Category: History

My Conversation with Russ Roberts on Vasily Grossman’s *Life and Fate*

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Russ and I agreed to read the book in its entirety and then discuss it.  Here is part of the episode summary:

Russ and Tyler cover Grossman’s life and the historical context of Life and Fate, its themes of war, totalitarianism, freedom, and fate, the novel’s polyphonic structure and large cast of characters, the parallels between fascism and communism, the idea of “senseless kindness” as a counter to systemic evil, the symbolic importance of motherhood, the psychology of confession and loyalty under totalitarian systems, Grossman’s literary influences including Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dante, and Stendhal, individual resilience and moral compromises, the survival of the novel despite Soviet censorship, artificial intelligence and the dehumanization of systems, the portrayal of scientific discovery and its moral dilemmas, the ethical and emotional tensions in the novel, the anti-fanatical tone and universal humanism of the book, Grossman’s personal life and connections to its themes, and the novel’s enduring relevance and complexity.

Here is one bit from me:

COWEN: Amongst Soviet authors, he is the GOAT, one could say, to refer to our earlier episode. But this, to me, is one of the very few truly universal novels. The title itself, Life and Fate — it is about life and fate, but the novel is about so much more. It’s about war. It’s about slavery. It’s about love, motherhood, fatherhood, childbirth, rape, friendship, science, politics. How many novels, if any, can you think of that have all of those worlds in them in an interesting and insightful manner? Very few.

The one that comes closest to it is, in fact, his model. That’s Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a three-word title with an and in the middle and two important concepts. They’re both about war. They’re both about the invasions of Russia or the USSR. There’s a central family in both stories. The notion of what is fate or destiny is highly important to Tolstoy, as it is to Grossman, though they have different points of view.

Napoleon plays a significant role in War and Peace. In Life and Fate, Hitler and Stalin make actual appearances in the novel, which I find shocking when I read it, like, here they are on the page, and it’s actually somewhat plausible. So, he’s modeling this, I think, after War and Peace. He actually pulls it off, which is a miracle. I think it is a novel comparable in quality and scope and import to Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which is sometimes called the greatest novel ever. So that is a pretty amazing achievement.

And on some non-book issues:

COWEN: I think I should have said it’s a bimodal distribution, that you go one way or another. Look at it this way: In the simplest Bayesian model, your views should be a random walk, that the recent evolution of your views shouldn’t predict where you’ll end up tomorrow. But that’s not the case, really, with anyone that I’ve ever met. There’s some kind of trend in your views. You’re either getting more fanatical, getting more moderate, getting more religious, more or less something.

And that, to me, is one of the most interesting facts about human belief, is how hard it is to find belief as a random walk. So, what’s wrong with all of us? If you’re getting more moderate all the time, that’s wrong too. That’s a funny kind of, you could say, almost fanaticism, where you ought to say, “Well, I see the trend so I’m just going to leap to where I ought to be.” Then the next day, maybe 50 percent chance I’ll take a step back toward being more dogmatic or less moderate. But again, that’s not what we see from the moderates either.

ROBERTS: I wonder how much of it is the fact that it’s really convenient to have a system, gives you something to shove into the box. You’ve got this black box that you take the world’s events and you’ve decided how they should be processed. Then something new comes along, and you know how to deal with that because you’ve got this box; you’ve got all these great examples from the past.

At some point for me, I just started thinking that maybe the box doesn’t work all the time. I think a lot of people love the box. It’s a great source of comfort, whether it’s religion or ideology or other things. Maybe there’s just something peculiar about me. When you’re younger, certainty is deeply comforting because the world’s a bit too complicated to deal with. It still is, but I’m just less certain.

COWEN: There’s also a more charitable interpretation of what you’re describing. Think of yourself as working through problems, which is fine. Working through problems takes some time. You can’t every day pick up a new problem. The problems you’re working through as you — I wouldn’t say solve them, but as you somewhat make progress on them — that’s going to give you some persistence in the deltas of how your beliefs change.

I’m not sure — the pure Bayesian model might just be wrong. It’s so far from actual human practice. Maybe we shouldn’t just damn humans for not meeting it, but realize there are structures to how you work through things, and they are going to imply certain trends that go on for periods of time.

