Social attitudes usually reflect social conditions (not moral preferences)

It turns out that personal finance isn't so "personal."  Much of it has to do with prevailing attitudes toward financial conditions.  Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis recently worried in public [WSJ; behind firewall] about people who might walk away from their mortgages now their homes are worth less than their loan balance.

Calculated Risk puts up some scary numbers, which indicate the potentially seismic consequences of large-scale shifts in social attitudes. How scary?  How does TWO TRILLION strike you?

If every upside down homeowner resorted to "jingle mail" (mailing the keys to the lender), the losses for the lenders could be staggering. Assuming a 15% total price decline, and a 50% average loss per mortgage, the losses for lenders and investors would be about $1 trillion. Assuming a 30% price decline, the losses would be over $2 trillion.

Not every upside down homeowner will use jingle mail, but if prices drop 30%, the losses for the lenders and investors might well be over $1 trillion (far in excess of the $70 to $80 billion in losses reported so far).

There's a huge social component to personal ethics--much larger than we usually suppose.  Is walking away from your mortgage bad behavior?  Well, what if not only makes financial sense, but many people are doing it?  What if it were recommended?  Shame depends on the visibility of certain personal behavior in the eyes of a public, and there seems to be much less shame associated with cutting one's mortgage losses.  The big lesson (apart from the shame I hope the banks are feeling) is that personal character is developed in symbiosis with social conditions, not in spite of them.

The economists have no clothes

Over at The Atlantic, Gregory Clark admits, rather refreshingly, that academic economists have no clothes.

The current recession has revealed the weaknesses in the structures of modern capitalism. But it also revealed as useless the mathematical contortions of academic economics. There is no totemic power.

As a discipline, economics proposes models, which are by definition incomplete. That is, they exclude some details and highlight others. To think that economic theories actually describe reality--as opposed to offer an image of reality that is useful for some purposes--is to mistake the map for the world.

Ceci n'est pas le monde.

Further, the dismal science has all too often provided models whose validity is impossible to ascertain, since it has often built its theories on the basis of premises that are false prima facie. The point here is that, logically speaking, false premises do not yield false conclusions; rather, false premises render the truth values of an argument's conclusions indeterminate. It isn't that economic models are false, but rather that the falseness of their premises means that can know nothing with certainty about their conclusions. We can't say whether economic models are true, false, or some determinate mix of the two. Logically speaking, they're mere speculation, with the same logical status as wishful thinking.

You mean we came all this way and we don't even know if we're wrong?

For example, the theories of classical economics generally accept as axioms (i.e., they accept as true without argument) the following:

1. All economic actors are rational.
2. All economic actors have perfect information about the markets in which they act.
3. All resources are scarce.

These are bad axioms, since they're obviously not true. As in, there's no doubt at all that these are false. Of course, not all branches of modern economics still accept these premises without qualification, but historically speaking these assumptions lie at the foundation of all economic thought. This is precisely the main reason I never studied economics in college. Who can take seriously a discipline that, wherever it ends up, begins with nonsense? While there's no doubt that the phenomena we think of as economic are intrinsically interesting, I remain skeptical that the formal discipline of economics has a great deal to offer beyond the obvious. As Clark notes:

The debate about the bank bailout, and the stimulus package, has all revolved around issues that are entirely at the level of Econ 1. What is the multiplier from government spending? Does government spending crowd out private spending? How quickly can you increase government spending? If you got a A in college in Econ 1 you are an expert in this debate: fully an equal of Summers and Geithner.

Common sense cloaked in jargon and equations. Even the economists' invisible clothes look rather shabby these days.

The value of inconvenience

By almost any meaningful performance measurement, the U.S. economy in the 20th century performed better under Democratic administrations than under Republican ones. Reflecting on this seeming paradox, Christopher Carroll suggests that

perhaps the best explanation has to do with attitudes, not doctrines: Maybe capitalism works better when its excesses are restrained by skeptics than when true-believers are writing, interpreting, judging, and executing the rules of the game. (The Democrats are surely the more skeptical of our two parties).

Most would agree that restraining the excesses of almost anything counts as good sense, but this is only a preliminary step toward a bigger and more interesting idea:

Capitalism works better when it is being held accountable to some external standard than when left to its own devices.

