Social Science Professions

Don't buy it.

I remember reading somewhere the calculation that, up until about 1924, physicians did more harm than good. They killed George Washington by letting blood. President McKinley died not from being shot, but from the surgeons expanding the wound and fishing for the bullet with dirty fingers. Patent medicines relied heavily on things like cocaine and heroin.

Even today, estimates are that only 27% of what physicians do is justified by any science. The rest is mostly tricks of the trade to reassure the rubes—er, “placebo effect.”

On this slim foundation rests all the immense prestige now enjoyed by the medical profession; and extended, on their example, to so many other professions that claim to be “scientific.”

Most of the rest probably still do more harm than good. I submit that most of them—those based on “social science”—always will. Psychology and psychiatry, modern education, human resources, sociology, social work, modern journalism.

First, scientific methods do not work on human subjects, who are too unpredictable and too conscious of being studied. Studying people as objects is nonsensical, as well as intrinsically dehumanizing.

Second, any profession exists on the basis of a claim of special knowledge not available to the general public. It is therefore essential for such professions to gin up some body of knowledge that would come as a surprise to the uninitiated.

This means that they must from the start reject all conventional knowledge and common sense about their subject—all that we legitimately do know about it.

This makes them systematically harmful. We would be vastly better off if they were prohibited by law. They are actively doing harm, and demanding huge sums of money to do so.

We are seeing proof of this all the time, if we care to look. The Internet is daily demonstrating that the mainstream media, the professional journalists, are less accurate and less reliable than the amateurs, the "citizen journalists." All the studies show that homeschooled children do better than those professionally educated.

My hope for mankind is that these social science professions will soon become casualties of the Internet.

Why Marxism Survives in the Academy

Right: Marxism. Left: the proletariat.

Why, given the obvious evidence that it simply does not work, despite the revelations about Stalin, the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, Tiananmen, and China’s abandonment of Marxist economics, does Marxism continue to dominate the Humanities and Social Sciences in university, the academy generally, the education world down to pre-school, journalism, publishing, and to a lesser extent all the professions?

Here’s one possible reason: because it is so clearly wrong.

This can make it useful for the same reason the educational theories taught in teacher’s colleges are always wrong.

Nobody could arrive at the support of Marxism based on either evidence, logic, or common sense. You therefore must be “educated” into it. Like some secret handshake, it justifies the education, and certifies that you have it.

More than that, by systematically embracing something any reasonably bright person can see is wrong, you are proving your loyalty to the group. They can be confident, if anything untoward is going on in your sight, in that profession, that you will not be one to blow whistles, lose then their sweet positions, and get them all in trouble. If you can swallow Marxism without flinching, you will swallow anything you are asked or told to do for the good of your class. You are a good German.

This leads to a further conclusion that may be useful: the more Marxism dominates a particular field, the more corrupt it is. This is strong evidence that whatever else that profession or school or brand is selling, is snake oil. To survive, they need to enforce some code of silence and loyalty.

And a further conclusion: those fields that are most Marxist currently are those most likely to be disrupted by new technology. It strongly suggests they are serving no useful purpose, are only preying on their fellows, and so can easily be bettered by laypeople or machines, or by nothing at all.

Why We Do Not Need Professional Bloggers.

Now bend over.

I read that Washington DC is now going to require all child-care workers—kindergarten teachers, ECE, daycare workers—to have college degrees.

It’s a terrible idea.

At the same time, I keep reading pieces about the decline of the American “working class,” how those without a college degree can no longer find decent work. How this has become a social crisis, with a frightening rise in suicides, drug abuse, family breakups, and tearing of the social fabric. Witness the voter rebellion that just elected Trump.

We keep reading that this is caused by globalization, and by automation. Maybe, but there is another obvious cause, which is far more under our control: creeping credentialism. We now require a college degree for all sorts of jobs that used to be available out of high school.

Leaving vast swathes of the population without a living wage.

Since World War II, this disease of credentialism has been growing. Everybody wants to be a “professional,” and everybody wants to go to college. And those who do not, or cannot, are thrown to the curb, as “deplorables.”

According to studies (e.g., Brookings Institute), the net result, along with rising unemployment and declining prospects for so many, has been a rise in costs and a deterioration of services for the general public.

