Slate: The Great Divergence: The United States of Inequality....get ready to read

[AsburySkinsFan]

The Great Divergence: The United States of Inequality

http://www.slate.com/id/2266025/entry/2266026/

Part I

In 1915, a statistician at the University of Wisconsin named Willford I. King published The Wealth and Income of the People of the United States, the most comprehensive study of its kind to date. The United States was displacing Great Britain as the world's wealthiest nation, but detailed information about its economy was not yet readily available; the federal government wouldn't start collecting such data in any systematic way until the 1930s. One of King's purposes was to reassure the public that all Americans were sharing in the country's newfound wealth.

King was somewhat troubled to find that the richest 1 percent possessed about 15 percent of the nation's income. (A more authoritative subsequent calculation puts the figure slightly higher, at about 18 percent.)

This was the era in which the accumulated wealth of America's richest families—the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, the Carnegies—helped prompt creation of the modern income tax, lest disparities in wealth turn the United States into a European-style aristocracy. The socialist movement was at its historic peak, a wave of anarchist bombings was terrorizing the nation's industrialists, and President Woodrow Wilson's attorney general, Alexander Palmer, would soon stage brutal raids on radicals of every stripe. In American history, there has never been a time when class warfare seemed more imminent.

That was when the richest 1 percent accounted for 18 percent of the nation's income. Today, the richest 1 percent account for 24 percent of the nation's income. What caused this to happen? Over the next two weeks, I'll try to answer that question by looking at all potential explanations—race, gender, the computer revolution, immigration, trade, government policies, the decline of labor, compensation policies on Wall Street and in executive suites, and education. Then I'll explain why people who say we don't need to worry about income inequality (there aren't many of them) are wrong.

Income inequality in the United States has not worsened steadily since 1915. It dropped a bit in the late teens, then started climbing again in the 1920s, reaching its peak just before the 1929 crash. The trend then reversed itself. Incomes started to become more equal in the 1930s and then became dramatically more equal in the 1940s. Income distribution remained roughly stable through the postwar economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s. Economic historians Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo have termed this midcentury era the "Great Compression." The deep nostalgia for that period felt by the World War II generation—the era of Life magazine and the bowling league—reflects something more than mere sentimentality. Assuming you were white, not of draft age, and Christian, there probably was no better time to belong to America's middle class.

The Great Compression ended in the 1970s. Wages stagnated, inflation raged, and by the decade's end, income inequality had started to rise. Income inequality grew through the 1980s, slackened briefly at the end of the 1990s, and then resumed with a vengeance in the aughts. In his 2007 book The Conscience of a Liberal, the Nobel laureate, Princeton economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman labeled the post-1979 epoch the "Great Divergence."

It's generally understood that we live in a time of growing income inequality, but "the ordinary person is not really aware of how big it is," Krugman told me. During the late 1980s and the late 1990s, the United States experienced two unprecedentedly long periods of sustained economic growth—the "seven fat years" and the " long boom." Yet from 1980 to 2005, more than 80 percent of total increase in Americans' income went to the top 1 percent. Economic growth was more sluggish in the aughts, but the decade saw productivity increase by about 20 percent. Yet virtually none of the increase translated into wage growth at middle and lower incomes, an outcome that left many economists scratching their heads.

Here is a snapshot of income distribution during the past 100 years:

Why don't Americans pay more attention to growing income disparity? One reason may be our enduring belief in social mobility. Economic inequality is less troubling if you live in a country where any child, no matter how humble his or her origins, can grow up to be president. In a survey of 27 nations conducted from 1998 to 2001, the country where the highest proportion agreed with the statement "people are rewarded for intelligence and skill" was, of course, the United States. (69 percent). But when it comes to real as opposed to imagined social mobility, surveys find less in the United States than in much of (what we consider) the class-bound Old World. France, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Spain—not to mention some newer nations like Canada and Australia—are all places where your chances of rising from the bottom are better than they are in the land of Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick.

