Steve Reads

Level-zero programmers obsess over essentially unimportant details of programming: whether you should write blocks like

void someFunction(void) {
    printf "Yes\n";
}

or like

void someFunction(void)
{
    printf "Yes\n";
}

, for instance, or whether to use vim or emacs to edit your code. These are unimportant for at least a couple reasons. First, you can solve these sorts of style problems in an entirely automated way. Second, there are many, many things that are more important than these sort of nits; they don’t even really impact your code’s readability, for one. These details don’t even count as ‘style’. They’re purely mechanical.

A level-zero English-language writer pays attention to Strunk & White. What’s odd about Strunk & White is that, far from being about The Elements of Style like its name suggests, it’s really The Elements of Grammar. True, grammar does matter. Inasmuch as “style” means “writing to appeal to your audience,” and inasmuch as your audience cares about little grammar nits, grammar is important. Grammar, in this view, is arbitrary but important. It’s like the location of the silverware at dinner, or like not chewing with your mouth full: it’s an arbitrary convention that certain groups of people pay attention to. It’s a class identifier. Using “whom” properly, or not ending a sentence with a preposition, is a class identifier. It’s a way to signal to people of your class that you’re one of them. Others will completely miss the signal, which doesn’t make them rubes; it just means that they don’t subscribe to your particular class signals. So call it Elements of Writing For The Wealthy, perhaps.

But even with that caveat out of the way, and even if you don’t agree with Language Log that Strunk & White is a pile of trash, it’s still the case that The Elements of Style is wildly, comically unimportant to the act of writing readable text. Whether you use “whom” properly (and I’m a dues-paying member of the Whom-Using Board Of Pedants) has practically nothing to do with whether people will read your writing all the way through to the end.

Grammar is important to get you off the ground, in a certain sense. Works riddled with typos are often hard to get through. Using commas where you mean to use semicolons will sound wrong in your reader’s ear if he’s trained to read them that way (so again, the rule “know your audience” is logically prior to the rule “use punctuation properly”).

But that’s just the point: this is level-zero stuff. These are the rules you pay attention to because they’re rote and mechanical, and thereby easier to remember and implement than “grab your reader with a good hook” or “use lots of examples when you’re arguing an abstract point.” They’re high-school rules; they’re not adult rules.

I spent two hours on Sunday trying to explain what makes this book as amazing as it is. I failed. I will try again soon. Until then, I’d just strongly advise you to go read it. It’s one of the few best books that I’ve read in the last five years. And it’s not at the top of the list only because I’ve read books like The Power Broker and Common Ground that are such landmarks. It’s definitely in the top five, though. So please, go read it.

(Current events coincidence: Cronon has been in the news lately for his investigations into the Republican legislation machine. I happened to read Cronon’s book on Krugman’s few-months-old suggestion, but otherwise this is just a coincidence.)

Repeat after me: there is no Social Security crisis. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s turn the microphone over to the Congressional Budget Office from July of last year:

CBO estimates the 75 year actuarial balance to be -0.6 percent of gross domestic product (GDP); that is, under current law, the resources dedicated to financing the program over the next 75 years fall short of the benefits that will be owed to beneficiaries by about 0.6 percent of GDP. That figure is the amount by which the Social Security payroll tax would have to be raised or scheduled benefits reduced for the system’s revenues to be sufficient to cover scheduled benefits. In other words, to bring the program into actuarial balance over the 75 years, payroll taxes would have to be increased immediately by 0.6 percent of GDP and kept at that higher rate, or scheduled benefits would have to be reduced by an equivalent amount, or some combination of those changes and others would have to be implemented.

Once the temporary Social Security tax reduction goes away, we’ll be back to 7.65% for OASDI + Medicare Part A. So what the CBO is telling us is that we could increase the tax from 7.65% to 8.25% immediately and solve the problem for the next 75 years.

CBO also lays out some policy options, and how much of the 0.6%-of-GDP gap each of them would close. One option is to eliminate the cap on the Social Security payroll tax, so that income above $106,800 would also pay the 6.2% OASDI tax. If we did this, the 0.6% gap would close by … wait for it … 0.6%. (See the chart on page xi.)

