Robert, Welcome back to the Lake.

Mark, Thank you for Hosting today’s Book Salon.

Hello everyone.

Thanks, nice to be here.

Welcome to Firedoglake – glad you could join us!

Much of the book talks about departures from the “traditional economic model,” so before talking about what is wrong with this model according to the book, I thought we should start with what the traditional model is and what it tells us.

Took me a minute to find the right page. Nice to be back on FDL!

Hello!

When you are ready to get started, what are the essential elements of the traditional model?

By “standard model” economists usually mean some variant of the invisible hand story in which market forces are presumed to channel self-seeking behavior for the common good. That’s an incredibly powerful insight in some settings, but often the conditions required for the story to work just aren’t met.

So by following what is best for me as an individual, the traditional model assumes that, somehow, this will be transformed into what is best for society as a whole?

There must be some important assumptions behind this result.

Glad you dropped by, Mrs. Thoma and Frank. I am still boiling from listening to Brooks and Robertson on MTP this a.m. blaming the consumer’s extravagance for the economic meltdown. I have watched people who were living on pre-scheduled expense levels socked with huge price overruns from gas companies which then were an expense that all of the goods transported via fossil engine vehicles go through the roof, and then go into debt and get into economic emergencies, and to hear them blamed for the economic meltdown they have suffered most intensely infuriates me. Is it your impression that as long as our media shows total ignorance of reality, that we cannot make sound decisions?>

According to the invisible hand narrative, businesses compete in the market with the sole aim of making money. To pad their profits or steal market share from their rivals, they develop better products and cost-saving innovations. These work just as they’d hoped in the short run, but rivals quickly copy them, and in the end the ultimate beneficiary is the consumer, who gets better products at lower prices

But Adam Smith never believed that market forces alone would produce the greatest good for all. Smith was mainly worried about monopolists, but the real problem with the invisible hand runs much deeper than that.

It breaks down, for example, when people’s ability to achieve their goals depends on how much they spend in relative terms, as in the example you mentioned of spending on interview suits. Such examples are pervasive. People take greater safety risks to earn more money so they can buy a house in a better school district. But when everyone does likewise, they succeed only in bidding up the prices of those houses.

Dr. Frank – hello! Welcome to the Lake. For the last 8 years, the concept of ‘the common good’ sort of got thrown off the bus…

So the presence of competition is important, and that is what most people think of when they worry about markets failing to do as the invisible hand suggests, but you are saying there are other, more important problems.

One is that comparisons are relative, not absolute, and this can lead to “arms races” in consumption. Can you expand upon this idea of relative versus absolute comparison a bit?

[Hi Ruth - I hope to get to issues about energy, and the government’s response in a bit - thanks.]

The housing example would be good, I think. How does relative comparison come into play here?

Hi Toby:

Yes, one of the themes of the book is that the market, by itself, may not be enough to ensure that our economy achieves “common good.” I hope we can get to that in a bit more detail soon.

Welcome to both. How do these insights play out in the health care reform debates? We hear arguments that all we need is a little more competition, or less govt. intervention, to bring lower costs/better service. And we see Senators trying to design incentives/penalties to deal with free rider problems in the context of mandates. How should we view/understand these efforts, and what social context aspects apply that are not being considered?

Other important assumptions in standard economic models are that people are well informed and disciplined. They pay attention not just to immediate rewards and penalties but also to ones that are uncertain or that occur with considerable delay. But people often to ignore rewards and penalties that aren’t immediate and certain. People are reluctant, for example, to build on a flood plain in the immediate aftermath of a severe flood. But land on flood plains is considerably cheaper (for obvious reasons!), and people’s caution about building there doesn’t last long.
That tendency played a big part in the run-up to the financial crisis. People saw others making money by investing in highly leveraged securities. Rather than cede relative position to those investors in the short run, they felt compelled to follow suit. Money managers, for their part, felt compelled to offer higher-paying riskier securities because they knew many of their customers would desert them if they didn’t. In the end, the bubble was bound to burst, the invisible hand notwithstanding.

A suggestion: to reply to a specific comment, click on the “Reply” button first, and that will, in your reply, provide a link to the commenter, so we know what/whom you’re responding to.

When the assumptions that underlie the invisible hand are not present, and one of the arguments of the book is that they are not, then markets do not optimally move us toward the common good.