Recommended, obviously.

*Kaput: The End of the German Miracle*

by  Tyler Cowen in

By Wolfgang Münchau, this book is the best and most detailed account of the German economic decline to date.  Excerpt:

In 2018, the federal government promised that Germany would become a world leader in artificial intelligence.

As if they don’t understand that such efforts are more than just a play toy.  The overall lesson I took away from this book (my interpretation, not the author’s) is that if a country does not have enough ambition and seriousness in its businesses and education systems, sooner or later it will not have that in its government either.

Another lesson is that the world, overall, is working less well than you might think.

I am sad to recommend this one.  My primary reservation is that the author does not do enough to diagnose Germany’s obvious cultural malaise as an underlying root cause.

My Conversation with the excellent Neal Stephenson

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the episode summary:

In Neal’s second appearance, Tyler asks him why he sometimes shifts from envisioning the future to illustrating the past, the rise of history autodidacts, the implications of leaked secrets from the atomic age to today’s AI, the logistics of faking one’s death, why he still drafts novels in longhand, Soviet idealism among Western intellectuals, which Soviet achievements he admires, the lag in AR development, how LLMs might boost AR, whether social media is increasingly giving way to private group chats, his continuing influence on technologists, why AI-generated art might struggle to connect with readers, the primer from The Diamond Age in light of today’s LLMs, the prospect of AGI becoming an unnoticed background tool, what Neal believes the world really needs more of, what lies ahead in Polostan and the broader “Bomb Light” series, and more.

Excerpt:

COWEN: How effectively could you stage your own death? You. Say you really want to do it, and you’re willing to do it.

STEPHENSON: To fake it or to actually —

COWEN: Fake it, but everyone thinks it’s real. I read about it in the papers. “Neal is gone.” I nod my head, I weep, and then I forget about it. I don’t mean I forget about you, but you understand what I’m saying.

STEPHENSON: Wait, there’s not that many circumstances under which all physical traces of someone can be obliterated. That’s a fairly hard thing to do. It would have been easier a hundred years ago, but now we’ve got cameras everywhere, and we’ve got DNA testing and other ways to prove or to disprove that somebody’s actually dead. I guess it would have to be something like a plane crash into the ocean.

COWEN: But then how do you survive it?

STEPHENSON: Oh, yes. Okay.

COWEN: To kill yourself is one thing, but to pretend you’ve killed yourself and stay alive seems harder.

STEPHENSON: You could parachute out if it was a small plane, not a jet airline full of people, but a single-seater. I guess that might work.

COWEN: So, hire a private plane, have it crash, parachute out into somewhere where you —

STEPHENSON: You’re witnessed getting into the plane and taking off, but then there’s no way to recover the evidence for some reason. It’s pretty hard to do. If someone really wanted to, if they were just determined to go and find the . . . You see the efforts that people have gone to to go down to the Titanic. Well, if you can go find that thing and check it out with a submarine, then it’s pretty hard to really find a place that can’t be accessed in that way.

I very much enjoyed Neal’s new book Polostan.  And here is my first Conversation with Neal Stephenson.

*Blitz* (no spoilers)

by  Tyler Cowen in

This is the Steve McQueen movie about the Nazi blitz against London.  I found it visually superb, countering clichés (mostly), showing a different and more varied side of civilian life in wartime, and perhaps the best screen treatment (ever?) of what life was like in the earlier “world of atoms”.  I objected to the overuse of Dickensian references.  In any case one of the best movies of this year, please note we live in a charmed time I hope you are enjoying it.

The 1970s Crime Wave

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Tyler and I wrap up our series of podcasts on the 1970s with The 1970s Crime Wave. Here’s one bit:

TABARROK: …people think that mass incarceration is a peculiarly American phenomena, or that it came out of nowhere, or was due solely to racism. Michelle Alexander’s, The New Jim Crow, takes his view. In fact, the United States was not a mass incarceration society in the 1960s.

It became one in the 1980s and 1990s due to the crime wave of the 1970s. It was not simply due to racism. It is true Blacks do commit more crimes relative to their population than whites, but Blacks are also overrepresented as victims. The simple fact of the matter is that Black victims of crime, the majority group, demanded more incarceration of Black criminals. In 1973, the NAACP demanded that the government lengthen minimum prison terms for muggers, pushers, and first-degree murders.