The whole system works better when "held accountable to some external standard," when it is, in a word, constrained. Optimal performance, in other words, is the fruit of struggle. Make things too easy and performance declines.

Relaxed external standards? Check. Highlight reel material? Not so much.

Consider how effective coaches pull outstanding athletic performance from their players. Good coaches don't let their players do whatever they want, without accountability or oversight; they create rules and systems of accountability. A good soccer coach makes you use your weak foot in order to develop it. A good swimming coach pushes you to hold your breath longer. Optimal athletic performance depends upon the measured application of psychological and physiological pressure. (Go watch Gavin O'Connor's Miracle to see a dramatization of great coaching.) Good coaches don't remove limitations--they use them.

Or consider architectural and industrial design. The famous designer Charles Eames (yet another famous St. Louisan) once remarked:

Design depends largely on constraints.

We tend to believe that creativity is best served by removing constraints. If we could just somehow make the process of invention easier for the inventor, we imagine that she would be more inventive. But the opposite is usually true. People get creative--truly creative--when challenged to negotiate constraints. Budgets (within reason) push architects to develop new strategies to solve old problems. (The story of how the design of Seattle's new public library building developed is a great example.) The particularities of manufacturing processes push industrial designers to find solutions which challenge convention. (The story of the how the first commercially viable computer mouse was designed is a textbook example.) Constraints drive creativity.

Artist Andy Goldsworthy creates astonishing ephemeral works using only the materials he finds on site during his wilderness hikes: creativity driven by constraint.

The same is true in business. Real innovation happens where someone discovers a new way to scratch an old itch, where someone thinks through a problem in a new way (even if it's simply a new application of an old technology). When we talk about innovation happening "at the edges" of a market or industry, what we mean is that innovation happens where business rubs up against constraints. (The "mainstream" of anything is where things flow smoothly, right?) We can't have innovation--and capitalism's greatest strength as an economic system is its powerful incentives for innovation--unless we have the right kind of rules and restrictions. (The question of "more" regulation versus "less" regulation is puerile. The kind of regulation matters more than the amount.) The free market, to put it pointedly, is only as free as its constraints force it to be.

Of course, constraints are damned inconvenient. And that's precisely the point. It's often--if not always--in response to inconveniences that people are most creative, most inventive, most innovative. And so we're led inevitably to the conclusion that inconveniences can be useful.

"Traffic lights are just the Man keeping us down! We will not be constrained!"

Some inconveniences, naturally, are more useful than others, but that hardly obviates the necessity of inconvenience for optimal performance. It's easy enough to see how inconveniencing others might be worthwhile, but it's one of the marks of emotional maturity to see the value of inconvenience for oneself. Politics--in the largest possible sense of the word--is only possible because we deliberately accept to be inconvenienced in certain ways (e.g., we don't simply use whichever car is closest, use guns to force our crushes to go out with us, or lynch elected officials from opposing parties). We recognize that our condition is collectively better when we all accept to be inconvenienced in certain ways. (Again, the kind of self-regulation matters more than the amount.)

Finding--and enforcing--the right kind of constraints is key to getting the most out of people, as innovators, as politicians, as artists, as designers, and even as citizens. We would all of us do well to remember that inconvenience--yes, even our own--often serves us much, much better than convenience.

The meaning of business

Lately, I've been mulling over a comment made by my uncle--who has the reputation in the family of being a super savvy investor--to the effect that it doesn't matter what a business does per se, so long as it turns a profit. I've argued before on this blog that my uncle's position unfairly impoverishes the concept of value. I've even gestured (crudely) in a few directions which might help us to enrich our concept of value.

Over at The Bastiat Society Blog, however, Ben Rast has a post entitled Business as Creative Act, which takes the first few steps down what I think is the brightest path toward a full and mature understanding of what business is (and why my uncle is mistaken). Simply put:

Business, as a creative act, draws on the very same strengths and suffers the same weaknesses as the creative act in art. They are more alike than dissimilar.

By "creative act," Rast means to emphasize entrepreneurship particularly:

We can illustrate just how much artistic creativity and business creativity have in common with the following paragraph of advice to writers, taken from an interview of William Faulkner published in the Paris Review in 1956:

"Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him."