In such a case, one of the questions is how governments might intervene to correct this. What is the best way for government to help markets achieve the common good? Later, after talking a bit about how markets break down, we will (hopefully) talk about how government’s can help to maximize the size of the economic pie, and how this can help us reach the goal of maximizing the common good.

Thanks – will do.

In the end, the bubble was bound to burst

While the ‘financial writer’ community reveled in the soaring market and only such presagors of doom as Paul Krugman, Roubini, and other off camera voices the popular media ignored gave any such warming.

Last Friday, the FDIC issued a press release saying this:

As part of its loss-share agreement with acquirers of failed FDIC-insured institutions, the FDIC is encouraging its loss-share partner institutions to consider temporarily reducing mortgage payments for borrowers who are unemployed or underemployed. This program will provide additional foreclosure prevention alternatives to these borrowers through forbearance agreements that will give them an opportunity to regain full employment and avoid an unnecessary foreclosure.

“With more Americans suffering through unemployment or cuts in their paychecks, we believe it is crucial to offer a helping hand to avoid unnecessary and costly foreclosures. This is simply good business since foreclosure rarely benefits lenders and would cost the FDIC more money, not less,” said FDIC Chairman Sheila C. Bair. “This is a win-win for the borrower, who can remain in his or her home while looking for a new job, and the acquiring institution, which continues to receive payments on the loan. Ultimately, by reducing losses under our loss-share agreements, this approach helps reduce losses to the FDIC as well.”

It’s a sad commentary on banks that Bair needs to remind them that foreclosures have costs, and renegotiating some non-trivial portion of the loans in their portfolio might make more sense to them financially than foreclosing.

Is this an example of non-rational, acting against self-interest behavior in the business sector?

All parents want to send their kids to a good school. But a “good” school is a relative concept. It is one that is better than other schools in the same area. And the best schools tend to be located in neighborhoods with the most expensive houses. So to send your kid to an average school, someone must spend as much as others do on housing. When lenders relaxed their mortgage standards (low or no down payments, interest only loans, etc), some were able to borrow more to bid for houses in better school districts. That put pressure on others to follow suit. But in the end, all that extra debt managed to accomplish was to bid up the prices of houses in the better school districts. As always, half of all children are attending schools in the bottom half.
In short, we did better when regulators didn’t let us borrow so much, because that enabled us to sidestep some of the pressure to engage in fruitless arms races.

Welcome Mr. Frank!

I’ve seen two recent critiques of economics in the news recently: 1) Paul Krugman’s essay in the NY Times magazine and 2) HuffPo’s article on The Fed’s enormous hold on economists in the US. HuffPo’s article really got me thinking about groupthink by economists. What can we non-economists do in discussions with economists who don’t think outside the box and dismiss our concerns because we are not economists?

There’s a unacknowledged “debate” in the country about whether or not to have an explicit “industrial policy” backed by sound economics or whether government intervention is inherently suspect or worse. Yet other nations don’t seem to be hung up on this topic; they just decide policies and pursue them. Is America just uniquely dumb? Or wise? Do the book’s insights tells us anything about those questions?

Regulators need to be humble.
Just because a market outcome is less than ideal, we should not assume that a regulation will automatically make things better. Many regulations have unintended side effects that end up making matters worse.
That said, experience has taught us that regulators can often change people’s incentives in ways that get us closer to what we’re trying to achieve. In general, it’s better to do that by changing people’s incentives than by issuing blanket prohibitions–for example, by taxing carbon emissions rather than by prescribing what kinds of coal companies are allowed to use.

So the traditional model requires:

1. Pure competition
2. That comparisons be absolute, not relative
3. That we aren’t biased toward immediate rewards and away from rewards (or costs) in the future.

If any of these break down, then the invisible hand won’t work as economists assume.

Three topics so far are the financial crisis, health care reform, and energy policy. Let’s turn to the financial crisis first.

Your NY Times column today (in the business section) was about reforming the financial system. As I understand it, you believe the problems were a combination of 2 and 3 above. Is that correct?

There are some great, accessible books out that clearly develop why the forecasts and prescriptions of standard economic so often go astray. The 2008 title Nudge is one. Its focus is on the standard assumption that people act rationally. In fact, it explains, people make numerous systematic cognitive errors that cause them to behave differently from the predictions of standard models. I’m also happy to recommend my own book, The Economic Naturalist’s Field Guide, whose focus is more on the ways in which people’s motivations differ from the assumptions of standard models.