All my life I've heard Latin America described as a failed society (or collection of failed societies) because of its grotesque maldistribution of wealth. Peasants in rags beg for food outside the high walls of opulent villas, and so on. But according to the Central Intelligence Agency (whose patriotism I hesitate to question), income distribution in the United States is more unequal than in Guyana, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and roughly on par with Uruguay, Argentina, and Ecuador. Income inequality is actually declining in Latin America even as it continues to increase in the United States. Economically speaking, the richest nation on earth is starting to resemble a banana republic. The main difference is that the United States is big enough to maintain geographic distance between the villa-dweller and the beggar. As Ralston Thorpe tells his St. Paul's classmate, the investment banker Sherman McCoy, in Tom Wolfe's 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities: "You've got to insulate, insulate, insulate."

In 1915, King wrote, "It is easy to find a man in almost any line of employment who is twice as efficient as another employee,"

but it is very rare to find one who is

ten times

as efficient. It is common, however, to see one man possessing not

ten

times but

a thousand

times the wealth of his neighbor. … Is the middle class doomed to extinction and shall we soon find the handful of plutocrats, the modern barons of wealth, lined up squarely in opposition to the propertyless masses with no buffer between to lessen the chances of open battle? With the middle class gone and the laborer condemned to remain a lifelong wage-earner with no hope of attaining wealth or even a competence in his old age, all the conditions are ripe for a crowning class-conflict equaling in intensity and bitterness anything pictured by the most radical follower of Karl Marx. Is this condition soon coming to pass? [emphasis his]

In the end, King concluded it wasn't. Income distribution in the United States, he found, was more equal than in Prussia, France, and the United Kingdom. King was no socialist. Redistributing income to the poor, he wrote, "would merely mean more rapid multiplication of the lowest and least desirable classes," who remained, "from the reproductive standpoint, on the low point of their four-footed ancestors." A Malthusian, he believed in population control. Income inequality in the United States could be addressed by limiting immigration (King deplored "low-standard alien invaders") and by discouraging excessive breeding among the poor ("eugenicists are just beginning to impress upon us the absurd folly of breeding great troops of paupers, defectives and criminals to be a burden upon organized society").

Today, incomes in the U.S. are more unequal than in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, not less so. Eugenics (thankfully) has fallen out of fashion, and the immigration debate has become (somewhat) more polite. As for income inequality, it's barely entered the national political debate. Indeed, the evidence from the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections suggests that even mild economic populism was a loser for Democrats. (To sample authentic economic populism, click here.)

But income inequality is a topic of huge importance to American society and therefore a subject of large and growing interest to a host of economists, political scientists, and other wonky types. Except for a few Libertarian outliers (whose views we'll examine later), these experts agree that the country's growing income inequality is deeply worrying. Even Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve Board chairman and onetime Ayn Rand acolyte, has registered concern. "This is not the type of thing which a democratic society—a capitalist democratic society—can really accept without addressing," Greenspan said in 2005. Greenspan's Republican-appointed successor, Ben Bernanke, has also fretted about income inequality.

Yet few of these experts have much idea how to reverse the trend. That's because almost no one can agree about what's causing it. This week and next, I will detail and weigh the strengths and weaknesses of various prominent theories as to what has brought about the income inequality boom of the last three decades. At the same time, I'll try to convey the magnitude of its effects on American life. The Great Divergence may represent the most significant change in American society in your lifetime—and it's not a change for the better. Let's see if we can figure out what got us here.

[AsburySkinsFan]

Part II

The Usual Suspects are Innocent

Most discussion about inequality in the United States focuses on race and gender. That makes sense, because our society has a conspicuous history of treating blacks differently from whites and women differently from men. Black/white and male/female inequality persist to this day. The median annual income for women working full time is 23 percent lower than for their male counterparts. The median annual income for black families is 38 percent lower than for their white counterparts. The extent to which these imbalances involve lingering racism and sexism or more complex matters of sociology and biology is a topic of much anguished and heated debate.

But we need not delve into that debate, because the Great Divergence can't be blamed on either race or gender. To contribute to the growth in income inequality over the past three decades, the income gaps between women and men, and between blacks and whites, would have to have grown. They didn't.

The black/white gap in median family income has stagnated; it's a mere three percentage points smaller today than it was in 1979.This lack of progress is dismaying. So is the apparent trend that, during the current economic downturn, the black/white income gap widened somewhat. But the black/white income gap can't be a contributing factor to the Great Divergence if it hasn't grown over the past three decades. And even if it had grown, there would be a limit to how much impact it could have on the national income-inequality trend, because African-Americans constitute only 13 percent of the U.S. population.