Now, notice how well it works as advice to entrepreneurs -- those troublesome dreamers and innovators in business -- with a few strategic substitutions.

"Let the entrepreneur take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get business done, no shortcut. The young entrepreneur would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good entrepreneur believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old business, he wants to beat it."

Rast is astute to catch this similarity. People who launch new enterprises resemble artists in their drive to make something new, to add an original trope to the poem of humanity. But it's obvious, in a sense, that entrepreneurs are creators. What's not so obvious is that all productive activity (in the economic sense)--that is, all business activity--is creative as well.

To put it succinctly, human creativity is coextensive with human endeavor. Wherever people get stuff done, there people come up with new ways to think, do, and make. It doesn't matter what you call the end product--good, service, artwork--productive human activity demands creativity for the very simply reason that every object humans make with intention and every action humans do with intention bears the stamp, as it were, of the intention that brought it into being.

Aristotle identified four causes which obtain in the world: the material, the formal, the efficient, and the so-called final cause. It's the last one which concerns us here. The

final cause explains the cause of something in terms of its conceived end, or the purpose why it is made. According to Aristotle, [the] final cause is “the end (telos), that for the sake of which a thing is done.”

Every good is made and every service performed for the sake of something else--specifically, they're made and performed for the sake of the customer's good. That's why we call them "goods," right? Yes, yes, the producer produces goods in order to get paid, and the service provider serves in order to get paid, but they only get paid if someone recognizes the value of their goods and services. (And this objection is weak, since money is only and always a means to an end. "To get paid" can never be a final cause for making or doing something for the simple reason that money always points beyond itself to another end--one always exchanges the money on something else. It is not, simply put, final.)

Because goods and services are self-evidently intended to do someone some good (otherwise who would buy them?), we can say that economically productive activity is not only a functional activity, but is additionally an expressive activity--that is, it means something. In particular, it speaks to a vision of the good in general and the customer's good in particular. Even further, each good produced and each service provided changes the world; each good and each service brings into being a new state of affairs which must be presumed to be better than had the good been left unmade, the service undone (again, otherwise who would buy them?).

From this line of thinking two absurdly important conclusions follow:

1. Businesses really do change the world--so they'd better get it right. The presumption of "providing value," of making or doing something "good," is built into the very possibility of business. If a business doesn't add value--that is, if it doesn't make the world a better place--then it has no business being in business. It seems almost too obvious to need saying, but... businesses may be judged by the same standard as every other human endeavor, and that standard is whether or not the business's making and/or doing makes the world a better place.
2. Investors are to companies what patrons are to artists--so they'd better get it right. Warren Buffet famously advises investors to buy shares of a company only if they'd be willing to buy the whole company. I'll take Mr. Buffet one step further. You should buy shares of a company only if you'd be willing to be that company's sole customer--like an artist's patron, buying, owning, and enjoying responsibility for that company's entire output. Just as being a shareholder means being wholly and individually responsible for (and dependent upon) a company's entire financial performance, so being a shareholder means being wholly and individually responsible for (and dependent upon) a company's entire, world-changing making and doing. Just like a patron, you've put money down so that the companies you own can make what they make, do what they do. You enjoy the financial fruit of the shares you own for the single, simple reason that the companies you own get paid for changing the world, and the world they're making and enacting is the world we all live in--the world our children are growing up in.

Responsibility in education

One of my personal favorite pedagogic precepts was best expressed by the laconic Mr. Miyagi, one of the all-time best teachers portrayed in cinema: "No such thing as bad student; only bad teacher."

"Man who catch fly with chopstick accomplish anything."

Which is not to say that even the most gifted teacher will enjoy success with every student. It's just that the most important lessons we learn from our teachers--how to face the overwhelming reality of human ignorance, when and how to (dis)respect authority, when to resort to knowledge and when to resort to compassion--derive not from what the teacher knows but from who the teacher is. That's because good teachers know that learning is not the process by which the student absorbs the teacher's knowledge, but rather the process by the student creates knowledge. The teacher can only either stimulate or suppress the student's personal learning process; or, put differently, what a student really gets from a teacher is an attitude, and if a student internalizes a (teacher's) bad attitude, then that student will find all future learning difficult.