It’s a sad commentary on banks that Bair needs to remind them that foreclosures have costs, and renegotiating some non-trivial portion of the loans in their portfolio might make more sense to them financially than foreclosing.

Is this an example of non-rational, acting against self-interest behavior in the business sector?

Good question. Or alternatively, is this an exammple where the individual interest and the public interest do not coincide, which suggests the need for intervention to pursue the latter?

Yes. As I mentioned in comment 18, we seem wired to focus on short-term relative reward. When rivals start pulling ahead, we feel compelled to respond. One way to pull ahead during a housing bubble is to invest in highly leveraged portfolios of mortgage-backed securities. As long as housing prices keep rising, you’ll earn higher returns than you could with safer, less leveraged investments. Many people were worried about the risks they were taking, yet seemed unwilling to watch their friends and neighbors pass them by.
So it’s the combination of concern about relative reward and disproportionate focus on the short run that proves so deadly.

Thank you! I’m thinking of buying your book for my sister, who is an economist, for Christmas.

I will let Dr. Frank answer specifically, but this touches upon another way in which markets can fail to maximize the public good.

When there are externalities associated with an economic transaction, i.e. costs or benefits that are outside the market (like firms polluting the air without paying the costs of doing so), then markets will not function correctly.

Houses in foreclosure have externalities – a house falling apart in a neighborhood (or several) can affect the value of houses around it. Banks will not care about the effect of the foreclosure on the value of other houses, and this can cause private and public interests to differ. It may be in the public interest to help the homeowner, but not in the private interest of the bank for that reason.

So we now have a 4th item on our list:

4. The traditional model assumes there are no externalities.

Bank managers have regulatory incentives not to acknowledge the losses they stand to take on their mortgage loans. So they try to kick the foreclosure can down the road. But from the standpoint of the system as a whole, it would be better to acknowledge that a house is under water and reduce the amount the homeowner owes. The problem is how to do that for homeowners who are prepared to abandon underwater homes without offering the same write-downs to people who are willing to keep making their mortgage payments on underwater homes.

Yes, and perhaps we can add that the models assume people correctly assess present versus future costs/values — as in the climate debate. I don’t know how you get a country to assign a proper value to future climate change that might affect others more than themselves, when all they hear about is current costs — as in my electricity bill could go up if you tax coal.

Good point, Mark! Concern about relative position is just another form of externality–a “positional externality” as I call it. When someone moves forward in any hierarchy, others necessarily move back. If others in front of you stand to see better, you see worse. So you stand, too. Yet when all stand, no one sees better than if all had remained comfortably seated.

it would be better to acknowledge that a house is under water and reduce the amount the homeowner owes.

For which the manager needs to be able to demonstrate that results are economically better, and needs a model to base his/her action on, it would seem.

To finish this, let me try to summarize what I think you are saying about the financial crisis:

First, a small difference in returns can make a huge difference to a financial firms bottom line since investors look at relative returns (the firm who offers a slightly higher return at the same risk level gets most of the business). Thus, the relative comparison leads to an incentive to take more and more risk so as to be able to offer higher and higher returns.

Second, the reason that people are willing to take the risk is that they don’t properly evaluate risks in the future versus risks today. They see the high rewards from speculating today, and don’t balance that temptation with a proper assessment of the potential costs tomorrow.

Thus, because of relative comparisons, firms have an incentive to offer higher and higher returns, which become riskier and riskier. People are willing to accept those risks because they fail to fully account for possible problems in the future.

Let me note that your NY Times column says the solution to this is to limit leverage, i.e. to limit the amount of risk that people can take.

[I also believe we need to curtail leverage.]

As I note in comment 27, there’s good reasons to worry that regulations don’t always improve matters. That’s what the “industrial policy” debates are all about. The lessons of recent decades suggest we can avoid much of the pitfalls of regulatory excess by relying more directly on tax policy than we have in the past. If the roads are too congested, for example, we can implement congestion fees rather than build extra lanes that will just attract more traffic. We have to tax something. The exciting prospect is that we could raise all the tax revenue we need simply by taxing activities that cause harm to others. Taxes like that not only don’t make the economic pie smaller, they make it bigger.