Nor is this surprising. Any certification regime is really a cartel in restraint of trade. By limiting competition, it forces consumers to pay higher prices.

Those in the given “profession,” the “experts,” love the idea. They get more power and more money. Hence the virus has passed quickly from one job to another.

But it is not good for the general public. Besides rising costs as a consumer, for inferior service, he is barred from more and more jobs for which he will not have the specific qualification. And, if he is poor, cannot afford to get. And a lot of funds and energy are ploughed into useless education instead of productive work. The rich get a bit richer, the poor get a lot poorer.

In some jobs, mind, it does make sense to have specific academic qualifications: medicine, law, engineering, accounting, dentistry. Or at least, to have specific qualifying exams testing necessary knowledge. In sum, the traditional professions, as we knew them before World War II.

But for most jobs, it does not make sense.

Take ECE, the current example. Caring for children is a talent. It is not really something you learn: you have a maternal or paternal instinct, or you don’t. You empathize with kids, or you don’t. There is probably nothing at all you could get by sitting at a desk for four years that would make you any better at it. Instead, such an academic qualification directs you away from all the skills you need for the job, and requires skills unrelated to it. Anyone who is really good with children and enjoys being around them is going to find it hard to ignore them entirely and instead devote four years to isolation from them. The ability to do so does not bode well for their commitment to kids.

So such accreditation selects for those less cut out for the job. At the same time, it reduces the pool of employees available, and forces employers to select on grounds other than actual ability to do the job.

No surprise, then, if the quality of day care begins to fall. While the costs go up.

We have seen the same thing happen, over about the last generation, to journalism. The skills that make a good newsman—a refusal to defer to authority, a restless curiosity, and an ability to write well—are either not teachable, or antithetical to the requirements of an academic journalism degree. So the rise of journalism schools has kept good journalists out of journalism, and fairly quickly destroyed the field.

That chicken is now roosting. Amateurs on the Internet are now able to wipe the floors with multi-million dollar media enterprises.

We have seen the same thing happen, over about the last generation, to el-hi teaching. Costs for education at all levels have been spiralling upward, since we started requiring education degrees, and the quality of teaching has been drifting downward.

Academic ability is indeed a valuable prerequisite here—you cannot teach what you do not know, and the best learners are the best teachers. Nevertheless, by requiring a specific qualification, a specific education in “education,” instead of subject knowledge and overall academic ability, the field has been destroyed.

The problem here is that anyone who has attended schools at various levels for twelve or sixteen years, and has been an able student, necessarily knows a lot about how to learn and how to teach. That’s a lot of hours of classroom observation, discovering what approaches work and do not work, and so forth. There is really no valid knowledge about how to teach thet might be transmitted in an education degree that he or she is not by then already going to know.

In order, therefore, to narrow down the number of prospective teachers, and so establish their cartel, “education professionals” have had to create an entirely bogus field. It is not just that education degrees are content free: in order to teach something new that marks their graduates as “trained professionals,” they have to constantly come up with something they have not seen before. Inevitably, they gravitate to teaching and requiring techniques that are proven not to work in the classroom.

Now schools must hire based on holding this degree, at the cost of both teaching ability and subject knowledge. As with ECE courses, any good teacher would find sitting through a typical ed degree more or less intolerable: they would have to put aside for the duration any of their natural teaching instincts, and any of their natural learning instincts, to do something that violates everything they care about.

So again, the education accreditation process systematically weeds out good teachers.

This is probably going to be the next chicken to arrive home. We already know that private schools that do not require teachers to be certified do consistently better; and complete amateurs, homeschooling parents, do consistently better; than the “professionals.” Just wait until online education gets widespread.

Another problem with accreditation for any field is that it standardizes. Any work of standardization eliminates the bottom of the field; but at the inevitable cost of eliminating the top as well. Any unconventional methods will not pass muster, regardless of whether they are unusually bad or unusually good. So unless all that is required in a given field is competence, you lose as much as you gain.

For some fields, like accountancy or dentistry or copyediting, that works well.

Many other fields suffer from imposed conformity. Journalism is an obvious example: when all journalists write the same way, and think the same way, it becomes tedious to read a newspaper. Teaching is another: part of good teaching is inspiring interest, and when everyone teaches to formula, interest is the first thing lost. ECE would be a third.