Women constitute half the U.S. population, but they can't be causing the Great Divergence because the male-female wage gap has shrunk by nearly half. Thirty years ago the median annual income for women working full-time was not 23 percent less than men's, but 40 percent less. Most of these gains occurred in the 1980s and early 1990s; during the past five years they halted. But there's every reason to believe the male-female income gap will continue to narrow in the future, if only because in the U.S. women are now better educated than men. Ever since the late 1990s female students have outnumbered male students at colleges and universities. The female-male ratio is currently 57 to 43, and the U.S. Department of Education expects that disparity to increase over the next decade.

Far from contributing to the Great Divergence, women have, to a remarkable degree, absented themselves from it. Take a look at this bar graph by David Autor, an MIT labor economist:

The graph demonstrates that during the past three decades, women have outperformed men at all education levels in the workforce. Both men and women have (in the aggregate) been moving out of moderately skilled jobs—secretary, retail sales representative, steelworker, etc.—women more rapidly than men. But women have been much more likely than men to shift upward into higher skilled jobs—from information technology engineer and personnel manager on up through various high-paying professions that require graduate degrees (doctor, lawyer, etc.).

These findings suggest that women's relative gains in the workplace are not solely a You've-Come-a-Long-Way-Baby triumph of the feminist movement and individual pluck. They also reflect downward mobility among men. My Slate colleague Hanna Rosin, writing in the Atlantic, recently looked at these and other data and asked, "What if the modern, postindustrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men?"

She might have asked the same about the modern, postindustrial family. The declining economic value of men as Ward Cleaver-style breadwinners is a significant reason for the rise in single parenthood, which most of the time means children being raised by an unmarried or divorced mother. The percentage of children living with one parent has doubled since 1970, from 12 percent to more than 26 percent in 2004 (see Table 2). Conservatives often decry this trend, and they rightly point out that children who grow up in single-parent homes are much likelier to be poor. "Single mothers seldom command high wages," confirmed David Ellwood and Christopher Jencks, both of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, in a 2004 paper. "They also find it unusually difficult to work long hours." But it would be difficult to attribute much of the Great Divergence to single parenthood, because it increased mostly before 1980, when the Great Divergence was just getting under way. By the early 1990s, the growth trend halted altogether, and though it resumed in the aughts the rate of growth was significantly slower.

Also, single parenthood isn't as damaging economically as it was at the start of the Great Divergence. "That's mostly because the percentage of women who are actually working who are single parents went up," Jencks told me. In a January 2008 paper, three Harvard sociologists concluded that the two-thirds rise in income inequality among families with children from 1975 to 2005 could not be attributed to divorce and out-of-wedlock births. "Single parenthood increased inequality," they conceded, "but the income gap was closed by mothers who entered the labor force." One trend canceled the effects of another (at least in the aggregate).

While we're on the topic of single versus two-parent households, perhaps we ought to consider what a "household" is.

Stephen J. Rose is a labor economist at Georgetown best-known for publishing, since the 1970s, successive editions of Social Stratification in the United States, a pamphlet and poster much revered by the left that depicts economic inequality in the United States. In his recent book Rebound, Rose made an apparent 180-degree turn and argued that worries about rising income inequality and a disappearing middle class were overblown. Rose built his case largely on the notion that the Census Bureau's preferred metric—"median household income"—was misleading.

The trouble, Rose wrote, was that households varied greatly in composition and size. A household might consist of a single young man just starting out on his own or an elderly widow in retirement. Neither would likely enjoy a high income, but that would be a function of mere circumstance (the young man was just beginning his climb up the greasy pole; the retired widow no longer worked at all) and need (neither was likely to be responsible for any children). Another problem, Rose suggested, was that some households were bigger than others. Couples tended to have larger household incomes than single people, but that was because they likely collected two paychecks rather than one. The proportion of Americans living alone had for various reasons increased over time; that needed to be taken into account, too. Correcting for all these factors, Rose calculated that median household income was 30 percent higher than the Census' official figure (about $50,000 in 2007).

