And if Arwa Mahdawi were an economist

That folks don’t know about economics is fair enough - there are blindspots among economists about football, needlepoint, literature and how to get the tops off jars - but there do sometimes occur those moments where economists get told what they already know:

I am not an economist, but it seems to me that one way companies can end the labour shortage is by paying people more and treating them better. A few forward-thinking employers are trying this unusual strategy. For the most part, however, companies seem to be demanding that the government bail them out by creating conditions that give them their pool of desperate and easy-to-exploit workers back. The US’s largest lobbying group, for example, is trying to pressure the government to end unemployment benefits.

Even in the US no one is arguing for the end of unemployment benefits. Rather, the end of the extra payments, the widened definition of who qualifies, which leads to some 25% (some say 50%) of the American workforce having higher incomes from not working. As Richard Layard has been known to point out, if you pay people not to work then people will not work.

But to the larger point being made. When there’s a shortage of labour then why not pay people more? Well, yes, this is what Karl Marx was rabbiting on about with his reserve army of the unemployed. If there are those crustless waifs a’wailin’ outside the factory gates then the capitalists never do need to raise wages in order to gain more labour. Thus improvements in productivity and profits accrue solely to the capitalists.

The moment full employment is reached - something that depends upon the structure of the labour market as to what actually is full employment - then in order to gain more labour to exploit, to expropriate from, the seeker after more labour must offer a better deal than can be got elsewhere. Further, that better deal needs to be on offer to the current workforce to stop their leaving for it elsewhere.

This is the very mechanism by which wages rise with productivity over time. This is the how and why of rising living standards. This coming with our usual observation that if even an economist as odd as Marx can get this right then the rest of us should find it easy enough.

The observation works the other way too. The number of those quitting their jobs for others is a good guide to how close to full employment we are. Which is why the number is tracked in a monthly report. Graphed even. And, if we’re getting a record high number of quits - that indicator of full employment - while we still have an unemployment rate of 5.8% - which isn’t full employment - then we must be doing something to screw up the structure of the labour market as to what actually is full employment.

Seeing one sign of full employment while not having full employment is indeed that signal that something is wrong. Actually, it’s the proof required to start muttering about how the expansion and extension of unemployment insurance benefits needs to be curbed.

That not everyone knows economics is just fine, as with knowing how to take the tops off jars. But it does grate when the “what if?” supposition is exactly the point that economists have considered, have thought through and have come up with an answer to.

Why does the US have record quits and also a high unemployment rate? Because unemployment benefits are currently too high.

Funding residential care

Roughly 1 in 25 of the total population aged 65 and over live in care homes, a figure that rises to nearly 1 in 7 of those aged 85 years and over. Residential social care is expensive, though most people will not need it. The majority of those who are in care homes suffer from dementia or severe memory loss.

As people are living longer, there is pressure on governments to ensure that it is adequately funded, and several different approaches have been suggested to achieve that to ensure that everyone who needs residential care will receive it.

One proposal is to copy the NHS, and have a state-run service paid for out of taxation and free at the point of consumption. A problem with this is that the cost in higher taxes might be more than people are prepared to pay, and more that they are prepared to vote for. There is the added problem that if it were done in this way, demand would rise, perhaps steeply. People currently ready to make sacrifices to care for elderly relatives in their homes would expect the state to take care of them instead. There would probably be self-selection as people opted to receive the free state care, and perhaps even “granny dumping” as people shifted the burden of care onto the state. The costs, like those of the NHS, could be expected to spiral.

An alternative method, proposed by Theresa May’s government, would be to have those with assets and incomes, including their homes, above a certain level, paying towards the costs of their residential care. The proposal was reckoned to have been an electoral disaster because elderly people want their assets to be handed down to their children rather than being consumed in what might be years of residential care. Their children, not surprisingly, take a similar view. The plan, dubbed a “granny tax” was reckoned to have contributed to Mrs. May’s loss of her Parliamentary majority, and future plans incorporating the same principle are unlikely to find favour with politicians.

Another method could be to have residential care funded on an insurance basis, with people paying premiums throughout their working lives to cover residential care should they later need it. It would have to be compulsory to prevent non-payers who needed care becoming a state liability. Such insurance would have to be handled by private providers rather than government, or it would simply become taxation by another name, and subject to all the drawbacks that has.