Generally, any field in which talent or giftedness is important will suffer from “professionalization.” Professionalization tends towards mediocrity.

At the same time, the requirement that just about everyone spend long years at a desk to get a decent job is a cruel imposition on the young. There is a reason why the generation gap and teenage angst surfaced soon after the Second World War. In was then, thanks largely to the GI Bill, that higher education and the requirement for it became widespread.

As a result: widespread youth unemployment; young people perhaps being locked for life into an unsuitable career. Young people forced to delay marriage and family, forced to delay their financial independence and adulthood to jump for years through humiliating and essentially meaningless hoops. So a sense of existential angst, frustration, alienation, and a lot of destructive behaviours: loose sex, drugs, mental illness, suicides. So the teenager was invented; so the Sixties happened.

And we are training people to remain children, in permanent infantilism, by tacking on four or six more years of childhood dependency, instead of teaching them to be responsible adult individuals. This, as Jefferson pointed out, is antithetical to a democracy. This kills good citizenship.

The quality of higher education has also been devastated. College should be for the exceptionally intelligent. It does not make sense any more if it is for everyone. It becomes just a holding pen, a second high school, because people have to be pushed through who have no natural talent or interest for things like critical analysis, memorization, or the world of ideas. As it gets corrupted by this dumbing down, it is no longer available for the highly intelligent.

Here is a useful estimate of average IQ by college subject. This is fairly reliable, because SAT and GRE tests match up well with IQ scores. It seems to me a good rule of thumb that any subject not attracting an average IQ of about 120 or above would be better dealt with by a technical college, or apprenticeship. Folks functioning below about this level are not really going to be adept at critical thinking. Better for them to concentrate on learning the particular skills to do a particular job, instead of wasting their time.

Unfortunately—perhaps you’ve noticed—technical colleges keep disappearing. They keep morphing into universities. This is a bad tendency on two grounds: first, we need more technical colleges, not more universities, and second, it sends the message that even the technical schools think college is the goal.

The drive for accreditation has devastated the young. It has devastated the working class. At the same time, it has emphasized the gap between the poor and the rich. And at the very same time, it has ensured that the rich, and those in control, the “elite,” are less competent and less intelligent on average year by year.

This is not heading in a good direction. The working class gets less, and pays more, while they increasingly see they are being governed and lorded over by idiots.

I suggest that government should pull out altogether from regulating professions. Leave it to the free market. Pull out any regulations tending to favour professionalizing. If people see a need for quality control, they will demand it of the professions themselves, one by one. There is no reason for government to be involved.

To reduce the notion that college is for everyone, I suggest that government pull any funding—which is vast--to majors or universities attracting an average IQ below 120, or the equivalent SAT score. And no student loans for college for students below that level. Below that level, they and we would be better off with technical college, or apprenticeship.

Sure, give funding and student loans in the same proportion to those below that IQ level, But not for college. For technical school or apprenticeship, or loans to young entrepreneurs.

Some may be uncomfortable with using SAT score exclusively to choose university students, and not marks. Because it discounts individual effort. And intelligence is not quite the same as academic ability. Although the correlation is pretty strong.

But marks are fundamentally unreliable. Set a minimum mark, and all marks will probably rise to meet it. You could set a standard test of academic knowledge; but you would be penalizing people who go to bad schools in bad neighbourhoods—usually poor people. Another option would be to let just about everyone in for first year, but then flunk them ruthlessly. The problem there is that it is too much pressure: you are evaluating for steely nerves early maturity as much as ultimate ability.

But we must not go on as we are. We are heading for the abyss.

John Stuart Mill on Education

Before state schools were introduced, John Stuart Mill saw clearly why they were a bad idea:

A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another, and the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation.

In proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body. An education established and controlled by the State should only exist, if it exist at all, as one among many competing experiments carried on for the purpose of example and stimulus, to keep the others up to a certain standard of excellence.

In other words, school vouchers. Mill suggests these be backed up with standardized tests from government in certain designated essential skills:

The instrument for enforcing the law could be no other than public examinations, extending to all children, and beginning at an early age. An age might be fixed at which every child must be examined, to ascertain if he (or she) is able to read. .... Once in every year the examination should be renewed, with a gradually extending range of subjects, so as to make the universal acquisition, and what is more, retention, of a certain minimum of general knowledge, virtually compulsory. Beyond that minimum, there should be voluntary examinations for all subjects, at which all who come up to a certain standard of proficiency might claim a certificate.

