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Saving money by doing the right thing

Camphill Village Trust (described here) is a poignant example of the damage managers do when when they focus on doing things right rather than doing the right thing. But in this CVT is far from alone: imagine the same effect multiplied many thousands of times over and you get an inkling of extent of the malady that is now crippling the entire public sector.

As it happens, that crisis is the subject of a report launched last week by Locality, a network of social and community enterprises, in partnership with consultancy Vanguard. Called ‘Saving money by doing the right thing: why local by default must replace diseconomies of scale’, it estimates at £16bn (conservatively) the savings that could be achieved not by hiring more people or building huge IT systems but by something much simpler: stopping doing the wrong things and doing the right ones instead.

As the report (disclosure: I helped edit it) shows, it’s a design problem. The wrong thing that the public sector obsessively pursues is a services model based on the industrial principles articulated by Adam Smith in his famous description of a pin factory in The Wealth of Nations. Smith calculated that by breaking the overall task down into many simpler ones (18 in the case of the pin), quickly trained workers using basic machines were up to 240 times productive than craftsmen who made the whole thing.

The big idea here is economies of scale: the more and faster you make something, the cheaper it is. Scale economies are irresistible to managers looking to cut costs and are almost never challenged. Yet their importance is constantly exaggerated, even in manufacturing. According to one accounting guru, ‘There is no longer any reason to rule out localisation of economic activity on the grounds of scale economies. Scale economy, beyond very small volumes, is a concept that should be discarded’. It is reported that under Prime Minister Tony Blair the No 10 Delivery Unit was commissioned to compile a report on economies of scale. It was never published, the strong inference being that nothing of interest was found – or nothing that chimed with the Treasury’s preferred narrative.

In fact, in services, as the Locality report makes plain, scale economies lead up a dangerous and costly blind alley. More equals less, and for two reasons. One, scale thinking blinds managers to the real costs of service. And two, they depend on standardisation, which is fine for pins but a disaster for service organisations. Unlike for pins, human demand for services is individual and infinitely varied. Force-fitting human-shaped needs into standardised pre-determined categories designed to minimise unit costs (think 10-minute GP appointments, 15-minute slots for home care or ‘Press 1 for X, 2 for Y’ etc) is doomed to jack up cost and multiply demand as people represent over and over to get their problem sorted.

The truly momentous finding of Vanguard’s research is that inexorably rising demand on A&E departments, GP surgeries, social care and even housing is a myth. On the contrary, underlying demand for most public services is both stable and predictable. All the ‘increase’ consists of what Vanguard calls ‘failure demand’, repeat calls caused by a failure to do something or do something right the first time. On analysis typically between one-third and two-thirds of all demand on services consists of failure demand – demand that shouldn’t be there.

Unfortunately managers focused on scale economies don’t see this, because they measure activity or unit costs: the cost of taking a call, making an assessment or performing15 minutes of care.

But unit costs are irrelevant to the real cost of service or care, which is from beginning to end. To minimise true cost, services therefore have to be optimised for end-to-end flow, too. There is a world of difference between the fragmented industrialised transactions that managers think of as care and what people need and want. As the report graphically illustrates – it is the first to do so – most of what people experience as care (and most of the work that service providers perform) consists of repeated assessments and referrals; sometimes clents never get beyond that, or only when their condition has become an emergency.

This is both grotesque and eye-wateringly expensive. In effect, we have the worst of all possible worlds: public and private-sector organisations competing to do the wrong thing better, with increasingly intrusive regulation struggling to prevent inevitable abuses. Commissioning for scale, as is currently encouraged, make things worse. Crushed between a rapacious private sector and state regulation of near Stalinist prescriptiveness social enterprises and charities like CVT struggle to keep a space free for diversity and innovationx. Private-sector prime contractors strip out most of the value, leaving crumbs for lowest-common-denominator subcontractors now detached from direct connection with their end-funders and commissioners.