That was the good news. The bad news was that even with these new calculations, Rose couldn't deny the existence of a Great Divergence. "Under all circumstances," he wrote, "inequality has risen considerably, and this is a bad thing for America. Those at the bottom of the income ladder have benefited only minimally from the significant gains in overall production over the past three decades."

Back, then, to the drawing board. Conventional liberal and conservative explanations about what ails society can neither explain the Great Divergence nor make it go away.

[endzone_dave]

Welcome to a global economy. If all you can do is assemble parts for a living, your income won't be much greater than the people in Asia who do it for almost nothing.

[AsburySkinsFan]

Welcome to a global economy. If all you can do is assemble parts for a living, your income won't be much greater than the people in Asia who do it for almost nothing.

The problem is that the disparity transcends education. The middle class, many many of whom have college educations, is simply disappearing, all the while the income gap is growing.

[endzone_dave]

The problem is that the disparity transcends education. The middle class, many many of whom have college educations, is simply disappearing, all the while the income gap is growing.

I think it some of it pertains to what your degree is in. If you have a history degree, you might have a tougher time getting a high paying job vs. 30 years ago.

[AsburySkinsFan]

I think it some of it pertains to what your degree is in. If you have a history degree, you might have a tougher time getting a high paying job vs. 30 years ago.

You're really going to try and make the argument that the Great Divergence is about too many people having History degrees?

The reality is as was stated in the articles that while the income on the low end has gone up slightly, the incomes on the top end have increased dramatically. Education cannot account for that.

[Predicto]

Welcome to a global economy. If all you can do is assemble parts for a living, your income won't be much greater than the people in Asia who do it for almost nothing.

That doesn't really explain it. It's not just the lower class and working class that is falling behind.

Everyone is falling behind except the top 2 or 3 percent, which is making out like gangbusters (and passing huge wads along to their kids). This is how you end up with an aristocracy.

[Predicto]

I think it some of it pertains to what your degree is in. If you have a history degree, you might have a tougher time getting a high paying job vs. 30 years ago.

I thing that pretty much the same thing is happening even if you have an engineering or computer degree.

[endzone_dave]

That doesn't really explain it. It's not just the lower class and working class that is falling behind.

Everyone is falling behind except the top 2 or 3 percent, which is making out like gangbusters (and passing huge wads along to their kids). This is how you end up with an aristocracy.

I won't disagree with the fact that CEOs and Wall Street tycoons are making tons of cash - I'm the first to say that it's out of control. I don't see professionals making less than they used to though, at least not in the DC area.

[Bang]

Good thing i bought a guillotine last year.

I have a feeling the price is going go up

~Bang

[Predicto]

I won't disagree with the fact that CEOs and Wall Street tycoons are making tons of cash - I'm the first to say that it's out of control. I don't see professionals making less than they used to though, at least not in the DC area.

Those professionals in the DC area (and San Francisco area, and so on), those people pretty much ARE the top 2-3 percent that I'm talking about. The CEOs and Wall Street tycoons are only the top 1/10 of one percent, and of course, they are doing even better.

[mcsluggo]

i actually think that engineers and lawyers, and doctors...etc... HAVE been keeping up (with earlier rates of increase) and are actually doing fine.

But two things are happening: the very rich are getting much richer, and the bottom half (at least, probably more like 2/3) are seing their incomes rise at both a slower rate than they did in the past and at a slower rate than the economy on the whole-- and by a substantial margin.

at some of what is happening with the bottom half IS directly attributable to a more open economy. Unskilled labor in the US is hurt by trading with countries where unskilled labor is both more pletiful, and cheaper. In addition, unskilled labor is hurt by immigration--- both directly (as a simple fact, if you increase the population by several million people, most of whom are much poorer than the average US population... the income distribution gets worse) and indirectly (they also drive down the wages for unskilled labor).

BUT a huge portion is also the increasingly favorable tax treatment that the richest have received. Particularly the essential elimination of the inheritance tax. In my opinion, that is the single stupidest, and most inefficient and regressive moves this country has ever made. Period.

but... what i found fascinating in that graph is what the hell happened right at the beginning of WWII !!?? i had always heard that income disparity decreaced from the roaring 20s until the late 1970s, and then that reveresed... that isn't really what happened at all! Income disparity PLUNGED in like 2 years, and then held steady for a long time....

what happened to change things so abruptly?

did the war effort give political cover for taxig the rich much more heavily? or was it something else?