More attractive still might be a plan like a pension fund that people would build up over their working lives, so that it could pay the care home costs of those who needed it, while remaining the property of those who did not. For the most part, the people funding their residential care if needed would be themselves when younger, in employment, and paying into their fund. It does involve people paying more out of their earnings to build up the funds, but unlike taxation they would not see it as money taken from them because it would remain their property and would be passed on as part of their inheritance when they died.

The difficulty lies in the transition to such a system. It might be fine for young and middle-aged people to build up such funds, but some provision has to be made for those approaching the time when they might need residential care but haven’t had time to build up sufficient funds. There is no easy answer to this, but a massive sell-off of state assets, especially land, might be used to pay into people’s funds to build them up quickly to an adequate level.

There is also the political problem that this is a long-term solution, whereas politician have time horizons that reach only to the next election. Politicians might find it easier to offer people money that will be paid for by future earners long after the present politicians have moved on. And those private funds might well attract future Chancellors looking hungrily for new taxes.

Busting the 'pull factor' myth

Listen to any Parliamentary debate on the question of whether to allow asylum seekers to work in the UK and the principal objection is immediately clear; doing so will create an economic pull factor for illegal migrants, who will jump on a small boat or the back of a lorry and immediately start making money at the expense of British workers, whilst adding to the backlog of asylum claims. This argument is underpinned by the assumptions that the majority of asylum seekers are in fact economic migrants who choose to move to the UK to enhance their employment prospects, and that they have enough detailed knowledge about each individual country’s asylum systems to make informed choices about destinations, a concept otherwise known as ‘asylum shopping.’ These predications form the basis of current Home Office policy guidance which prescribes ‘a clear distinction between economic migration and asylum that discourages those who do not need protection from claiming asylum to benefit from economic opportunities that they would not otherwise be eligible for.’ 

So determined is the Home Office to remove any such pull factor out of the equation that, since 2002, the UK has notably been the only country in Europe to enforce a 12-month ban on asylum seekers’ employment rights; in Germany there is a wait of three months and in Italy only two.  Even after the 12 month period, they are restricted to occupations listed in the Government’s Shortage Occupation List, which includes professional ballerinas and numbered orchestral string players, rendering their access to the labour market superficial.

You might be sympathetic to this policy if it had any real grounding in empirical research. It does not. First of all, when discussing reasons for irregular migration, an understanding of push factors is arguably far more imperative. There is clear evidence that conflict is the single most significant factor associated with asylum claims in Europe. Considering this, it is not surprising that qualitative studies have shown that many asylum seekers, particularly women and young men, do not even know their final destination when fleeing conflict, this being decided either by their families, smugglers, or other agents. 

More importantly, the perceived pull factor of superior career prospects does not factor in asylum seekers’ decision making when fleeing to the UK. In fact, studies which have looked into the links between European asylum policies and the number of asylum applications received in each country have found no correlation between labour market access for asylum seekers and an increase in asylum applications. In actuality, asylum seekers have reported little to no knowledge of the UK’s asylum policies on arrival, despite the longevity of the 12-month ban, and assume that they will be expected to work in order to support themselves. Many do not know how to claim asylum, and some do not even know what asylum is until they arrive. Such limited knowledge of UK asylum policy clearly disproves the notion of asylum shopping; removing the permission to work has had no demonstrable impact on asylum seekers’ decisions to seek refuge.  

It’s also worth pointing out that an abundant availability of illegal work is likely to be of far greater attraction to irregular migrants who have no legitimate claim to asylum than legal labour market access to those awaiting a decision on their claim. The OECD has cited the illegal employment of foreign workers as a major pull factor for irregular migration, calling for labour market and migration policies which facilitate legal pathways to work. Ironically then, by refusing to allow asylum seekers to work, the Government is creating its own pull factor.

Well might the Government insist that its remaining work ban on asylum seekers is an appropriate policy response to the refugee crisis. However, it is a policy response to the perceived anti-immigrant feeling amongst the voting public, (which is in itself a fallacy considering 71% of people polled by Refugee Action agreed that people seeking asylum should be given the right to work), rather than a response to well-evidenced research. Moreover, this policy encourages, rather than dissuades, illegal migration by those who see economic opportunities in the informal sector, which only serves to undermine the ‘pull factor’ argument. It is surely time for the Government to see sense; to halve the waiting time to sixth months and to dispose of the inadequate Shortage Occupation List. To do so is to listen to the real evidence.