The Black newspaper, the Amsterdam News, advocated mandatory life sentences for “the non-addict drug pusher of hard drugs.” The Black columnist, Carl Rowan, wrote that “locking up thugs is not vindictive.” Eric Holder, under Obama, he was the secretary of—

COWEN: Of something.

TABARROK: Yes, of something. He called for stop and frisk. Eric Holder called for stop and frisk. Back then, the criminal justice system was also called racist, but the racism that people were pointing to was that Black criminals were let back on the streets to terrorize Black victims, and that Black criminals were given sentences which were too light. That was the criticism back then. It was Black and white victims together who drove the punishment of criminals. I think this actually tells you about two falsehoods. First, the primary driver of mass imprisonment was not racism. It was violent crime.

Second, this also puts the lie, sometimes you hear from conservatives, to this idea that Black leaders don’t care about Black-on-Black crime. That’s a lie. Many Black leaders have been, and were, and are tough on crime. Now, it’s true, as crime began to fall in the 1990s, many Blacks and whites began to have misgivings about mass incarceration. Crime was a huge problem in the 1970s and 1980s, and it hit the United States like a brick. It seemed to come out of nowhere. You can’t blame people for seeking solutions, even if the solutions come with their own problems.

A lot of amazing stuff in this episode. Here’s our Marginal Revolution Podcast 1970s trilogy

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New results on tariff history do not favor protectionism

by  Tyler Cowen in

I cover these in my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:

A new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that tariffs probably did more harm than good. Using meticulously collected industry-level and state-level data, the paper traces the impact of specific tariff rates more clearly than before. The results are not pretty.

One core finding is that industries with higher tariffs did not have higher productivity — in fact, they had lower productivity. Tariffs did raise the number of US firms in a given sector, but they did so in part by protecting smaller, less productive firms. That was not the path by which the US became an industrial giant, nor is it wise to use trade policy to keep lower-productivity firms in business. Not only does it slow economic growth, it also keeps workers in jobs without much of a future.

These results contradict the traditional protectionist story — that tariffs allow the best firms to grow larger and capture the large domestic market. In reality, the tariffs kept firms smaller and probably lowered US manufacturing productivity.

The paper also finds that the tariffs of that era raised the prices for products released domestically. That lowers living standards, and should give a second Trump administration reason to pause, as he just won an election in which inflation was a major concern. The finding about inflation also counters another major protectionist argument: that tariffs eventually lower domestic prices because they allow US firms to expand and enjoy economies of scale. That is the opposite of what happened.

The paper also details how lobbying, logrolling and political horse-trading were essential features of the shift toward higher US tariffs. A lot of the tariffs of the time depended on which party controlled Congress, rather than economic rationality. Trump is fond of citing President William McKinley’s tariffs, but they are evidence of the primacy of political influence and rent-seeking, not of a well-thought out strategic trade policy.

The authors of the new research are Alexander Klein and Christopher M. Meissner.

Human Capital Accumulation in China and India in 20th Century

by  Tyler Cowen in

By Nitin Kumar Bharti and Li Yang:

Abstract. The education system of a country is instrumental in its long-run development. This paper compares the historical evolution of the education systems in the two largest emerging economies- China and India, between 1900 and 2018. We create a novel time-series data of educational statistics related to enrolment, graduates, teachers and expenditure based on historical statistical reports. China adopted a bottom-up approach in expanding its education system, compared to India’s top-down approach in terms of enrolment. While India had a head-start in modern education, it has gradually been overtaken by China- at Primary education in the 1930’s Middle/Secondary level in the 1970s and Higher/Tertiary level in the 2010s. It resulted in the lower cohort-wise average education and higher education inequality in India since 1907. Vocational education is a central component of the Chinese education system, absorbing half of the students in higher education. In India, the majority of the students pursue traditional degree courses (Bachelors, Masters etc.), with 60% in Humanities courses. Though India is known as the “land of engineers”, China produces a higher share of engineers. We conjecture that the type of human capital in China through engineering and vocational education helped develop its manufacturing sector. Utilizing micro-survey data since the 1980s, we show that education expansion has been an inequality enhancer in India. This is due to both the unequal distribution of educational attainment and higher individual returns to education in India.