[elkabong82]

Production has gone up, so have prices, and thus profit. However, wages in general have not gone up at an equal rate to production and prices. Through various deregulations in industry loosening the tax percentage on the wealthy, and through curbing the increase percentage in labor (one method has been outsourcing), the top gains not only their percentage, but also a portion of the wage labor percentage, hence they increase at a much larger rate now.

There's also the trickle down effect. As prices increase yet wages are forcibly neutralized, things become less affordable for the average American. When some of the items (such as gas, healthcare, housing) which have become necessities in American life then increase in cost, the owners of those items make off like bandits while the average person might then have to cut costs elsewhere, which on a mass scale can cause huge drops in spending, especially in the service and retail industries, whose employees constitute a substantial part of the lower middle class bracket or poor bracket.

The problem, IMO, is that while capitalism forces survival of the fittest and does at times raise the standard through such, the goal is excess, which turns to greed, which inevitably turns to corruption. We need to place a limit on ourselves, IMO, when it comes to capitalism. That limit is set through taxation, and various methods, such as luxury tax, increased income tax % on the wealthy, inheritance tax, etc. have been used to help level off income inequality.

I believe we had similar tax systems or laws in place during the post-WWII boom. I think one big contributing problem was the loosening of various regulations in Wall Street and mortgages. They were sold on "we did so well as private industries through the late '90s, we obviously don't need regulation, we can handle ourselves and get even richer." Now we are all dealing with the consequences.

But there are exaggerations and myths permeated which make a lot of people think taxing the rich is evil, like it's the same as taxing the average person. "All that welfare only helps lazy people continue to mooch" for example, is at times used as justification for not increasing taxes. Socialism is used like communism by some at even the slightest suggestion of any kind of regulation.

So until enough people see through the scare tactics to where the majority of the US realizes the severity of the income disparity and supports the type of regulation and taxation needed through the ballot box and open discussions, the problem IMO will continue as it has, and the top 1% will exponentially gain while we will be the ones left to deal with the repurcussions, as we are now with the economy.

[DeanCollins]

It's not a mystery to me. Follow the money and in particular the stock market. With CEOs paid insane amounts of money based on growth and stock price of a company. Often times laying off 10's of thousands just to make the stock price go up in increase their pay. We've destroyed our manufacturing industries in favor of importing cheaper goods. The average American has less than a 100 IQ. These people need manufacturing (and construction jobs). Other jobs were eliminated by mechanization, farming, manufacturing... all to reduce costs, increase production and raise stock prices. The result is a sea of unemployed that the nations richest will be taxed into supporting unless they figure out a way to put these folks to work in companies that aren't concerned about the share price. I won't even go into how the hard working folks retirement (securities) were fleeced by this 1/10 of 1%.

I never took an economics class, but I have heard what tariffs and other forms of protectionism causes with international trade, but there are industries that this country

could redevelop and protect to make products for our own consumption. I, as much as anyone, love to go looking for deals on the internet while the brick and motor stores in my town are closing. But at some point 1/3 of the commercial properties become empty (about 50 percent were when I moved here in '92) and I know that, for a few bucks here and there, I was a part of that process. The people that used to work at those stores, many are unemployed, and many of their houses are in foreclosure. Where will it end?

[AsburySkinsFan]

The problem, IMO, is that while capitalism forces survival of the fittest and does at times raise the standard through such, the goal is excess, which turns to greed, which inevitably turns to corruption. We need to place a limit on ourselves, IMO, when it comes to capitalism. That limit is set through taxation, and various methods, such as luxury tax, increased income tax % on the wealthy, inheritance tax, etc. have been used to help level off income inequality.

As I read the article, and as I read this post one thought keeps coming to my mind, and I'm confused as to why so many find this a mystery, and it seems that the reason this divergence is so apparent is simply that Capitalism is working perfectly. The law is that those running publicly traded companies have a fiduciary responsibility to increase profits and the share-holders stock holdings as such it was inevitable that there would come a point in time when our economy reached a critical mass when expense cuts finally started to cut into the actual workforce at which point the employees became the liabilities to the companies. So those at the top kept cutting workers and freezing pay rates all the while their profits kept climbing. Sooner or later something had to give, and it would seem that the justifiable cost liability was seen as the employees.