Now then. You typically hear it said that people will have to work longer in order to close the gap. “Working longer” means “delaying when people can receive Social Security retirement benefits,” which in turn (because people have finite lives) means “decreasing the total amount that people will receive in retirement benefits over their lives.” That’s the whole point: make them work longer so that Social Security pays out less.

Since Social Security is the major source of income for a large fraction of Americans (I’ll find a citation for that; I just saw it cited the other day), and it’s not the major source of income for wealthy people, “increasing the retirement age” is another way of saying “decreasing benefits for the poor and middle-income Americans.” The CBO says that doing this would close about half the gap. (See the same chart on page xi.)

On the other side, we could tax higher-income earners. Taxing income above $107,000 would affect approximately the top 13% of tax returns, and would solve the entire Social Security “problem” in one fell swoop.

So, to review, two available options are

• increase the retirement age, which, virtually by definition, is equivalent to cutting benefits for poor and middle-income earners, and would solve half the problem.

• remove the cap on Social Security taxes, which would affect the top 13% of tax returns and solve the entire problem.

Please keep this in mind whenever you hear some Very Serious Person intone that we’ll all need to tighten our belts and work longer to keep Social Security afloat.

(Attention conservation notice: 2100 words about a book that will make you jealous: The Box is a terrific read about shipping containers, of all things. It’s like if you spent every day using your Honda Civic’s gear shift, then one day found that someone had written The Lowly Honda Civic Gear Shift and How It Will Change Everything and made millions off it. “I should have written that!” you say. But you didn’t write it. Marc Levinson did, and he did it better than you (or I) would. He did it incredibly well, in fact.)

Why do cities form where they do? Why do they grow to the sizes they do? One popular answer has to do with companies’ desire to be near their customers and near their suppliers. Much of Krugman et al.’s magnum opus, for instance, is based around this idea. The idea, in turn, depends critically upon transportation costs. Imagine instead that you could get products to your customers, and components from your suppliers, via a teleportation machine that magically conveyed them at no cost to you. Would you still need to locate your company near your customers? It seems unlikely. You might still put your company near where your suppliers are, so that you could draw on a pool of specialized talent when it came time to hire. But that teleportation machine would radically change your business.

We may have arrived at the teleportation era. As Glaeser and Kohlhase put it, “it is better to assume that moving goods is essentially costless than to assume that moving goods is an important component of the production process.”

Imagine the steps involved in moving a dishwasher from Maytag in Newton, Iowa to somewhere in the French countryside 40 to 50 years ago. It might be loaded on a train in Iowa, conveyed to the Port of New York, unloaded from the train by a burly longshoreman, loaded onto a ship, carried across the ocean, unloaded by another burly longshoreman on the Brittany coast, loaded manually into a train, brought to a major French city, then loaded onto a truck and brought to the countryside. Maytag would typically hire a cargo-forwarding company to handle all these details. The shipping costs in many cases were a double-digit percentage of the final cost of the product.

One of the main reasons why these costs were so high is that the process was so labor-intensive. As Marc Levinson lays out in The Box, stevedores would fit miscellaneous bits of cargo in every available nook and cranny of a ship: bags of coffee alongside televisions alongside containers of solvent. They’d have to be laboriously packed and unpacked whenever the shift from ships to trains or trains to ships or trains to trucks happened. The more-than-occasional crate of whiskey or bag of coffee or box of electronics would go missing.

In retrospect the solution seems obvious: find some way to get machines to do this for us. Put everything in uniform containers. Then get cranes to pull the containers off ships and drop them on the backs of trucks. Cut humans out of the process altogether (apart from operating the cranes). Radically reduce the labor-intensity of the process. Do what capitalism does best: replace humans with machines.

To fully exploit the benefits of the process, there must be standardization, and the standardization must extend from ships to trucks to trains. The more specific rules people must remember (“this 30-foot container has a special coupling to clamp it to a 20-foot container, and of course the 20-foot container must sit atop the 30-foot one …”), the harder it is to scale. With standardization, machines can grab the containers, shift them off trains, shift them onto trucks, and keep moving without thinking. (A.N. Whitehead: “It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilisation advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.”)