He then turns to the professions--and sees immediately the danger of government certification here:

The examinations, however, in the higher branches of knowledge should be entirely voluntary. It would be giving too dangerous power to governments, were they allowed to exclude any one from professions, even from the profession of teacher, for alleged deficiency of qualifications. Degrees, or other public certificates of scientific or professional acquirements, should be given to all who present themselves for examination, but such certificates should confer no advantage over competitors, other than the weight which may be attached to their testimony by public opinion.

In other words, nobody should be prevented by law from setting themselves up as or from employment as a pharmacist, or an engineer, or a lawyer, or anything else. Such restraint of trade leads inevitably, as it has led, to self-interested cartels with no regard for the public interest.

It is that simple--it is all predictable. If we have nevertheless ended up with compulsory public schools and government-regulated professions, it can only be because this was the deliberate intent. Those in power wanted to protect a ruling class, and to impose conformity on the rest of us.

This, according to Mill, is not tolerable in a free society.

The Death of the Professions

The numbers in this article are startling.

The tide is going far, far out.

I did not expect to see this sharp decline in law yet—I thought medicine was more vulnerable. But nobody comes from China or the Middle East to the US to study law, because American law does not apply back home. So the law schools are being hit by a student shortage that is masked in other disciplines by rising numbers of international students.

It seems that, with so many legal forms available online, and with Internet search capabilities, a lot of the traditional lawyer’s job is no longer necessary.

Makes me wonder what we are all going to do for a living here in North America, with manufacturing all gone overseas, service gone to call centres abroad, storefronts closing due to Internet shopping, and the professions being replaced by the internet.

The obvious answer is that we are all going to work on the Internet. But there will be no more advantages to simply living in North America—you can log in just as easily from Mumbai as Manhattan.

Professional Journalism

Heading West.

A question inspired by Candy Crowley's mismanagement of the second US Presidential debate: why has journalism grown so bad, and so corrupt? What caused this?

For many years, I had the strong sense that newspapers and newsmagazines in general had tumbled far downhill since my youth. But I could not be sure. It might have had to do with the more jaded eyes of age. But now, with the Internet, there can be no doubt: the amateurs in the blogosphere do far better than the professionals.

And that last word may tell the whole story. I think it was a terrible error to turn journalism, during my own lifetime, into a “profession.” Journalists just a little older than I tended to have only a high school education, if that—they got into journalism because they could do it, because they could write, and tell a story interestingly. Now they get into the profession not because they can write, but because they have taken the required courses. The same awful process has also, over about the same time period, destroyed the teaching profession.

There is a basic principle here that is too often overlooked. Whenever you introduce standards to any area, you are eliminating two things: the bottom, the substandard, but also the top, the exceptionally good. That is the essence of professionalism: standardization—in other words, conformity. It is fine in areas in which simple competence is sufficient for all or most purposes--technical areas. But in areas, like writing or teaching,that require some element of creativity in order to work at all, it is going to damage, and ultimately destroy, the field.

The single obvious reason why the US dominates the contemporary world, culturally, technologically, and politically, is because of its tradition of nonconformity—aka “rugged individualism'” if you like. Those who found the local society too constraining in its demands could always escape to the frontier; and the doctrines of individual liberty on which the country was founded reduced the demands of conformity in the first place. There was also always the sense that this was the “New World,” which need not ever be constrained by the habits of the old.

The same secret led to the strength of Britain. On top of a strong innate social tolerance for, indeed glorification of, eccentricity, robustly expressed by John Stuart Mill, Britons needing breathing room could always take to the sea, and long had the ready option of shipping out to the Empire. There is nothing like the expatriate existence for freeing oneself from social pressures.

Sailing Before the Wind: The Jeanie Johnston.