However, like the myth of expanding demand, the other main finding of the Locality and Vanguard work also contradicts the conventional narrative of doom. It is that, as the report title suggests, doing the right thing is far more economical and effective than doing the wrong thing. It’s a secret well known to the quality movement but counterintuitive to those brought up on economies of scale: poor service is never as cheap as it looks and always more expensive than good, because lower unit costs are more than wiped out by the corrections, revisits and rework involved in putting it right.

Examples in the report demonstrate that effective, ie efficient service, is delivered one person at a time. The four design principles are:

  • local by default, allowing people’s needs to be understood in context;

  • help people to help themselves, fostering agency and responsibility rather than dependency;

  • focus on value, not cost. Managing cost drives cost up; managing value – solving people’s real problems – strips away failure demand and brings overall costs down;

  • accountability to purpose, not outcome. Measures related to outcomes and targets distort behaviour and hide failure. Measuring achievement agains purpose foster learning, improvement and innovation.

Redesigning service around these four principles as opposed to industrial scale economies reveals eye-opening truths. Rebalancing lives is often a matter of simple practical measures: a walk-in shower, better lighting and even velcro fasteners for buttons on clothes can be enough to restore confidence and dignity and snap faltering individuals out of the medicalisation process that currently leads to repeated A&E episodes with an inevitable end point in a care home.

When lives are put back on track, wonder of wonders, demand begins to fall. As the report demonstrates, a problem family is likely to be known to many agencies – schools, police, courts, housing, benefits, mental health, for example. Turning such family round has a demultiplier effect, reversing the vicious circle of increasing demand and turning it into a virtuous one. Getting children back to school may help obesity, alcohol and health problems. Bit by bit, whole communities can begin to regenerate themselves from within. Switching off demand is where the long-term savings come from, a powerful second whammy that follows from the simple, less costly solutions emerging from newly joined up service.

A community like CVT’s Botton Village has always instinctively worked to the guiding principles laid out in the report. Not perfectly, but in good faith it has over the years built up a sophisticated and delicately-balanced model of what the right thing looks like in terms of looking after other human beings. Perversely, it and other good organisations are now being pulled away from them and forced to do the wrong thing by current obsessions with scale and standardisation. Saving money by doing the right thing – isn’t that what the public sector should be about?

Social care: who needs enemies?

Last week I visited Botton Village. Botton is an extraordinary 230-strong community of people with mental disability, some quite severe, and volunteer ‘co-workers’ who live and work together in a tiny village tucked away in the wilds of the North Yorks moors. Now 60 years old, Botton’s frugal model of self-help and reciprocal care has helped hundreds of residents live lives of dignity and value, and inspired and attracted volunteers from all over the world. It is also a poignant test case for today: can its unique therapeutic community survive today’s rigid, rule-based public-sector management model?

Botton is the jewel in the crown of the Camphill Village Trust (CVT). Camphill was founded in Scotland at the end of the war by a group of Austrian refugees from Nazism, chief among them paediatrician Karl Koenig, basing themselves on the teachings of Rudolf Steiner. Some of Steiner’s views are controversial, but what is not in doubt is the record of the experimental communities the refugees set up to offer education and a shared life initially to handicapped children, then when they reached school-leaving age to adults as well. Camphill has sprouted more than 100 fellow communities and imitators all over the world, including one near Moscow; families wanting more for their relatives than the by-the-numbers care on offer in conventional care homes ‘would walk over glass’ to get them taken in, as one parent puts it.

As developed over the years, Camphill communities are a marvel of economy and balance. They are autonomous and self-managing, with the unsalaried volunteers at their centre. Living expenses are shared: everyone, regardless of disability, is expected to contribute, and the community in turn sustains and develops them in a spirit of brotherhood and equality. There is a strong work ethic. Botton, formed from a small estate made available and later made over by the Macmillan family in gratitude for the new life given there to a family member, has five working farms, all organic and biodynamic, workshops and its own school. The Camphill ethos doesn’t suit everyone, so after a month’s trial, new residents and their housemates get to choose whether they stay or go – but those who have found their place there thrive in its accepting embrace.