How else might we keep pushing costs down? Well, if I’m a shipping company that sends a 20-foot container from Iowa to France, I need that container to come back to me somehow. I could just ask the ship to turn around after it deposits its goods in France and bring empty containers back to me, but that’s a ship that’s making no money — it’s just transporting empty boxes. To make back my costs, I need to charge customers for the outbound trip and the empty-box return trip. If I want to minimize idle shipping time, and thereby lower what I can charge customers, and thereby get more customers, I need to fill up that ship on the way back. This is easier when the trade gap between the two trading countries is near zero. Imagine, instead, that this is a ship traveling from China to L.A. The U.S. current-account deficit to China is quite large, meaning that there’s a lot of stuff coming from China and not a lot going back. So if a ship is going to make the circuit from the U.S. to China, it maybe will want to take a side trip from the U.S. to Japan before returning to China.

To lower prices, we’ll also want to put more boxes on board each boat. But here we run into problems: not all ports can handle monstrous ships carrying thousands of boxes. The Port of New York, as it turns out, was designed for the earlier era when stevedores manually unloaded cargo; they were caught completely unawares by the “containerization revolution.” Elizabeth, New Jersey invested many millions in containerizing their port, and they’re now the busiest port in the United States. New York is history.

Imagine the ships growing larger and larger. As Levinson says at the end of The Box, there will someday soon be ships larger than “Malacca-max,” which is the largest size of ship that can fit through the Strait of Malacca. (Should such a ship ever sink, it would take with it a billion dollars in cargo.) As these ships grow larger, and the cost per ton of goods thereby shrinks, it may become cost-effective to centralize shipping to a single port, say, on the East Coast of the United States, even though the goods would then have to travel a much longer distance by train. Levinson discusses the possibility of building a port on rather remote islands north of Scotland and shipping the goods to London from there; again, all of this becomes possible as the ships become larger.

All is not roses and sunshine and cheap iPhones, however. Throughout The Box, we see the longshoremen’s unions fighting tooth and nail against the mechanization of their jobs. I’ve been unable to find numbers on a quick scan, but Levinson suggests that stevedores have lost their jobs in droves. (What’s unclear to me is whether the increased volume of shipping has made up for decreased per-unit labor costs.)

Now that transportation costs are negligible, manufacturers will choose to locate their factories where labor costs are lowest, rather than locating them, say, in New York or Chicago or L.A. I don’t know enough economics to judge whether this is better for the world overall. It’s certainly brought jobs to China, whose suffering throughout the 20th century was the stuff of legend (“Finish what’s on your plate; there are kids starving in China.”)

As Karl Polanyi taught us, mechanization of everything is part and parcel of capitalism, and it is always and everywhere destructive. This may be “creative destruction,” as Joseph Alois Schumpeter put it, but it’s destruction nonetheless, and every capitalist society has done what it could to slow that destruction. I say “slow,” not “stop,” because it’s likely impossible to slow technological adoption. Stevedores seemed to know that they were eventually going to be automated out of jobs, so they negotiated contracts wherein shipping companies paid some of their savings from containerization into a fund for their employees. In the long term, I don’t know how well this worked out for stevedores — how many of them got help transitioning into new jobs, versus how many became decided to leave the labor force early, versus how many took jobs as supermarket checkout clerks because that was the best job they could find given their age and skill set. This mechanization of jobs happens continuously under capitalism, and we can expect it to continue. Librarians may lose their jobs because of Google and e-books; secretaries may lose them because of Microsoft Word and email. Many of these people have spent their lives doing exactly what we teach them that they’re supposed to do: train to become experts at their jobs and spend a lifetime working hard to gain mastery. They reach age 50 or 55, they get automated out of a job, and now what? A just society helps them either transition with dignity to a new job, or, when that seems impossible (for instance, because they’re too old to retrain), it helps them retire with a decent pension. And a decent society provides a high level of general education to everyone, so that it’s easier to transition from one job to another.

You could imagine a fantasy scenario wherein a perfectly rational, perfect omniscient corporation sees, 40 years in advance, that its business model is going to be rendered irrelevant. Better yet, corporations as a whole might, after centuries of watching the same pattern over and over, see that creative destruction is entirely predictable, and they might plan for it to protect their employees. But you can also very easily imagine the opposite (e.g., companies increasingly don’t expect their employees to stick around for more than five years, so there’s an equilibrium wherein companies don’t invest in their employees for the long term). And the opposite is much easier to imagine than the fantasy. Long story short, I don’t see any institution other than the government that’s in a position to guarantee workers job security or a dignified retirement. And given the GOP’s perennial desire to gut Social Security, I have my doubts even that the government is in a reliable position here.