This alone ensures that professionalization will be a disaster in most instances. On top of this, the creation of a profession creates a group consciousness, and a sense of common interests. This is not good. As Adam Smith observed, you cannot expect a group of people in the same trade gathered together, even for recreation, not to immediately turn to ways to conspire against the public interest for their own benefit. That is what a profession does, perfectly—a thing we would hold illegal in the corporate world. Now journalists all come up through the same schools, have many friends on rival papers, and attend the same parties, on top of their inevitable time together in the newsroom. They are a clique. Membership in the clique comes to be based not on ability, but on reliable commitment to the interests of the clique.

Fortunately, just when everything seemed to be going Stalinist, the innate rebellious genius of the Anglosphere created a new frontier: cyberspace. We have the bloggers, now, and the online educators, shaming and exposing the cliques and recovering the option of excellence. It is no accident this all first came from California, the last post on the Westward march; and, in the case of the WWW, from a Briton who had opted to live abroad.

The Left Explained in 2000 Words or Less

It's not hard to understand the modern left, really. So long as you jettison all that bunk about the working class and the poor. Pierre Trudeau said it fairly straight, long ago, when he was asked, running for the Liberal leadership, if he was a Marxist. He replied that his political philosophy came from Plato's Republic.

The True Founder of the Left.

The left's fundamental belief is that of Plato: that the ideal society should be run by a meritocracy of the best and the brightest, of the enlightened, of the learned.

Besides Plato, it is the teaching of Confucius. It is also in the spirit of Rabbinical Judaism.

So why conceal it, consciously or not, behind a smokescreen of Marxist talk about the working class? The working class really just does not figure here. First, I think, because their idea is undemocratic, and so a bit of a challenge to get past the majority of voters who become the ruled. The obvious ploy is here used: claim it is all for their best interests, that they are under threat from some powerful enemy (the rich capitalists), and that they, ordinary folks on the street, are somehow the ones being empowered.

The Leftist is on the Left; the Red is wearing Red. Aristotle is in Tory Blue.

But in reality, the power must be held, perhaps “temporarily,” by a “vanguard” movement. Which is of course not working class at all. Trudeau, Rae, Obama, Kerry, Gore, Kennedy, Castro, Guevara, Mao, Lenin—none of these are working class, or even a generation away from working class. They are all professionals.

If they get away with it, it kind of proves their point: that the working classes are easily manipulated and so not competent to mind their own affairs.

"Relying on Mao Zedong Thought; Making the Revolution."

The second problem with telling the truth about the agenda of the left is that this doctrine of rule by experts goes against Christian gospel, which condemns the professional class in very plain and consistent terms, as the “scribes and Pharisees.” The suggestion is that such a system is inevitably oppressive over time. And so it has been, historically. Such a rule by a professional elite was the essence of Communism in Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia over the past century. In Bulgaria, I met an older tour guide who lamented that, nowadays, nobody cared about his proper credentials any more. Just about anyone could be a tour guide now if they could do the job.

This is why leftist regimes always emphasize health and education: more money and more power for doctors and academics.

Nazi Germany, although it had its genuine working class element, was also a rule by professional elite. The party's support was nowhere stronger than among university students and academics. As is the left's support today.

The third problem with telling the truth is that the idea of meritocracy tends to violate the idea of human equality. True, a real meritocracy would not discriminate on the basis of class, race, or sex. But it assumes, on the other hand, that human capacities are radically different on the basis of education or training. This in turn is concealed behind a smokescreen of stressing equality in terms of race and sex.

Soviet Poster: "The Illiterate is a Blind Man."

Yet against all this, it seems only common sense that those most qualified to run the world are the professionals, the experts, the well-educated. What's so wrong about that? Wouldn't everyone be better off? I listened only recently to a MSM commentator, an editor for Slate magazine, making just this argument for the case that China currently had a pretty good government.

We are speaking, after all, not of a ruling class by birth, but one by proven merit.

Unfortunately, as a Christian, I am inclined to believe that Jesus was right about all this, and Pharisaism is not a productive or moral way to run things. As he noted, and as history seems to prove, meritocracies of this sort become oppressive.

First, it is intrinsically unlikely to suppose that another person, who does not know you, can tend to your best interests better than you can, even with all the best motives in the world. He does not know you as well as you do, and people do not vary that greatly in their intellectual capacities. This is where the left really believes in extreme human inequality. Only on this assumption of extreem human inequality would the rule by experts make sense. Christianity teaches, instead, that we are all equal in the sight of God, and all necessarily competent, independent moral agents—otherwise there is no salvation.

