão maior

Social mobility: Rising sons | The Economist via The Irish Economy » Blog Archive » Social Mobility

Lido hoje

Going to America: A Ponzi scheme that works | The Economist: "The greatest strength of America is that people want to live there"

The idea of progress: Onwards and upwards | The Economist: "In the rich world the idea of progress has become impoverished. Through complacency and bitter experience, the scope of progress has narrowed. The popular view is that, although technology and GDP advance, morals and society are treading water or, depending on your choice of newspaper, sinking back into decadence and barbarism. On the left of politics these days, “progress” comes with a pair of ironic quotation marks attached; on the right, “progressive” is a term of abuse. It was not always like that. There has long been a tension between seeking perfection in life or in the afterlife. 

Optimists in the Enlightenment and the 19th century came to believe that the mass of humanity could one day lead happy and worthy lives here on Earth. Like Madach’s Adam, they were bursting with ideas for how the world might become a better place. Some thought God would bring about the New Jerusalem, others looked to history or evolution. Some thought people would improve if left to themselves, others thought they should be forced to be free; some believed in the nation, others in the end of nations; some wanted a perfect language, others universal education; some put their hope in science, others in commerce; some had faith in wise legislation, others in anarchy. Intellectual life was teeming with grand ideas. For most people, the question was not whether progress would happen, but how. 

The idea of progress forms the backdrop to a society. In the extreme, without the possibility of progress of any sort, your gain is someone else’s loss. If human behaviour is unreformable, social policy can only ever be about trying to cage the ape within. Society must in principle be able to move towards its ideals, such as equality and freedom, or they are no more than cant and self-delusion. So it matters if people lose their faith in progress. And it is worth thinking about how to restore it."

A happy Christmas – alone | Balaji Ravichandran | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk: "The meaning of Christmas, and its supposed power to bring friends and family together, is again in evidence this year. Jonathan Freedland admirably called for an end to loneliness, and urged social policy to address it – a sentiment echoed by a Guardian leader. I do not wish to detract from the importance of addressing chronic loneliness, particularly in the elderly. Many people end up alone, not just over the festive season, but for significantly longer periods, for want of company, and not of their own volition. It is easy to pity them (which is just offensive) and say that we must do more as a society to help them. What is significantly harder is to understand the nature of, and the causes behind, loneliness in various sections of society, and ask whether and where society should act. [...]
Thomas de Quincey, the famed intellectual who influenced Baudelaire and Borges, wrote: Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is like light – the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential. All come into this world alone; all leave it alone For those who willingly choose to spend their Christmas alone, this is my Christmas message."

Da utilidade de dar presentes aos conhecidos

Consumerism - Salon.com: "The author of 'Scroogenomics' explains why holiday shopping is a drain on the wallet and the holiday spirit".

De acordo.

________
PS: Sobre o mesmo ler: Margens de erro: O que está errado com o Natal.

Teoria económica da Mafia

Creative contract enforcement in Italy – Chris Blattman: "[...] The book [...] essentially advances an economic theory of the mafia: they are entrepreneurs and firms who collude and compete; the good they sell is not violence, or stolen property, but protection. 

That is, they enforce contracts in places the government can’t or won’t, like illegal and illicit markets, or areas where the police and courts are weak. They actively compete with the police to provide protection, and this good is in high demand. Every transaction done under the table cannot seek protection from the courts, and the mafia step naturally into this gap.

Their name is their trademark, and they prevent new entry by force but also by complex social rules and ethnic identity. Naturally the mafia also help create demand for the product, through intimidation and threat, but the real demand for services comes from government regulation or government failure. Every tariff or ban or rule creates an incentive for a black market, and the market evolves contract enforcement mechanisms where the state does not."

Num primeiro relance, existem por cá experiências similares, mas importaria acompanhar o que os outros estão a fazer

Here comes the citizen co-producer | openDemocracy: "Many countries in Europe are searching for new ways to involve citizens and the third sector in the provision and governance of social services. At a general level, the reasons are similar throughout Europe. They include the challenge of an aging population, the growing democracy deficit at all levels, local, regional, national and European, and the semi-permanent austerity in public finances, prior to the recent worldwide financial melt-down. While the impact of this last is yet to be seen on public services, there is a silver lining: now may be the time for expanding the role of civil society and cooperative production of welfare services."

Resulta daqui, também, a importância do combate à corrupção

"Conditional Altruists" Assurance game, by Daniel Little: How does a group of people succeed in coming together to contribute to a collective project over an extended period of time? [...]Purely self-interested egoists won't make it -- that is the message of Mancur Olson's Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods. 

[...]
As Amartya Sen observes in "Rational Fools" (link), "The purely economic man is indeed close to being a social moron." [...] But we know that this conclusion does a bad job of describing real social life. People in villages, communities, political parties, religious organizations, public television audiences, and ethnic groups do in fact often succeed in getting themselves organized and mobilized in pursuit of a public good for the group. 