Another classic capitalist pattern is the race to the bottom among state and national governments, and we see it in the shipping context as well. Ports invest millions and billions of dollars to accommodate larger and larger boats, and they take on the risk that no one will use them — or that some other port, likewise investing billions, will steal away all their business. As soon as it’s economically sensible for a shipping company to move to a cheaper port somewhere further down the coast, it will do so, leaving billions of dollars of wasted port investment.

There’s a concern, when reading a book like The Box, that you’ll get a monomaniacal focus on one single cause: that the author, having spent a decade researching shipping containers, will attribute everything in the modern world to that one cause. The big questions we’d want to ask are:

• how much international trade moves by ship?
• how much has the cost of final goods declined because the costs of shipping declined? How much has the cost of final goods declined for other reasons (like, for instance, because cheap manufacturing labor has become available in China)?
• how much did it cost for a given parcel to move, door-to-door, before and after the containerization revolution?
• how much did the increase in international trade have to do with containerization, and how much had to do with the rise of the Asian Tigers?

Levinson is not really in a position to answer these questions, both because they’re not his book’s focus and because the data aren’t available to answer many of them. It turns out to be hard to count total shipping costs, door to door, when large companies often got under-the-table discounts for bulk shipments. Levinson’s focus on containers sometimes makes him credit them when other causes seem just as likely — for instance, his assertion that Korean exports trebled thanks to the containerization of their ports. It seems just as likely to me that the rapid rise of the Korean economy, the Korean government’s support for domestic manufacturers (particularly export industries?), and massive capital investments had a lot to do with the rise of Korean exports. I don’t know one way or the other, but Levinson doesn’t address these other possibilities; his book leaves little room for that.

The Box is a terrific book indeed, and I think in no small part that’s because of his monomania. It’s a tautly told tale about the men who built up their container businesses before the world even knew that standardization would change everything, and at the same time it presents a flood of data in a highly readable way. It’s one of the few books I’ve read that manages to tell a good story and deliver data well. You’ll love it.

(Attention conservation notice: 1400 words thinking aloud about innovation, Apple-style, and what connection it might have to the standard, boring sort of competition that you read about in introductory economics.)

I’ve become somewhat obsessed with Apple in recent months (see “The iPhone is a gateway Apple product”). They’re an easy company to get obsessed over, because they build the best products. When Google was building the best products, like their search engine or the maps app, I was obsessed with them too. Most of their other products are quite good, but they’re not perfect in the way that the iPhone is, in the way that the Google search app is, or in the way that Google Maps is. Every time I use Google Calendar — and I use it, mind you, a dozen times a day — I’m reminded of all the things it could do better. I never think that about Google search or about the iPhone. They are perfect.

It’s been remarkable to watch Apple’s competitors. Apple invented the iPod 10 years ago, and it has owned the category ever since. Others have tried to compete with them, but haven’t managed to produce anything even comparably good. Likewise with the iPhone. When I remember what preceded the iPhone, my mind is kind of blown. Pre-iPhone phones were thought to be such poor computers that manufacturers decided to invent their own alternate universe, including their own poor substitute for HTML, rather than just put a fast computer in your pocket. Other companies have had four years to respond, including at least one company that makes a lot of money and should, by all rights, have beaten Apple at this game.

Yet they’ve not. Not even close. Android continues to be the technology of tomorrow, just as Linux has always been, and one strains not to say that it will always will be the technology of tomorrow.

I see in this the simplified picture of markets that we read about in introductory economics. Someone starts a company — say, a bakery making artisanal bread in a big city. There’s unmet demand for this bread, so people flock to it. The lines run out the door, and the bakery is habitually sold out by noon. They ramp up their production and add some machines to augment human labor. Maybe they raise their prices. Now the lines are shorter (translation: prices have risen, so quantity demanded has decreased), but the bakery’s total amount of income has increased (translation: price elasticity is less than 1). Now the bakery is making lots of profit.