Second, not ourselves being God, how do we determine who is an expert? Classically, other experts decide—but how do we know they are truly expert? We have to have some objective test to ensure that we have something more here than a randomly self-selected, self-perpetuating clique. The education system is the one the meritocrats tend to rely upon. But that retains the problem: are those who set the curriculum and the tests the real experts, and are their solutions the best? Might a lone genius always fail the test by seeing something better?

The two most obvious checks are, firstly, a free market in expertise, and secondly, a democracy, in which the popular will is sovereign over the legal and educational system. The left, and professions generally, is rather opposed to both of these checks. Indeed, forming into an profession is by its essential nature a restraint on the free market and the popular will.

The religious priesthoods have their own such checks and balances: celibacy, for one, as a test of sincerity. The left, inevitably, is opposed to this as well. For military professionals, the success or failure of actual military operations is the great objective check. Science and engineering have their own objective check, that of reproducible results; and, even more, of bridges not actually falling down.

Interestingly, these professions that face regular objective checks tend to be less leftward-leaning than the others. Indeed, to the extent to which a profession or area of expertise is identifiably political, ideological and leftist in its corporate stance, and opposed to objective checks, to that extent we can fairly assume it is not a real collection of experts but a self-selecting, self-perpetuating clique.

The third problem with this sort of professional meritocracy, as hinted at previously, is that there is an inevitable danger that even true experts will not be, by that qualification, paragons of disinterested virtue. Give any group special powers and privileges, and they are entirely likely to exercise them, not for the public good, but in their own self-interest.

The stance of the left is based, implicitly or explicitly, on the assumption of the moral superiority of the professional class. They are to be given power because, unlike the merchant class, they are not motivated by money, greed, or profit. Unlike the working class, they do not cling in ignorance to their guns and their religion.

Yet there is absolutely no basis for this. Once, when any academic training necessarily included a rigorous education in a religious tradition, and any awarded degree was a ministerial license, it might have had some theoretical basis. Although the New Testament will not accept this argument. But now, when there is no moral or theological component to the typical education, there is no argument for professionals being any less greedy, power-hungry, slothful, deceitful, or lascivious than the average man. Giving them special powers and privileges, therefore, is simply giving them a license to exploit the rest to their own advantage. As Adam Smith observed, no group of men involved in the same trade can ever meet, even in relaxation, without the meeting becoming in time a conspiracy against the public good. We understand this, and act accordingly, in the case of merchants and manufacturers. We act as if the opposite is the case in the professions. This is mad.

Besides comparisons of Denmark to Bulgaria, we can see the failure of the left-wing meritocratic ideal in detail in real life. Compare the urban-planned spaghetti junction suburbs of the fifties and later with organically-developed older towns and inner cities. Which is a more amenable environment—that created by the urban-planning experts, or that created by people working out what they wanted for themselves? To my mind, there is no question.

Consider the quality of “journalism” since reporters formed themselves into a profession in about the nineteen-sixties. Have newspapers and magazines and television news gotten better since? No, they have entered a downward slide, to the point that traditional newspapers, magazines, and network news are dying now all around us. Yes, it is the technology, but that is not the whole story. Established news organizations should have been able to move to the new technology and still dominate, with a superior “professional” product. The problem faced by the journalism profession is that they are too easily faced now with open competition from outside the profession, and cannot compete successfully. The professionals simply are not as good as amateurs outside the profession.

One sees the same deterioration in the public schools, since “educators” formed themselves into a profession at about the same time. Quality goes down and costs go up as a profession turns from serving the customer to serving their self-interest. The boom in homeschooling, and all the available statistics on it, show that the amateurs here too can consistently outperform the profession.

The same is doubtless true of many other professions. Moreover, the domination of the professions, which has grown by leaps and bounds since the Second World War, can be seen to account for a lot of our current financial problems in the developed world. The growing cost of education; the growing cost of health care; the growing cost of malpractice insurance; the growing pension burden in the public service. They are largely due to the parasitism of the professions on the larger society.

One possible partial solution would be to reintroduce a religious underpinning to all professional education. That, I think, would help, but the New Testament says it would not be enough.

More promising is the growing role of technology and globalization in creating a true free market in expertise. Let's hope.