Now let us all praise the achievements of Bolivarian socialism

Socialism - by which we mean the proper thing, not simply some intense form of social democracy - never does actually work. At which point a certain hat tip to The Guardian. Over the years their opinion pages have been full of laudations and paeans to that Bolivarian socialism imposed in Venezuela. How the arrival of a properly democratic economy, the full use of Modern Monetary Theory, fixing prices to make sure that food is properly affordable, sticking it to those Damn Yankees, have or will, real soon now, create a paradise upon Earth. Their news pages have, at the same time, reported rather more faithfully on what has actually been happening:

The continuing exodus of millions of Venezuelans is reaching “a tipping point” as the response to the crisis remains critically underfunded.

More than 5.6 million have left the country since 2015, when it had a population of 30 million, escaping political, economic and social hardships.

A useful guide to the success or not of a polity is to look at the direction of the population flow. Of course, individuals might move in either direction for any number of reasons. But if the net flow is outward then we can assume that there’s something that socioeconomic system isn’t offering which other places are. If inward then something is being done right. When 20% of the population walk out of the place it’s a reasonable assumption that something or other isn’t on offer.

Funny how those migration flows have tended to be out of those socialist places really, isn’t it? Almost as if the system doesn’t produce something that humans find desirable.

Still, in that spirit of finding silver linings wherever possible we do have to admit that the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart doesn’t have the machine guns pointing inwards.

Yet.

Cutting the regulatory deadwood

It was Milton Friedman who told us that nothing is so permanent as a temporary government programme. The same can be said of government regulations. They accumulate as new ones are added and the old ones stay in place. This is often true even if the old ones have been rendered obsolete by technological developments or changes in practices.

Regulation is a cost, even when it is a worthwhile one. It makes production more expensive and often reflects itself in increased prices. In many cases the tight regulations imposed on one country can make its goods unable to compete internationally against those from countries with more sympathetic regulatory regimes.

As the UK government seeks to take full advantage of its new status outside the EU and not having to accept regulations imposed from afar, there are several approaches it might take to hack away at the accumulated deadwood built up over the years that now burdens its businesses.

One involves the use of “sunset” clauses, under which when a new regulation is introduced, a termination date is set upon it so that it will expire on that date unless it is renewed. Even if it is renewed, the process of doing so brings it up into question, and provides the opportunity for evaluating its effects, and for introducing possible modifications that will lighten its load without losing any of its advantages.

A second way to reduce the regulatory overhang is to institute a policy of “one in, two out,” which specifies that a new regulation can only be introduced if two old ones are deleted. This motivates those seeking a new regulation to lobby for the repeal of old ones no longer seen to be as necessary as they once were. In pursuing this strategy, it is important to guard against the possibility of repealing only minor regulations of little consequence to make way for ones that have serious impact.

A third way was pioneered by Dan Quayle, who served as Vice-President under George H Bush from 1989 to 1993. He headed a Council on Competitiveness established by President Bush in 1989 to review regulations issued by Federal agencies, with the aim of ensuring that they did not unduly harm the competitiveness of American business. The Vice-President’s Council attracted the ire of Federal agencies and would-be lawmakers in Congress. It was described as “the roach motel of Congressional bills” after a popular pest control product of the time that lured cockroaches into a cardboard box and poisoned them. It was called a roach motel, and the TV ads featured the voice of Mohammed Ali saying, “they check in but they don’t check out.” It happened to regulations and bills that were deemed anti-competitive by the Council.

All three of these approaches could play a key role in a post-Brexit deregulatory strategy. Certainly a UK version of the Council on Competitiveness could provide a useful tool to explore and debate the anti-competitive aspects not only of proposed new regulations, but of existing ones as well. It might protect us from ill-thought-out new proposals, as well as clearing out the deadwood of past ones.

An example of thoroughly missing the point

Bob Seeley, who is apparently a Conservative MP, demonstrates how easy it is to thoroughly miss the point. He’s talking about the planning system and how it must not be changed to allow anything to be built anywhere near any of his constituents. We think we’ve got that nub of the argument correct there:

Second, planning should be environment-led. Low-density, greenfield housing is unsustainable on so many levels. Yet it is argued that as many as 400,000 homes are still planned on greenfield sites in the South in the next five years.