Other bakeries see this profit, and they want in. So they move into the market and try to do the same thing more cheaply. Maybe doing it more cheaply is harder, because the incumbent bakery makes its artisanal bread using giant machines that can produce individual loaves for not very much money at all (translation: high fixed cost to buy the machines, low marginal cost per loaf). Anyone who wants to move into the market would either have to make better bread for the same or higher price (think of Starbucks moving into a world of Maxwell House), or make equal-quality bread more cheaply. (Translation: high fixed costs are a barrier to entry, and make monopolies more likely.)

But if the incumbent baker makes money consistently for years, it may eventually happen that banks take notice and loan someone the money to start a competing bakery at scale. (Imagine here AMD moving into a world dominated by Intel.) Now the incumbent has to lower its prices. In some perfect-competition models, every last customer flocks to the cheaper bakery. The bakeries alternate investing huge amounts of capital to produce at cheaper prices at larger scale. We’re in a price war.

This may be a good thing — we get cheaper bread — but it’s not what Apple is doing. Instead, they’re innovating. They’re not running down the slippery slope of a price war. Instead, they’re making products that no one had and no one knew they wanted before. (I still don’t really need an iPad, though it would be handy for reading academic PDFs.) If they were a different kind of company, they could instead try to make cheaper widgets than their competitors, but where’s the joy in that? If that’s how companies operated, we wouldn’t even have BlackBerrys by now; we’d just have cheaper little knock-off LG or Nokia “feature phones.”

There are some models I remember learning in college that tried to capture this. They usually fall under the labels ‘imperfect competition’ or ‘monopolistic competition’. Coca-Cola has a legally enforced monopoly on the term ‘Coca-Cola’, for instance. But that doesn’t really capture innovation. Most of the models I remember learning, and nearly anything captured under the term ‘perfect competition’, don’t describe the sort of market where companies innovate.

I still need to finish reading Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, but he touches on a similar idea in there. His famous term from that book is “creative destruction”: capitalism’s great contribution to the world is that it constantly destroys industries and replaces them with new ones. No one laments all the horse-and-buggy drivers put out of business by the automobile. There are legitimate reasons to lament the end of businesses built around physical newspapers, and a just society will try to help laid-off newspaper workers land on their feet. But the innovation of the web, which gave rise to an entirely new industry that caught incumbents unawares, makes life better in many well-known ways.

One of Schumpeter’s main arguments (the book contains many arguments and ranges far afield; it argues, for instance, that soon capitalism will be destroyed when its large corporations turn into mere offices for the filling out of forms in triplicate) is that capitalist enterprises shouldn’t mainly fear that a new competitor will produce the same product for cheaper, but rather that an entire industry will come into being that renders the incumbents’ whole reason for being moot.

There’s an “innovation through cheapness” argument along these lines, most famously laid out in The Innovator's Dilemma. It goes like this: there’s some incumbent that makes a big, expensive product that’s the cream of the crop and whose lead seems impregnable. Think of Oracle databases, for instance, or the Sabre airline-reservation system, or Microsoft Windows. Some cheap competitor comes along, producing a product that doesn’t do most of what the big guys do, but does it for much less money (MySQL databases, Internet airfare searching, Linux). Initially, the big guy couldn’t care less about the newcomer — might not even notice the newcomer, in fact. The newcomer may have in fact taken away the big guy’s most annoying customers: those customers who care mostly about price, or those who demand a lot of features for not a lot of money. Good riddance, says the big guy.

Now that the newcomer has some customers, it can start adding features. Because the big guy has been around for a while, competitors have had a while to look at what customers are buying. The newcomer can bring fresh eyes to an existing market, too: the big guy has established sales forces that are trained at selling a specific kind of product, has a large bureaucracy that’s specialized in making their current product lines, and is slow to move in response to change. The newcomer is small and can be more agile. They keep adding features and taking away increasingly important customers from the big guy.

Eventually the big guy takes notice, but by this point it’s too late: the world has shifted entirely to the fresh, cheap product that the new guy is making. This hasn’t happened yet with Windows, of course. Oracle bought MySQL. A quick scan suggests only modest declines in travel-agent employment over the next 7 years. I should try to think of some other examples.

That’s at least two distinct types of innovation: innovating through inventing entirely new product lines that render existing products moot, and innovating through producing simplified subsets of existing products. The latter seems different than merely making a lower-cost version of the same product; that’s classic price competition.