It would seem that in the end Capitalism is on the verge of devouring itself.

[chipwhich]

As I read the article, and as I read this post one thought keeps coming to my mind, and I'm confused as to why so many find this a mystery, and it seems that the reason this divergence is so apparent is simply that Capitalism is working perfectly. The law is that those running publicly traded companies have a fiduciary responsibility to increase profits and the share-holders stock holdings as such it was inevitable that there would come a point in time when our economy reached a critical mass when expense cuts finally started to cut into the actual workforce at which point the employees became the liabilities to the companies. So those at the top kept cutting workers and freezing pay rates all the while their profits kept climbing. Sooner or later something had to give, and it would seem that the justifiable cost liability was seen as the employees.

Yeah because minimum wage costs, health care costs, retirement contribution costs and other related costs are too much to discuss.

It is all about companies profits and getting rich and not about simple realities.

Here is a clue, if you make it too costly to hire an employee, you probably wont.

[AsburySkinsFan]

Yeah because minimum wage costs, health care costs, retirement contribution costs and other related costs are too much to discuss.

It is all about companies profits and getting rich and not about simple realities.

Here is a clue, if you make it too costly to hire an employee, you probably wont.

Here's the other part of that clue; once you've cut everything else then the only thing left is the worker.

[deejaydana]

As I read the article, and as I read this post one thought keeps coming to my mind, and I'm confused as to why so many find this a mystery, and it seems that the reason this divergence is so apparent is simply that Capitalism is working perfectly. The law is that those running publicly traded companies have a fiduciary responsibility to increase profits and the share-holders stock holdings as such it was inevitable that there would come a point in time when our economy reached a critical mass when expense cuts finally started to cut into the actual workforce at which point the employees became the liabilities to the companies. So those at the top kept cutting workers and freezing pay rates all the while their profits kept climbing. Sooner or later something had to give, and it would seem that the justifiable cost liability was seen as the employees.

It would seem that in the end Capitalism is on the verge of devouring itself.

What we're seeing, in my mind, is not capitalism eating itself, it's simply more countries catching up through building their own market economies. If you are only marginally educated your work skills can be more easily outsourced. Certainly it's not a pretty sight and the short term consequences for Americans can be ugly. Slate is certainly a far left source to link up to and I'm not downplaying what the article mentions but demonizing capitalism is a cop out in my mind (though it's certainly in vogue these days...for now).

[chipwhich]

Here's the other part of that clue; once you've cut everything else then the only thing left is the worker.

True, that's why companies are hiring illegals.

So your point is?

[chipwhich]

BTW Asbury, Slate.com isn't going to go to fight for your religious beliefs. But keep on keeping on

[AsburySkinsFan]

BTW Asbury, Slate.com isn't going to go to fight for your religious beliefs. But keep on keeping on

Last check, this wasn't a religious debate.

[chipwhich]

Last check, this wasn't a religious debate.

OK, see my previous post.

[AsburySkinsFan]

True, that's why companies are hiring illegals.

So your point is?

If you don't see how that critical mass creates the divergence we are seeing then I don't know how else to point it out to you. But, from where I stand the hand writing is on the wall.

[AsburySkinsFan]

What we're seeing, in my mind, is not capitalism eating itself,

You know, you're right, it's not Capitalism eating itself, it's Capitalism coming to full realization, that the money will flow upward and the money that flows downward is simply the cost of business, and if those costs can be cut then by their thinking they should be cut, even if there is a human component.

it's simply more countries catching up through building their own market economies. If you are only marginally educated your work skills can be more easily outsourced. Certainly it's not a pretty sight and the short term consequences for Americans can be ugly.

I guess then that the important thing would be that the money controllers don't make the mistake in making the short term ugly, long term ugly.

Slate is certainly a far left source to link up to and I'm not downplaying what the article mentions but demonizing capitalism is a cop out in my mind (though it's certainly in vogue these days...for now).

You'll notice in reading the articles that the author is not the one criticizing Capitalism, that was my assertion.

[twa]

Last check, this wasn't a religious debate.

Yet it is one I hear from the religious social justice crowd all the time,not hard to see why it gets confused.