Interesting throughout, via Pseudoerasmus.

What is the Best-Case Scenario for a Trump Presidency?

by  Alex Tabarrok in

The economy is strong and Trump has a significant opportunity to simply take credit for that if he avoids major disruptions. While he must fulfill some of his campaign promises, people voted for Trump not for his policies per se. Trump has leeway. No one will accuse him of flip-flopping. While these are not my first-best policies, Trump won against astounding media and elite opposition and an attempted assassination. The people have spoken, so here’s a best-case outline for following through on Trump’s policies without cratering the economy:

  1. Trade Policy: Moderate tariff increases on China. No Chinese electric cars for us. But drop the “tariffs on everything” language. He can always say his rhetoric was a threat to get other countries to lower their tariffs. Let’s instead talk tough against our enemies but shift toward “friend-shoring”, maintaining or even lowering tariffs with allied nations, such as Canada, Europe, and possibly India, as part of a broader strategy to contain China’s influence.
  2. Border Control: Trump must strengthen the border. But let’s limit deportations to individuals who arrived in the past four years. Control the border, throw some illegals out but minimize human misery by not deporting long-term residents and their US-citizen families. Declare a win while avoiding economic disruption and strengthening the police state.
  3. Vaccine and Health Policy: Appoint Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head a committee on vaccine policy and, after several years of investigation, write a report. Take medical freedom more seriously.
  4. Crypto Regulation: Appoint Hester M. Peirce to head the SEC. Stabilize the regulatory environment for cryptocurrency. Simplify tax rules for crypto. Support digital dollar growth and treat stablecoins as what they are, namely, the US dollar dominating world electronic payments.
  5. Space and Innovation: U.S. Space Force! Commit to Mars exploration and position the U.S. as a leader in space innovation. Get advice from Elon.
  6. US AI. Immediately approve Meta for its nuclear-AI program. Swat the bees. Approve Amazon as well. Tell the FERC that their job is to increase the supply of energy. Keep the Chip Act but make it clear that the goal is to dominate the space not make jobs or social policy. We are the world leaders in AI. Let’s keep it that way.
  7. Kill Bureaucracy: Let Elon Musk take the chainsaw to a few bureaucracies like Javier Milei. Afuera! Afuera! Afuera! Streamline bureaucratic processes, cut red tape and invigorate tech and infrastructure initiatives.
  8. Respect Meritocracy: End race and gender based discrimination in government programs.
  9. Expand Housing Supply: Build baby build! Trump is a natural to lead this. Trump the developer! Incentivize states and localities to streamline zoning laws and reduce restrictions that hamper new housing developments. Increase housing supply.

Each of these policies is consistent with Trump’s priorities and rhetoric and has broad appeal for voters who value economic opportunity, accountability, and national resilience. The economy is strong. Trump has the wind at his back. If he is sensible, all of this would make for a successful presidency. If Trump wants the judgment of history, the path is open should he choose to walk it.

My Conversation with the excellent Christopher Kirchhoff

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the intro:

Christopher Kirchhoff is an expert in emerging technology who founded the Pentagon’s Silicon Valley office. He’s led teams for President Obama, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and CEO of Google. He’s worked in worlds as far apart as weapons development and philanthropy. His pioneering efforts to link Silicon Valley technology and startups to Washington has made him responsible for $70 billion in technology acquisition by the Department of Defense. He’s penned many landmark reports, and he is the author of Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Future of War.

Tyler and Christopher cover the ascendancy of drone warfare and how it will affect tactics both off and on the battlefield, the sobering prospect of hypersonic weapons and how they will shift the balance of power, EMP attacks, AI as the new arms race (and who’s winning), the completely different technology ecosystem of an iPhone vs. an F-35, why we shouldn’t nationalize AI labs, the problem with security clearances, why the major defense contractors lost their dynamism, how to overcome the “Valley of Death” in defense acquisition, the lack of executive authority in government, how Unit X began, the most effective type of government commission, what he’ll learn next, and more.