Now, I’m pretty sure I never heard any coverage of innovation when I took economics classes in college. Is there any good modeling of this sort of thing?

See Grist, Krugman, Yglesias. The money quote:

So why is America’s “win the future” administration so fixated on railroads, a technology that was the future two centuries ago? Because progressivism’s aim is the modification of (other people’s) behavior.

Forever seeking Archimedean levers for prying the world in directions they prefer, progressives say they embrace high-speed rail for many reasons — to improve the climate, increase competitiveness, enhance national security, reduce congestion, and rationalize land use. The length of the list of reasons, and the flimsiness of each, points to this conclusion: the real reason for progressives’ passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.

There are many obvious things to say about this, and many good things that the esteemed gentlemen above have written. Here’s what I’ll add: the problem with cars is that they offer the illusion of freedom even while they demonstrate collective insanity. They are a perfect illustration of what can go wrong in markets.

Obvious observation: what does a traffic jam have to do with freedom? You and a few hundred of your closest friends, each in your automobile, are each enjoying your own freedom, sitting in traffic for hours at a time. I hope you enjoy that freedom.

The point that Yglesias has been making forever is that, if we watched a video of Soviet citizens lining up for their free bread, the shelves empty and the lines stretching for blocks, we would know right away what the problem is: the price of bread has been set incorrectly. We see — we live! — traffic jams and we don’t immediately think, “pricing problem,” when that’s precisely what we should think.

Driving imposes costs on others around us. Think of your decision to drive into Manhattan at rush hour: your extra car makes traffic just a little bit worse for everyone around you. In particular, one fellow estimates that each additional car on a weekday imposes a total of more than 3 hours of delays on everyone else.

From here, George Will then has two options available: either 1) insist that car drivers be made to pay the full cost of their effects on those around them, both in terms of ecological damage (the smoke that belches into the atmosphere while you’re idling in traffic) and in terms of time wasted by others, or 2) somehow insist that people have a right to impose costs on others for free.

Republicans’ habitual support for option 2) has mystified Yglesias for a long time. By what libertarian theory do people have a right not to pay for the damage that they cause?

One potential response is that we cannot trust the state to properly estimate the damage we cause others. And even assuming we can trust the state to do that, we cannot trust it to tax the people properly. Maybe the state will have every incentive to overtax, for instance. Or maybe the state will cater to certain interest groups: focus on the needs of train riders or car drivers to the exclusion of everyone else, for instance.

That’s just the point: the state already massively favors car drivers, for the reasons listed in my review of Triumph of the City. If George Will wants to get into a debate about the proper role of the state, I’d be happy to do that; but his first step will have to be answering the question: do people have a right to cause harm to those around them without paying for it? His second step will have to be to admit that the state already plays a massive role in Americans’ use of automobiles. The first is a principle that I hope everyone can agree on; the second is a blindingly obvious observation about the world around us. If he’s not willing to do these things, then it’s not a good-faith debate.

It’s perfectly legitimate to ask why we should want state involvement in transportation policy at all, given what a hash the government has made of things already. Gas taxes are perennially off the table, because politicians expect that they won’t sell; why should we expect that the government will ever properly tax people for the damage they do to the people and environment around them?

Again, this is a fine, legitimate question, and I’d be glad to discuss this with George Will. In particular, I’m more than willing to ask him if he has a free-market solution to the problem of people imposing costs on those around them. If there is such a solution, I’d love to hear it. But Will should know that the idea of taxing people for the damage they cause has been utterly mainstream in economics since the early part of the 20th century.

It feels a little silly to treat Will’s ideas with this sort of respect, and to invite him into a polite debate. Will’s job is to carry water for the Republican Party. He wears a bowtie and has a Ph.D. in political science; he’s the intellectually respectable face of the party, even when what he writes (as in this case) is utter garbage. I’m not going to be intellectually generous or gracious to Will; for whatever reason, he’s chosen not to offer that kind of generosity to my side.

To the contrary. What I’m arguing is that, if we actually had a fair debate, Will would be forced — this is not controversial in the least — to start from some premises about state intervention that he would hate. State intervention in the market is inevitable, if people are going to pay for the messes they make. Will wants that, doesn’t he?