Idea: we need a greenfield tax, the proceeds of which should be spend on brownfield clean-up to pay for and prioritise building on the 36,600 hectares of brownfield land in this country. The developers will squeal. But, to paraphrase Billy Bragg, whose side are we on?

Well, yes, whose side are we on? For us the ideal is simple enough - whatever planning system used should deliver housing that people wish to live in in places where people wish to live. Bob Seeley MP seems to have a different idea about this:

And levelling up; many Red Wall colleagues are beginning to realise how the South-East housing obsession damages them. Why? Because the current housing methodology "systematically disadvantages poorer parts of the country, particularly in the North and Midlands … where investment is more in need", according to one expert report.

A useful summation being that people should live where Bob Seeley thinks they should in housing that Bob Seeley thinks is adequate for them. We’d note that Lady Bountiful has always been put forward as a satire of a certain sort of conservatism, not a paragon to be emulated.

It’s simple enough to show that this, possibly disparaging, summation is correct. The only justification for the entire mess of Green Belt, no greenfield, not in the SE and definitely nowhere near any of my voters set of restrictions is that without the restrictions then that’s where housing would be built. Which does rather mean that people wish to live in greenfield, possibly Green Belt, housing in the SE. The very argument for the restrictions is to stop people gaining what they desire.

The entire point of having an economy - heck, a civilisation - is that folks get more of what they desire.

As we’ve noted before the only planning change currently required is to blow up the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 and successors. For the 1930s, before that abomination, was the last time the nation built the housing that people desired where they wished it to be.

Recovering freedoms

The recovery of freedoms for the people of the UK was to have been June 21st, but now is put back possibly until July 19th. There will undoubtedly be people after that date who will attempt to keep some of the restrictions in place simply because they like to tell people what to do. They will be egged on by self-styled scientists making spurious claims. We must be vigilant and determined if we are to reacquire the freedoms we enjoyed prior to the pandemic, and which the vaccine programme makes possible again.

We want the freedom not to be ordered what to wear, not to be confined indoors or only allowed out under limited circumstances. Nor must we be prevented from receiving visitors into the home without limit on numbers or on relationships.

We wish not to be prevented from travel, nor having to produce “valid reasons” for doing so. We must be able to return freely to this country without restrictions or requirements.

We need to be able to freely associate with others in such numbers and in such places as people may want, and not to be prevented from engaging in group activities. We need the freedom to engage in or watch sports, concerts, theatres and cinemas.

And most assuredly there must be no requirement to have permits for legitimate activities, nor to submit to questions about lawful pursuits.

All of the above freedoms must be restored, and the Acts that restricted them must be allowed to expire or be expunged. If such restrictions are ever needed again, Parliament can pass enabling legislation again if necessary. But they must leave the Statute Book until such a time.

In addition to having these basic freedoms restored, we must now put the case for “surplus freedoms” that people should acquire or reacquire to compensate for the temporary loss of the ones listed above.

These should include the freedom to speak one’s mind without fear of police action or criminal proceedings or criminal record, even if some people find the remarks offensive, or lead them to feel “unsafe.”

These “surplus freedoms” should include the freedom to engage in open debate that does not advocate physical violence against others, and to be able to do so on public platforms without authorities being able to prevent this by excluding certain people or subjects.

Hospitality businesses should have the freedom to continue to have tables outside that cause no public nuisance. And property owners should be able to develop their property in ways that cause no nuisance to others without the need for official approval.

A most welcome freedom would be a five-year moratorium, publicly announced as a commitment, against any new measures to restrict or discourage what people want to eat or drink. Having been under daily attack for many years by those who want to punish us for consuming what they disapprove of, it would be a most welcome pause, and even better if it were then made permanent.

Nuclear Fission, Fusion and Fiction

Today’s nuclear plants are expensive and produce waste that remains radioactive for thousands of years.  Some people consider them dangerous but that, Chernobyl excepted, is more potential than real. Like the original atom bomb, the energy is from fission – breaking apart large atoms such as uranium.  Since the 1940s, the hope has been to produce clean energy the opposite way, namely by fusing isotopes of the smallest atom, hydrogen, to produce helium and large amounts of electricity which do not depend on the wind blowing or the sun shining.  This is how the sun and all other stars produce light and heat. The trouble is that the hydrogen isotopes, deuterium and tritium, have positive nuclei and are extremely reluctant to fuse. Stars use their massive gravitational forces to overcome this reluctance but we have no means of replicating anything like those forces on earth. 