[...] 

Many theories can be articulated in order to account for the spontaneous occurrence of collective action.  

[...] 

Many real social actors seem to be what might be called "conditional altruists": they are willing to contribute some effort or personal resource to a collective project if they have grounds for confidence that a reasonable number of other members of the group will contribute as well. (Jon Elster explores the idea in The Cement of Society: A Survey of Social Order.) 

[...] 

Conditional altruism thus attributes a common moral psychology to social actors, which we might refer to as the "fairness factor." Individuals are willing to factor collective goods into their calculation of the costs and benefits of action, and they have some degree of motivation to act in accordance with a proposed collective action that would benefit them even if they could evade participation. They are disposed to act fairly: "If I benefit from the action, I should take my fair share of creating the benefit." (Allan Gibbard's Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment offers an effort to bring together the evolutionary history of the species with a philosopher's analysis of moral reasoning.) 

[...]
If fairness or conditional altruism are real components of human agency (for all or many human beings), then we can identify a few factors that are likely to increase the likelihood of cooperation and collective action. Measures that increase the actor's assurance of the behavior of others will have the effect of eliciting higher levels of collective action. And it is possible to think of quite a few social circumstances that have this effect. A shared history of success in collective action is clearly relevant to current actors' level of assurance about future cooperation. 

[...] 

(Michael Taylor, Community, Anarchy and Liberty).

[...]

(Robert Netting, Smallholders, Householders: Farm Families and the Ecology of Intensive, Sustainable Agriculture).

[...] 

(Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation: Revised Edition). 

[...] 

So no single answer to the question of collective action seems to work: "people are rational egoists," "people are altruists," or "people are conditional altruists." Rather, a given opportunity for collective action seems to display a mix of all these styles of reasoning. These variations could be the result of several independent factors: differences in the formation of individuals' moral psychology (emphasizing individualism or community from infancy); differences in current institutional settings (arrangements that make future interactions seem more likely to each participant); even potentially differences in personality or the genetic basis of decision-making across individuals.

[...] 

Ordinary social experience informs us that people have different levels of willingness to undertake sacrifice for a group's projects.

[...] 

Here is an interesting paper by Ernst Fehr and Klaus Schmidt titled "The Economics of Fairness, Reciprocity and Altruism – Experimental Evidence and New Theories." 

Via  Economist's View: "Conditional Altruists"

Ranking das drogas de acordo com a sua perigosidade: existem surpresas!

David Nutt's dangerous drug list | Science | guardian.co.uk: "David Nutt's dangerous drug list: research carried out by the ousted government drugs adviser and his colleagues on the most dangedrous drugs"

Livros: críticas

Existem críticas que em si mesmas são muito importantes de ler: não só motivam a leitura dos livros que trazem a juízo; carreiam informação da problemática em causa, como à partida qualificam e permitem uma sua leitura mais eficaz.

É o caso, particularmente, da primeira que referenciamos, da London Review of Books (LRB) sobre  The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett O livro discute os impactos da desigualdade no desempenho dos diferentes dos países, num leque amplo de campos, e à luz de um conjunto diferenciado de indicadores; equaciona o que se pode e deve fazer, e como, a nível político sobre isso - a crítica qualifica isso tudo (e fala-se de Portugal, também).

A segunda crítica é sobre um livro de Stephen Kotkin, "Uncivil Society", que discute o modo como o Leste Europeu comunista sossobrou - abordagem curiosa e não trivial.

LRB · David Runciman: How messy it all is  Buy this book "The argument of this fascinating and deeply provoking book is easy to summarise: among rich countries, the more unequal ones do worse according to almost every quality of life indicator you can imagine. They do worse even if they are richer overall, so that per capita GDP turns out to be much less significant for general wellbeing than the size of the gap between the richest and poorest 20 per cent of the population (the basic measure of inequality the authors use).

The evidence that Wilkinson and Pickett supply to make their case is overwhelming. Whether the test is life expectancy, infant mortality, obesity levels, crime rates, literacy scores, even the amount of rubbish that gets recycled, the more equal the society the better the performance invariably is. In graph after graph measuring various welfare functions, the authors show that the best predictor of how countries will rank is not the differences in wealth between them (which would result in the US coming top, with the Scandinavian countries and the UK not too far behind, and poorer European nations like Greece and Portugal bringing up the rear) but the differences in wealth within them (so the US, as the most unequal society, comes last on many measures, followed by Portugal and the UK, both places where the gap between rich and poor is relatively large, with Spain and Greece somewhere in the middle, and the Scandinavian countries invariably out in front, along with Japan).