Excerpt:

COWEN: Now, I never understand what I read about hypersonic missiles. I see in the media, “China has launched the world’s first nuclear-capable hypersonic, and it goes 10x the speed of sound.” And people are worried. If mutual assured destruction is already in place, what exactly is the nature of the worry? Is it just we don’t have enough response time?

KIRCHHOFF: It’s a number of things, and when you add them up, they really are quite frightening. Hypersonic weapons, because of the way they maneuver, don’t necessarily have to follow a ballistic trajectory. We have very sophisticated space-based systems that can detect the launch of a missile, particularly a nuclear missile, but right then you’re immediately calculating where it’s going to go based on its ballistic trajectory. Well, a hypersonic weapon can steer. It can turn left, it can turn right, it can dive up, it can dive down.

COWEN: But that’s distinct from hypersonic, right?

KIRCHHOFF: Well, ICBMs don’t have the same maneuverability. That’s one factor that makes hypersonic weapons different. Second is just speed. With an ICBM launch, you have 20 to 25 minutes or so. This is why the rule for a presidential nuclear decision conference is, you have to be able to get the president online with his national security advisers in, I think, five or seven minutes. The whole system is timed to defeat adversary threats. The whole continuity-of-government system is upended by the timeline of hypersonic weapons.

Oh, by the way, there’s no way to defend against them, so forget the fact that they’re nuclear capable — if you want to take out an aircraft carrier or a service combatant, or assassinate a world leader, a hypersonic weapon is a fantastic way to do it. Watch them very carefully because more than anything else, they will shift the balance of military power in the next five years.

COWEN: Do you think they shift the power to China in particular, or to larger nations, or nations willing to take big chances? At the conceptual level, what’s the nature of the shift, above and beyond whoever has them?

KIRCHHOFF: Well, right now, they’re incredibly hard to produce. Right now, they’re essentially in a research and development phase. The first nation that figures out how to make titanium just a little bit more heat resistant, to make the guidance systems just a little bit better, and enables manufacturing at scale — not just five or seven weapons that are test-fired every year, but 25 or 50 or 75 or 100 — that really would change the balance of power in a remarkable number of military scenarios.

COWEN: How much China has them now? Are you at liberty to address that? They just have one or two that are not really that useful, or they’re on the verge of having 300?

KIRCHHOFF: What’s in the media and what’s been discussed quite a bit publicly is that China has more successful R&D tests of hypersonic weapons. Hypersonic weapons are very difficult to make fly for long periods. They tend to self-destruct at some point during flight. China has demonstrated a much fuller flight cycle of what looks to be an almost operational weapon.

COWEN: Where is Russia in this space?

KIRCHHOFF: Russia is also trying. Russia is developing a panoply of Dr. Evil weapons. The latest one to emerge in public is this idea of putting a nuclear payload on a satellite that would effectively stop modern life as we know it by ending GPS and satellite communications. That’s really somebody sitting in a Dr. Evil lair, stroking their cat, coming up with ideas that are game-changing. They’ve come up with a number of other weapons that are quite striking — supercavitating torpedoes that could take out an entire aircraft carrier group. Advanced states are now coming up with incredibly potent weapons.

Intelligent and interesting throughout.  Again, I am happy to recommend Christopher’s recent book Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Future of War, co-authored with Raj M. Shah.

What should I ask Paula Byrne?

by  Tyler Cowen in

From Wikipedia:

Paula Jayne Byrne, Lady Bate…is a British biographer, novelist, and literary critic.

Byrne has a PhD in English literature from the University of Liverpool, where she also studied for her MA, having completed a BA in English and Theology at West Sussex Institute of Higher Education (now Chichester University).

Byrne is the founder and chief executive of a small charitable foundation, ReLit: The Bibliotherapy Foundation, dedicated to the promotion of literature as a complementary therapy in the toolkit of medical practitioners dealing with stress, anxiety and other mental health conditions. She is also a practicing psychotherapist, specializing in couples and family counseling.