Never ones to let such obstacles get in the way, researchers claim they can deliver commercial fusion power, if not by 2050, then at least by the end of the century.The research budgets have grown: in October 2019, the UK committed “£220M to the conceptual design of a fusion power station – the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP).” “A ‘tokamak’ is a machine that confines a plasma using magnetic fields in a donut shape that scientists call a torus. [It can also be spherical.] Fusion energy scientists believe that tokamaks are the leading plasma confinement concept for future fusion power plants.” The Russians invented this technology around 1958 and the word “tokamak” is an acronym of its description in Russian. The plasma process is explained later. 

The US Department of Energy’s Office of Fusion Science spends “approximately $700M per year.” On the 16th June, the UK Atomic Energy Authority announced an agreement with the Canadian start-up company, General Fusion, to build a £400M demonstration plant at the authority’s Culham campus.  Note that this will not actually produce any electricity, it will just show how that might be done. Of course, we would be considering far larger sums for the real thing; the budget for ITER, the European fusion project, is US $22bn. The US Department of Energy thinks it will cost $65bn. 

We need to look at these mutually repulsive isotopes a little closer.  Hydrogen, as most people know, is a single proton. Deuterium has the same proton with a neutron attached. Tritium is an isotope of hydrogen with a half-life of 12 years with the same old proton but now with two neutrons. It is produced as a by-product in nuclear fission reactors, and would also be formed in fusion reactors by using liquid lithium as the primary coolant. 

When deuterium and tritium nuclei fuse, they form helium kinetic energy. There are many other candidate atoms that could emit energy and power but as the lighter they are, the (relatively) easier it is to produce energy by fusing them, these two isotopes of hydrogen seem the way to go.  We have heard a lot about hydrogen as the clean fuel of the future but it has, as 1930s airship makers found out, its dangers.  If large scale fusion energy worked, the r helium output might be available as fuel in place of the combustible hydrogen. Apparently, whilst it is rare on earth, there is plenty of helium-3 (helium-3 is regular helium with each atom short of a neutron) on the moon and 25 tons of the stuff would power the USA for a year. But this is speculation. 

In terms of energy per unit mass, the yield of fusion is much greater than that of the fission of heavy elements like uranium. This is why nuclear weapons rapidly evolved from fission bombs to hydrogen (fusion) bombs. That leads to the thought that the hybrid fission/fusion model used by hydrogen bombs might be controlled and used for electricity generation in place of the purely fusion models now being pursued.  Unfortunately nuclear fission is only hot and dense enough in a critical mass of several kilogrammes of uranium or plutonium. Then there is a massive nuclear explosion, which would not be popular with the locals. The temperatures that can be safely reached in a controlled nuclear fission device, i.e. a reactor, are way too low for fusion to occur in a deuterium-tritium or deuterium-deuterium mixture. 

Returning to the fundamental problem of getting the two repulsive isotopes to coalesce, one must first collect minute quantities of deuterium from the sea, or wherever, and tritium from those fission reactors you are trying to get rid of. Whilst deuterium is rare on earth, there is plenty in the wider reaches of the solar system, notably on Jupiter, which may be of comfort for the longer term.  Sourcing deuterium, otherwise known as “heavy hydrogen”, in small quantities on this planet for pilot fusion plants is not a major problem; every million atoms of hydrogen taken from the sea yields about 156 atoms of deuterium.  Doing that on a commercial scale, however, might prove more challenging.  

Next, the two isotopes in the form of gases have to be mixed and made into a very, very hot plasma heated by an ionising electric current.  Note that it takes a lot of energy to get the hydrogen, and then the deuterium, and then heat the mixed gas to, say, 100M Kelvin - roughly the same as degrees Celsius and six times hotter than the sun’s core. At these temperatures, the gas becomes a plasma, i.e. a high energy state of matter in which the electrons are stripped away and move freely about.  It is the high temperature that gives the isotopes enough energy to overcome their mutual repulsion. If you are wondering how I know all this, this blog was based on emails from a respected physicist who prefers not to be named as he is not a specialist fusion scientist.  