Thus Bob Talbert's corollary to Mr. Miyagi's precept: "Good teachers are costly, but bad teachers cost more." So when I see failure in an educational context, I always look to the teacher (and his bosses) first.

Mr. Whipswitch could never understand why the other teachers kept ending up with the best students.

But it's not always that simple. Take the example of 14-year old Australian Beau Abela, who can barely read, let alone spell. He's in high-school, and has trouble counting beyond 10, so let's just set aside any questions you might have about his performance in algebra class. Beau suffers from a mild learning disability, so in some ways it's not surprising that his performance is subpar for his age, but this seems egregious. Indeed, Beau's condition--unless you're one of those all-too-common philistines who actually embrace incompetence--seems utterly outrageous. As in, it outrages me.

And I'm not the only one who's upset. Beau's father is suing the Victorian educational department for AU $300k. On the surface, seems like they probably deserve it. As you might expect,

Mr Abela [has] said his court action was not motivated by money, but by frustration at the way the system appeared to be letting down children. ... Mr Abela said he would drop the lawsuit tomorrow if the department would guarantee him it would educate (Beau) to a proper level.

I think most people can understand that Mr Abela is frustrated given his son's lackluster academic performance, but what exactly does he mean when says that the system is "letting down children?" Certainly the system doesn't seem to be producing measurable results in Beau's case. But to whom to attribute this failure? Or rather, how should responsibility for this failure be untangled?

Mr Abela concedes that

the Education Department had made significant efforts to help his son, including paying for one-on-one tutoring and providing a laptop. Over the years dozens of assessments and reports have been done to get to the bottom of Beau's problems. ... Documents seen by the Sunday Herald Sun show Panton Hills Primary School and Eltham High have directed considerable time and effort towards the troubled student.

What kind of problems, exactly?

Beau has been on ADHD medication in the past and school reports consistently say he does not concentrate in class or make an effort with his work. ... Eltham High School principal Vincent Sicari said in a recent report Beau's behaviour was increasingly disruptive and violent.

Doesn't sound like Beau's is an easy case. In fact, it rather sounds like the school system has been sensitive, proactive, and generous.

As framed by the Sunday Herald Sun, it looks as though Mr Abela is suing simply because he's frustrated--not because the school is at fault. And even if the school had been less responsive, how much (and what kind of) responsibility for Beau's failure could we honestly lay at the feet of his teachers and their bosses? How much (and what kind) belongs to Beau? Without more particular information on Beau's case, it's impossible to judge the case wisely.

But the very intractability of the case forces one interesting issue to the surface: Why do we persist in regarding education as a responsibility? Issues in contemporary education--especially failures--are almost always framed as a polarized conflict between individual responsibility and systemic sensitivity. The important question, as this line of thinking has it, is how much responsibility belongs to the student and how much to the system (as though responsibility only came in one flavor).

The key assumption which underlies this thinking is that education is a necessity, with all that that entails. And of course, education is necessary for the kind of society we operate [.pdf], the kind of culture we participate, the kind of government we practice. Indeed, few institutions bear more of the weight of our current way of life than universal education. The incredible social importance of education, however, tends to overshadow the fact that education provides (if these guys are to be believed) the most sublime pleasure available to human experience. It's worth remembering that our word school derives from the Greek skhole, which means "leisure"--school is supposed to be what humans do for fun.

In a Protestant culture (and especially in a Puritan culture), even the pleasure of learning is suspect; only the pleasure of discipline passes without question--especially if the one disciplined is oneself.

Wait just a minute? Did I just say that learning is fun? Yes. That's it exactly. We often get so invested in the importance of "an education" (by which we too often mean "a decent résumé") that we forget that we can always recognize real learning when it happens because it is always pleasurable. (Incidentally, this is a non-trivial criticism of contemporary schooling, which is, as everyone knows, no fun at all. When learning happens in an academic environment, it's almost always either an accident or against the rules.)

So I have one question for Beau and his teachers: What does it mean that Beau is obviously having no fun at all "being educated" at Eltham High?