The manager is also worried that formally acknowledging that a loan might not be repaid in full raises the risk that his bank will be taken over by the FDIC.

And this gets to where I wanted to head next.

Congestion is an externality that is not properly accounted for by the market process. The book says the solution is to have congestion taxes. So two questions.

How can a tax make a market work better? Aren’t taxes always distortionary?

Don’t congestion taxes hurt the poor? Why should only the rich be able to drive to the city?

Yes, limiting leverage is definitely the key step. Bank regulations limit leverage at 10 to one. But before the financial crisis, non-bank institutions like Bear Stearns had leverage ratios of 30 to 1 or more. If a financial institutions failure causes grave harm to the system a whole, it must not be permitted to employ extreme leverage.

Thanks, true – unless the cost is becoming so great tht the FDIC will avoid that if at all possible; and as you note to Scarecrow, tax powers can be used to alter harmful activities.

There will always be such externalities. One of the strange things about talking with folks about the economic cost of things is that they either assume that because there’s no direct monetary cost that it doesn’t exist, or that you can put an exact price on those externalities. I’ve seen both, and while the former is frustrating, it seems to me there ought to be a better way of acknowledging costs that are going to be, shall we say, fuzzy.

You won’t be surprised that a road becomes congested simply because too many vehicles attempt to use it at the same time. Road capacity is a valuable resource and shouldn’t be given away for free. If we charge for it, as London and many other cities do, people will have greater incentives to use it judiciously.
When New York proposed congestion fees last year, critics immediately objected that congestion fees would harm the poor. Similar objections are always raised against proposals to tax activities that cause negative externalities, such as carbon emissions and gasoline use. But because such taxes raise revenue while reducing activities that cause more harm than good, it’s always possible to transfer additional money to low-income households who would be hit hardest by the taxes.
Failure to address distributional concerns has sunk many policy changes that had great potential to increase the size of the economic pie. But we should never miss a chance to increase the size of the pie, because when the pie grows larger, it’s necessarily possible for everyone to have a larger slice than before. Objections to New York’s decision to charge for directory assistance calls were met, for example, by offering each telephone subscriber a monthly reduction of 30 cents.

Another problem is that the benefits of internalizing pollution or other costs (i.e. other externalities) are often diffuse, but the costs are very concentrated.

If we force a single, large polluter to pay the full societal cost of the pollution, it could be enough to motivate them to political action. They will do what they can to stop it if the costs are high. But the benefits to any one individual might be very small, small enough that they won’t be motivated to do much about it. So the beneficiaries are unmotivated, the polluters very motivated, and that asymmetry often creates a political blockade to beneficial policy.

Following the directory assistance rebate example, New York could have overcome objections to the proposed congestion fees by giving poor people who work in the city an annual allotment of free congestion vouchers. Poor motorists don’t drive into the city much, but they could use these vouchers when they do. Or they could sell them for cash on Craigslist.

We’ve learned in political debates recently that redistribution of income is un-American. Communists do it, or so we’re told.

So would it be possible to, say, impose a gasoline tax and then give everyone below a certain income level a rebate of some sort equal to the extra costs they face because of the tax? That’s the equivalent of charging for directory assistance and then giving a rebate on phone bills.

I’ve heard objections that it can’t work, we’re just taking money out of one hand and giving it back in the other, so people will buy the same amount of gas as before. Why is that argument wrong?

Very true. Even the health care debate, where most of us have some significant stake, seems to be going along these lines. The people who have insurance and can get health care are still numerous enough that the folks who are running the system are far more interested in affecting how things go than the average person. The fact that they get to collect vast amounts of our money to persuade or buy off people doesn’t help, either.

Organized electricity markets in the East and Midwest use “congestion pricing” to account for limited transmission between generation and customer/demand centers. The effect is that prices for energy generated in, e.g., Western Pa (where cheap coal plants are located) is lower than prices for energy generated in New Jersey, because transmission between PA and NJ is congested. The economists love it, and most market participants are fine with the scheme, but some buyers, especially municipal utilities who don’t like the complexity, hate it. They argue about it all the time. And when they do, state and federal regulators try to find ways to compromise it to avoid the controversy. So a big problem in applying economics turns out to be political opposition generated before regulatory bodies, who seek to avoid the pressure brought on them.