We are not done yet. Tritium is radioactive and may leak from reactors. There may well be substantial environmental radioactivity releases.  The plasma vessel can only be handled remotely for the year after use. Lithium is used as the buffer material but availability of that too, thanks to heavy use for batteries, is threatened.  It is even claimed we will run out in 2025. There are plenty more engineering and production issues to resolve, and differing methodologies to select, but we need not consider those now.  They all add up to a colossal energy requirement to fuel and operate a nuclear fusion plant.  So far no one has managed to make a fusion device produce more energy out than in, for more than several seconds. If we do, will we have to trawl the solar system to gather the raw materials? 

It does not look like anyone yet knows the answers to all of the above issues.  We will hear of “break-throughs” and some will be real and some mythical, “cold fusion” for example.  Nevertheless, it seems certain that nuclear fusion will make little or no contribution to zero carbon by 2050.    

The difference between make and receive

We’re noting one of those little linguistic changes that are designed to deceive:

Covid jabs for billions of humans will earn their makers billions of dollars

The word “earn” usually means, with respect to corporate matters, the profit made, not the revenue:

We look at the drug firms – led by Pfizer and Moderna – that are set to profit most in an unprecedented global vaccination drive

The one thing the rest of the article does not even mention is profit.

Pfizer and Moderna, which are charging $30-plus per person for the required two shots in Europe and the US, will take the lion’s share. Analysts believe they could make more than $50bn in revenues collectively from their Covid jabs this year.

Everything is about revenue. And that’s not, entirely not, the same thing. Yet there’s - OK, to our eyes there is - a determined effort underway to blur this vital distinction. We see it when people talk about the taxation of Amazon for example. Reference is made to revenues - that hundred billion or whatever it is - and the tax bill on the profits. But the revenue isn’t the same as the earnings, the amount made. The comparison between tax paid on earnings and gross revenue misleads - deliberately we think - vastly more than it reveals.

We’ve been through all this before of course. Time was that poverty meant crustless waifs being stuffed up chimneys to avoid their actual starvation. Then came the idea of relative poverty - being in a household with less than 60% of median earnings - and over time that distinction of “relative” was dropped. Leading to people insisting, with an entirely straight face, that Poland has less child poverty than the UK, a place thrice as rich. That’s not how the actual, as opposed to relative, living standards of children work out in reality.

The general realisation that the word has changed meaning in such propaganda takes some time to arrive. By which time the work is done, all are convinced that not having the third pair of trainers like the kids down the road is the same as being crustless - or even to be stuffed up a chimney - and that revenue is the same as profits, that to receive money is the same as to make it.

We should recognise this for what it is, propaganda, not explanation.

This is all something folks can - and will - work out for themselves

A certain inability to understand what people are capable of seems in evidence here:

Workers must be given a right to do their jobs from home, Labour has demanded as it piled pressure on the government not to let its consultation on flexible working be kicked into the long grass.

Hmm:

“Boss, I wanna work from home!”

“Tim, you’re a waiter.”

“Ah, yes, bit of a problem that….”

It is not possible for all jobs to be done from home. Not even that bit where the forks are polished is going to work that way. So, the actual demand is:

Rayner said: “As restrictions lift and we adjust to a ‘new normal’, we need a new deal for working people. As a starting point, this must mean the right to flexible working – not just the right to ask for flexibility – and a duty on employers to accommodate this unless there is a reason a certain job can’t be done flexibly.

So each and every discussion about whether a job can - or will - be done flexibly is going to be a negotiation between worker and employer. Because that’s where that discussion of whether it is possible or not is going to take place, between those two parties.

Which is where the discussion is going to be anyway, whether Angela Rayner gets her new law passed or not. Because that’s where discussions about the details of working arrangements take place right now, always have done, always will.

What happens to the wider economy is the summed and aggregate outcome of all of those individual decisions and negotiations. Rather like - well, exactly the same as - that wider economy anyway, it’s the summed and aggregate outcome of the 65 million of us making arrangements, taking decisions and negotiating with each other.

Folks, you know, adult human beings and all that, are entirely capable of having such conversations about who will do what in which manner. A goodly part of the art of governance is in leaving ‘em be to do so.