Just as significantly, this pattern holds inside the US as well, where states with high levels of income inequality also tend to have the greatest social problems. It is true that some of the most unequal American states are also among the poorest (Mississippi, Louisiana, West Virginia), so you might expect things to go worse there. But some unequal states are also rich (California), whereas some fairly equal ones are also quite poor (Utah). Only a few (New Hampshire, Wyoming) score well on both counts. What the graphs show are the unequal states tending to cluster together regardless of income, so that California usually finds itself alongside Mississippi scoring badly, while New Hampshire and Utah both do consistently well. Income inequality, not income per se, appears to be the key.

As a result, the authors are able to draw a clear conclusion: ‘The evidence shows that even small decreases in inequality, already a reality in some rich market democracies, make a very important difference to the quality of life.’ Achieving these decreases should be the central goal of our politics, precisely because we can be confident that it works. This is absolutely not, they insist, a ‘utopian dream’.

Why the Berlin Wall fell Salon Books Why the Berlin Wall fell Stephen Kotkin's fascinating "Uncivil Society" presents a revisionist account of Communism's failure In their introduction, Kotkin and Gross concede that this story -- in which the brave and idealistic are largely sidelined and victory comes in the form of the exhausted capitulation of an incompetent villain -- is "depressing."

PS: Um comentário à crítica e ao livro referenciados em primeiro lugar: It takes megadeath war to make a society more equal? afoe A Fistful of Euros European Opinion

Relevância actual de Marx

Muito interessante:

"Is Marx's vision still relevant in the twenty-first century world?

At bottom, Marx's biggest ideas were "critique," "exploitation," "alienation," "ideology," and "class." He also constructed a fairly specific theory of capitalism and capitalist development -- a theory that has historical pluses and minuses -- and a theory of socialism that can be understood along more democratic and more authoritarian lines. We might say that his theory of capitalism was too deeply grounded in the observed experience of mid-nineteenth-century Britain, and his theory of socialism paid too little attention to the crushing possibilities of power wielded by a future socialist state. Too much economics, too little politics in his worldview -- and too much of a Hegelian "necessitarianism" in his expectations about the future.

History has shown us a few things that Marx too would have recognized, with the benefit of another century of experience. History does not conform to a necessary logic of development. Capitalism is not one thing, but a set of institutions that have proven fairly malleable. There is no single "logic of capitalist development." Compromises and institutional accommodations are possible between contending economic classes. Social democracy, democratic socialism, Stalinist communism, fascist dictatorship, and liberal democracy are all feasible political institutions governing "modern" economic development.

So we might take a deep breath, take a step back, and ask a big counterfactual: How might Marx, with his critical eye for inequality and power and his acute sensibilities as a sociologist -- how might this social critic and theorist have processed the social realities of China in Shanghai in the 1980s? [...]"

Continuar a ler (recomenda-se) em UnderstandingSociety: If Marx had been born in Shanghai

A importância do contexto sócio-político no sucesso individual, e de como isso não é reconhecido

Isto é de leitura obrigatória:

"O Economist's View: "Clash of Autonomy and Interdependence" refere que: Jean-Paul Fitoussi says "Don't hold your breath" waiting for those who have found success within the free exchange system to acknowledge it was the result of more than their own meritorious achievement:

Clash of autonomy and interdependence, by Jean-Paul Fitoussi, Commentary, Project Syndicate: The bailout of the financial system was a bizarre moment in economic history, for it benefited those who benefited most from the markets’ “irrational exuberance” — the bosses of financial firms.

Before the crisis hit, however, redistribution of wealth (and the tax and social security payments that make it possible) was considered the biggest obstacle to economic efficiency. Indeed, the values of solidarity had given way to those of individual “merit”, judged by the size of one’s paycheck. The paradox is that a part of this evolution may be attributable to two positive factors: the slow work of democracy, which liberates individuals but at the same time leaves them more isolated; and the development of a welfare system that shares risks and makes individuals more autonomous.

With this isolation and autonomy, people increasingly tend to believe, for better or for worse, that they alone are responsible for their own fate. Here lies the conundrum. An individual is free and autonomous only because of the collective decisions taken after democratic debate, notably those decisions that guarantee each person access to public goods such as education, healthcare, etc. Some sense of social solidarity may remain, but it is so abstract that those for whom the wheel of fortune has spun so favorably feel little debt. They believe that they owe their status purely to merit, not to the collective efforts — state-funded schools, universities, etc. — that enabled them to realize their potential.  [...]

[...] Two conclusions can be drawn from all this. The first is that we all owe at least some of our success to others, given the public goods that society provides. This calls for more modesty and restraint in determining the highest salaries, not for moral reasons but for the sustainability of the system. The second conclusion is that the most privileged classes, which have benefited the most from the solidarity of others, notably the poor, can no longer deny the latter’s contributions. But don’t hold your breath waiting for them to agree."