And this is where, I think, the objections to the “size of the pie” argument come. People aren’t certain that, just because the pie gets bigger due to a particular policy, the size of the slice they get will necessarily increase. There’s no guarantee that the political process will ensure that result.

That was the objection made when Jimmy Carter proposed a 50-cent a gallon tax on gasoline to reduce dependence on foreign oil. Carter proposed to rebate the proceeds of the tax by reducing the payroll tax, which falls disproportionately on low-income households. “If you give the tax back, people will consume just as much as gas as before,” critics complained. But that missed the economic point. People COULD consume as much as before, but the tax on gas would give them a powerful incentive not to–by making it more attractive to buy fuel-efficient cars, form carpools, and adopt other strategies for freeing up money to spend on relatively cheaper alternative consumption goods.

Doesn’t it depend on how you rebate the money? The tax should be levied to affect decisions at the right moment on the margin, whereas the rebate can be done lump sum at later time that doesn’t affect behavior in real time.

a big problem in applying economics turns out to be political opposition generated before regulatory bodies, who seek to avoid the pressure brought on them.

Result; our tax codes are so complicated they are a real problem, and business pays a far lower amount of tax revenues than do individuals. Last official figures I could get for that was in 2001, when it was 20% of total from businesses.

Thanks for this format, Mrss. Frank and Thoma et al., and I have to depart now.

Exactly! The mere fact that the pie gets bigger does not automatically ensure that everyone gets a bigger slice. Often it’s necessary to come up with clever compensation schemes to make everyone whole.
But that’s not a rational argument for sticking with an inefficient policy. If changing the policy would make the pie bigger, there MUST be a way to give everyone a bigger slice. If the alternative is to stick with the current smaller pie, what’s the reason for not agreeing to compensation scheme that makes it possible for everyone to come out ahead?

Yes, the key element is to change the price of gasoline relative to the price of other goods (a lump-sum rebate that is independent of gas consumption works, but a per gallon rebate would not). The rebate gives people enough money to consume as much gas as before, but each gallon they consume costs more in terms of other goods than it did before the tax (a gallon of gas costs two songs from the iTunes store before the tax, after the tax a gallon costs three songs). Because it’s more costly, the incentive is to reduce consumption.

Yes, the rebate should be unrelated to the activity the tax is trying to discourage. If you gave gas taxes back in proportion to how much gas people used, that WOULD undo the effect of the tax.

Let me summarize:

When externalities are present, markets do not maximize the common good. Why? Because in this case, the prices the firm charges do not fully reflect costs and that causes us to use our resources inefficiently.

A tax forcing the firm to pay the externality brings prices in line with costs and improves efficiency (which just means that we get more out of the same inputs, i.e. the pie is bigger).

Because the pie is bigger, we can make everyone better off with the right distribution of the benefits.

The key to successful policy, then, is to come up with a compensation scheme that distributes the benefits in a way that makes everyone winners. And if we can make that clear, the politics should take care of itself.

One of the themes of my book is that if we’re going to weigh the pros and cons of a policy change, we’ve got to consider all the relevant costs and benefits, not just those that can easily be monetized. An essay in the collection (a copy of which is here: http://www.robert-h-frank.com/PDFs/ES.1.19.06.pdf ), I respond critically to an economist’s claim that a Texas hospital was right to disconnect a terminally ill patient before her mother could arrive from abroad to see her one last times. The economist argued that because this woman would not have voluntarily purchased ventilator insurance had it been offered to it when she was healthy, she was not entitled to a ventilator during her final hours. You don’t need to reject cost-benefit analysis to accept that this claim makes no economic sense.

I just happen to have a link to the NY Times column discussing that case:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01…..scene.html

How do the folks who have no public transportation option for getting to work have the ability to cut down consumption? In California we are already paying more than 3 songs per gallon.

Before I pose another question, does anyone else have something they’d like to ask?

A question specifically about the book which (with its prequel, The Economic Naturalist)I thoroughly enjoyed and learned greatly from.

The underlying idea of the earlier book, I take it, is that economics should be taught, not primarily by drawing graphs on blackboards, but by encouraging students to look at the world through the twin lenses of scarcity and self-interest. And the Field Guide builds on that by applying those lenses to a series of public issues. But part of the point is that those ideas need to be deepened if they are to fit the real world: that people act on more than “incentives” as economists understand them, and that “scarcity” is sometimes the result of the simple arithmetic fact that no more than one in ten people can be in the top decile of everything.