Why Bush and Rove seem confident

I think it's important to remember how very little information about states of mind that we are able to get via news stories and television. If we watched Bush and Rove deliver their bluffs in person, I bet we could tell within 30 seconds how much substance their claims had. Given what we do know about their personalities, my hunch is that they would both come off as liars, bluffers, and bullies, because that's what they are, after all.

Both men have built their careers on acting the way they're now acting, and both are habitual liars; each has a personal ethos to lie at the slightest provocation. Everything they both say is 100% unbelievable. The only reason we give their little tantrums any credence at all is because we don't see them regularly in person, and because we're not habitual liars, we find it difficult to bear in mind that other people may very well be. We all tend to project our own spiritual strengths and weaknesses onto others. The fact is that Bush and Rove are, as a matter of habit (which is to say, ethically), liars, bluffers, bullies, and we should interpret everything they say and do through that lens.

I would never join any club whose members ritualistically burn their underwear—while wearing it.

Bush is a self-deceiver. He can't admit, even to himself, who he really is and what he really thinks. Reality for him is only ever a dim reflection of his own desires and anguishes. Emotionally, he's 13 years old. He acts as though he can get what he wants simply by wanting it badly enough. Whatever good qualities he may have been born with have been spoiled. He's spiritually crippled. He bluffs and bullies because he actually thinks that's how leaders act.

Rove, on the other hand, is so habitually cynical that he wouldn't tell the truth even if it was wonderful. He'd still embellish it. He has a twisted, stunted heart, and so it's nearly impossible for him to imagine a world in which he doesn't have to lie and cheat in order to get what he wants. He bluffs and bullies because he literally cannot think of anything else to do.

As to stealing the election, I don't doubt that they'll try; nor do I doubt that they'll both fail and succeed to certain extent. The real question is whether the American people--who have thus far given these losers a pass on cheating--will continue to put up with their shenanigans. I somehow think that the carte blanche of 9/11 has expired. Candidates get away with stealing elections only when people let them. I frankly hope they really try to steal it, because I have a feeling convenient GOP victories will provoke a good deal more outrage now than they did in the past 6 years. Times have changed, but Bush and Rove have only become more like themselves.

(Cross-posted at TPMCafe.)

Senate "leader" on ethics less than ethical on further review

U.S. Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) editorializes in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

I will continue to do everything in my power to ensure that the Senate does the right thing from an ethics point of view.

If we were to take Santorum's statement at face value, we would assume that he means to encourage Senate members to adopt habits of professional practice which result in good Senators. Generally speaking, good Senators (qua Senators, which may differ to some extent from their goodness qua husbands or businessmen) are accountable to their constituents, politically effective (by which I mean that they prove able to advance their policy agenda), and fundamentally committed to the overarching principles of American government. One perennial bad habit of Senators has been the reliance on a small group of especially wealthy contributors for their financial support (we qualify the interests of such groups as "special" precisely because they are not general).

Santorum goes on, however, to explain exactly what he means by doing everything in his power to keep Senators away from the ethically slippery slope of improper lobbying:

When Sen. Bill Frist asked me to lead the Republican lobbying reform effort, the goal was to bring Democrats and Republicans together on a bill that we could all agree on.

Curious. I would have thought that the goal was formulating a baseline standard for what constitutes poor practice when it comes to mixing lobbying and fundraising. The challenge would have been persuading everyone to accept the highest standard possible, which is what political leadership is. For Santorum, the goal is simply to find something "we could all agree on."

Finding people willing to agree with him proved Mr. Santorum’s greatest challenge.

This is not political leadership, and it is does not really concern ethics. This is demagoguery--a sitting member of Congress spinning about "bipartisan working groups" while he indulges the most egregious of his bad habits. Further, even if Santorum could be taken more or less at his word, his actions don't really address the ethics of the situation, since establishing baseline standards of naughtiness won't encourage good habits, and good ethics means, more or less, good habits (as I've discussed elsewhere).

I ask you: Does this look like the best way to make ethical decisions?

An authentically ethical solution to the problem of improper lobbying and fundraising requires an approach which first and foremost assumes that continual improvement is possible. It’s not enough simply to set standards and leave it at that. Ethically, the point would have to be to inculcate in Senators good habits when dealing with lobbyists and handling their fundraising. Not that rules don't have an important role to play, but the question is less about specific rules than about an underlying commitment to being a good Senator. We need first to agree what a good Senator is in general, and then we need to come up with ways to get those elected to adopt habits which fit them to that mold.