Byrne, who is from a large working-class Roman Catholic family in Birkenhead, is married to Sir Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare scholar and former Provost of Worcester College, Oxford

Her books cover Jane Austen, Mary Robinson, Evelyn Waugh, Barbara Pym, JFK’s sister, two novels, and her latest is a study of Thomas Hardy’s women, both in his life and in his fiction, namely Hardy’s Women: Mother, Sister, Wives, Muses.  Here is her home page.  Here is Paula on Twitter.

Risers and Fallers, mostly Fallers

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is a fun post by Arnold Kling on which thinkers have kept name recognition and also influence.  Excerpt:

Sociology (Erving Goffman, Talcott Parsons, Robert Nisbet, Charles Murray, Matt Granovetter, Robert Trivers, E.O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould)

Is there not a good case to be made that we are living in Erving Goffman’s world? I think he coined the term “impression management,” and certainly with the advent of social media that is now a big part of our lives. But he is a Faller. Probably if you would read him now, you would dismiss him as offering Blinding Glimpses of the Obvious. Parsons and Nisbet are also Fallers.

Murray is still polarizing, but much lesser known than he was in the 20th century. So he is a Faller, but too much of one.

Granovetter is a Riser, no? Social networks are a big deal now, and he is known for his work on those.

I put the sociobiology controversialists in the sociology category, since the public doesn’t care about insects or peacocks. I would say that Gould’s crusade against evolutionary biology failed, so he seems to be somewhat of a Faller. Dawkins and Trivers seem like Risers, but Wilson was much more well known, and controversial, in his prime.

Keynes, Tolkien, and Rand are among the risers (sometimes relatively speaking), so what does that tell us about the current world?

Does it matter who Satoshi was?

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:

It also matters if Satoshi was a single person or a small team. If a single person, that might mean future innovations are more likely than generally thought: If Satoshi is a lone individual, then maybe there there are more unknown geniuses out there. On the other hand, the Satoshi-as-a-team theory would mean that secrets are easier to keep than people think. If that’s the case, then maybe conspiracy theories are more true than most of us would care to admit.

According to many speculations, Satoshi came out of a movement obsessed with e-cash and e-gold mechanisms, dating to the 1980s. People from those movements who have been identified as potential Satoshi candidates include Nick Szabo, Hal Finney, Wei Dai, David Chaum and Douglas Jackson, among others. At the time, those movements were considered failures because their products did not prove sustainable. The lesson here would be that movements do not truly and permanently fail. It is worth experimenting in unusual directions because something useful might come out of those efforts.

If Peter Todd is Satoshi, then it’s appropriate to upgrade any estimates of the ability of very young people to get things done. Todd would have been working on Bitcoin and the associated white paper as a student in his early 20s. At the same time, if the more mainstream Adam Back is involved, then maybe the takeaway is that rebellious young people should seek out older mentors on matters of process and marketing.

I believe that in less than two years we will know who Satoshi is.

The MR Podcast–Oil Shocks, Price Controls and War

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Our second podcast on the 1970s titled Oil Shocks, Price Controls and War is now available! Here’s one bit:

Tabarrok: …Sheikh Ahmed Yamani, in a famous statement, he was the oil minister for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, he’s a leader of OPEC, he says on October 16th, this is 10 days after the war begins, “This is a moment for which I have been waiting for a long time. The moment has come. We are masters of our own commodity.” They raise the price of oil. Oil production falls by about 9 percent to 10 percent. That doesn’t seem on the surface to be a huge amount, but it reveals something which people had not been prepared for, and that was the inelasticity of oil demand.

I would put it this way. I think this is the key idea here. Almost accidentally, the exporting countries had discovered that the demand for oil was more inelastic than anyone had ever realized. The main lesson they drew before 1973, the oil exporting countries thought that the only way to increase revenues was to produce more. After 1973, they learned that an even better way to increase revenues was to produce less.

Here’s another:

COWEN: Since the 1980s, economists, for a number of reasons, have underrated real shocks as a source of business cycles and downturns. You have the Keynesians who didn’t want to talk about it, and then you had the Monetarists, Milton Friedman, who wanted to promote their own recipe, and people just stopped talking about it. Even 2008, which clearly had a lot to do with a major negative shock to aggregate demand, but the price of oil is quite high at the time when that’s breaking, and it was a major factor behind the downturn.

TABARROK: Absolutely.

COWEN: No one wants to talk about that.

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