But since that’s true, how can you reliably distinguish a naturalistic, field-guide economic analysis from the sort of economic “just so” stories told by some free-market fundamentalists? If the voter participation rate were 5%, the economic naturalist would say: “Of course! Political participation is a public good, and public goods are underprovided.” Given that it’s higher than that, the economic naturalist can say, “See? People aren’t exclusively selfish!”

If we want to reason about how to increase voter participation, we can either try to think in costs-and-incentives terms or in terms of social and political psychology. Does economic naturalism help guide the choice of analytical methods?

Well, isn’t it possible that while an efficiency gain could increase the pie in the aggregate, that there could still be individual winners and losers? E.g., the injection of competition in health provider and/or insurance markets might lower total prices, but individual firms could lose market share. e.g., if we allowed in more foreign doctors, doctor fees could fall, but today’s domestic doctors would make less money, right?

So when we think about health reform, it might be useful to think in terms of lowering such licensing barriers unrelated to competence, lowering barriers to the importation of drugs, allow non-physicians to perform physician functions, have more local clinics and fewer mega hospitals?

Nice summary, Mark. And it highlights what’s so mysterious about the current healthcare “debate.” The US spends half again as much per capita on health care as any other wealthy democracy, yet achieves dramatically worse outcomes. We rank last, for example, in “preventable hospitalizations” (hospitalizations that wouldn’t have been necessary had the patient received minimally adequate medical care before the hospitalization occurred) and we also rank very low on preventable deaths. Simply by changing the way we pay for care, we could get dramatically better results for less money.
A creative politician ought to be able to craft a proposal to make that change attractive to everyone–even the insurance companies. Their profits account for only one cent of every dollar spent on health care. They’re responsible for much of the waste in the current system. Just paying them to go away would essentially solve most of the problem. (My essay that makes that point is here:
http://www.robert-h-frank.com/PDFs/ES.02.15.07.pdf .)
Barack Obama is a gifted political leader. He should be able to come up with such a proposal and make it clear to everyone why they’d be better off under it if we adopted it. His speech last week was a start. But we’re not there yet.

As we come to the end of this Book Salon,

Robert, Thank you for stopping by the Lake and spending the afternoon with us discussing your new book and economics.

Mark, Thank you very much for Hosting this great Book Salon.

Everyone, if you haven’t bought Robert’s book yet, here is a link.

Thanks all.

It’s a fair question. As someone from the Reality Based Community, you’ll be pleased to hear that I think evidence can serve as a check against giving undue weight to just-so stories. The literature on voting rates, for example, has grown remarkably more sophisticated in recent years. The narrow rational actor model could never explain why anyone would vote in a presidential election. But we know know a lot about the specific factors that influence participation rates. We’re not stuck with a choice between saying everyone’s selfish and everyone’s virtuous. Some interesting recent work suggests that seemingly virtuous behavior is often more self-serving than it appears.

Good question. Let me answer it by making reference to the climate change debate.

Many people are upset that we won’t have 100% auctions for carbon allowances, that they are being phased in slowly over time.

Assuming that they will actually be phased in as planned (perhaps a big if), there is an argument – made forcefully by Robert Stavins at Harvard – that this is not a giveaway, but just compensation for the costs the policy change imposes.

http://belfercenter.ksg.harvar…..ins/?p=108

He says (20% is his estimate of the share of the “giveaway” to private industry):

“it should be noted that this 80-20 split is roughly consistent with empirical economic analyses of the share that would be required – on average — to fully compensate (but no more) private industry for equity losses due to the policy’s implementation.”

Back to your question, such changes in health care policy may require that we compensate losers during the transition period in order to make the policy politically viable. (Some of those losers may be insurance companies.)

Yes, thanks to both. Here’s Mark Thoma’s blog site:

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/

Many thanks to you and Mark for hosting the discussion. I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to participate.
Best to all,
BF

Thanks everyone.

I barbara, an avowed econophobe, need to buy this book for myself. THis is fascinating. Ooops. Everyone’s going away. Doesn’t matter. Need to finish reading comments to myself . . . :-)