(Hat tip to Santorum Exposed.)

Enforcement (or: How to get uncooperative people to comply)

Following up on my previous post about the pretensions of “compliance professionals,” I’m going to recommend that you take a look at this great post (the first in a series of three) on the dos and don’ts of enforcement from the perspective of government regulators. (Full disclosure: I used to work for David Smith, who authors AHI’s USA weblog.)

For those unwilling to read the entire series, I give you the payload (offered in the third installment):

Rule enforcement: dos and don'ts

Do's	Don'ts
Within the rules as written	Based on a loose interpretation or memory
In writing	Solely verbally
Quickly	Slowly and irregularly
After each occurrence	Inconsistently
Proportionately	Unconnected to offense severity
In a measured escalation	Abruptly
To the letter of the documents	Whimsically
With forewarning	Out of the blue
Allowing chances to reform	Once and for all

Although “compliance professionals” ought to feel rather sheepish at picking such an embarrassing name for themselves, real law enforcement officers play a critical role, ethically speaking. Having good character means having good habits, and any set of habits must include both habits of commission (activities undertaken regularly) and habits of omission (activities avoided). Good rules (or laws) can provide an excellent starting point for the development of good character. But as David notes,

Written rules can never be better than their enforcement.

Ultimately, how you take your first steps on the path to virtue is less important ethically than the fact that they’re in the right direction. Getting “enforced” into the start of a good habit is largely equivalent, in the long run, to willing yourself into compliance. No matter who makes you do it, it’s never too late to start making those child support payments—you might end being a responsible parent. And it’s never to early to stop fudging your taxes. You might just catch yourself being honest when no one’s looking. And that’s good character.

How to confuse ethical issues

Thomas Shanks, S.J., Executive Director of The Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University runs through a sample case concerning due diligence on MCAE’s website. The webmaster introduces the case as follows:

Ethical principles and values are, of course, key to ethical decision making, but how should they be applied to actual business situations?

The clear implication is that ethics and business are two separate silos of human experience, one of which is highly abstract, and the other a collection of “actual situations.” Further, the webmaster’s statement suggests that achieving a clear understansing of ethics represents a intellectual challenge of the highest order. Oh my God! How should ethics be applied in bussines situations? Please, great and mighty consultant--enlighten us benighted souls! This clearly serves only to bolster the Center’s assumed position that you need a consultant to understand ethics. While leading an ethical life is surely a great challenge, understanding what ethics means and how ethics works could hardly be simpler.

The English word “ethics” derives from the Classical Greek word ethos, which means “habit.” (Ethos derives the Ancient Greek ethea, which means “where wild animals live,” closing the link between “habit” and “habitat.”) Ethics therefore means the habits of character we have acquired, and which shape our typical behavior. Good ethics means good habits of character; bad ethics means bad habits of character. Ethics do not specifically concern how we relate with other people, but rather how our characters--that is, our general disposition toward our experience--improve or worsen over time.

Habits are patterns of behavior—predispositions to act in a certain way—which we acquire through repetition. We become brave precisely by practising bravery; we become greedy by practising greed. These days, when we say that an action is “unethical,” we seem to mean that it’s a “cruel” or “insensitive” action. In point of fact, an unethical action is one which leads down the slippery slope to bad character. Several intemperate actions tend to incline one to still greater shows of intemperance. The guys at Enron didn’t start robbing old ladies in California as their first malfeasance; they had to build up to it.

Mr. Fastow: "I wasn't born a cheat and a crook; I had to practice diligently for many years.”

All of which makes speaking of ethics as if they were something to be applied seem pretty weird. You don’t apply your habits or your character; you just live them. (With determination and grace, you improve them.) Business situations, like all human situations, are saturated with ethical significance. The question isn’t whether or not to apply ethical values and principles. The question is whether your next move is going to make you worse or better off in terms of your habits of character. Does the choice you're making now make the next good move easier or harder? As to the question of why one ought to prefer a better character, another post to follow.