Over five decades Botton and CVT’s several other UK prospered, prudently husbanding resources and adding new properties to the original Botton base. Botton was the subject of an admiring TV documentary, and in 2005 won the Deputy Prime Minister’s Award for Sustainable Communities, which singled out its ethos of sustainability and mutual respect.

But while Botton went its own idiosyncratic way, the world around it was changing. The agenda in social care swung decisively towards personalisation, choice and ‘independent living’. The resulting suspicion of community care has been magnified by a series of high-profile scandals culminating in the notorious Winterbourne View. Risk, safeguarding and compliance with procedures have become the prime indicators of ‘quality of care’. Increasing suspicion of communities like CVT was matched by tightening public funding.

For Botton, too intent on its own affairs to pay much attention to the changing environment, it came as a rude shock when concerns were raised over its unconventional management and governance arrangements, followed in 2011 by critical reports from its funders, North Yorks County Council, and the Care Quality Commission. Caught on the hop, and fearing a drying up of funding, the charity’s board of trustees were panicked into the drastic step of bringing in a CEO and management team with NHS experience with the aim of reassuring funders and securing compliance with the regulatory regime.

The result has been a train wreck. For a finely balanced constitution that had been deliberately set up by refugees from the Third Reich to dispense with strong central authority, inserting a layer of top-down management was like injecting it with a foreign body. Long term co-workers, the heart and soul of the organisation, have felt themselves sidelined and downgraded by the import of paid care workers who have taken over some of their functions. Being volunteers rather than employees, they have no employment rights, and several have been suspended in controversial circumstances, being required to move with their families out of their homes of many years with minimal notice. Many have given up and moved on, leaving several of CVT’s communities with no or only vestigial co-working – in the view of many an abandonment of the ethos and way of life that they and their relatives signed up for. Even Botton, the Camphill stronghold, has suffered an exodus of residents and co-workers; together with a funding standstill by the local authority, the result is a Botton population that has shrunk by one third since 2011. Some of the workshops have shut, a full-time medical centre lined to the local GP surgery has been mothballed and there are fears for the school.

Most affected of course are the villagers. The ‘decarceration’ movement that gathered pace in the 1990s was rightly concerned with replacing dependency and ghettoisation in giant institutions with self-reliance and ‘care in the community’. But many see life at the now politically correct opposite end of the spectrum as just as restrictive, only in a different way. As former patient and social historian Barbara Taylor writes in her moving The Last Asylum, in the name of ‘choice’ and ‘independent living’, many mentally disabled have been shunted off into bedsits and hostels; nominally ‘in the community’, many live lonely lives with a TV their only company. Many see something similar happening within the CVT communities, where parents report villagers putting on kilos as they ‘choose’ Mars Bars over healthy house meals and decide to stay in bed rather than go to work in the mornings, and disturbed behaviour as individual TVs replace community life and interaction. ‘Another name for independent living is enforced loneliness’, says one insider grimly.

CVT is now facing a full-blown financial and identity crisis. A climate of fear and suspicion rules with tight-lipped managers on one side and many co-workers, residents and their families on the other. Family members say they are frustrated by a lack of dialogue with managers and the latters’ failure to come clean about their strategic intentions, while dire fears are stoked by the removal of co-workers from the board of trustees in favour of NHS administrators and the unpredictable and apparently arbitrary opening and closing of the membership lists. Both inside and outside, concerned observers fear that in the name of regulatory compliance, and with the tacit consent of the trustees, the new regime is bent on ousting the co-workers and turning the CVT communities into the kind of care homes they deliberately decided to keep their relatives out of.

The Botton experience underlines one of the lessons of Taylor’s book: in difficult and uncertain areas like mental health, management absolutes should be handled with as much care as high explosive. One generation’s political correctness all too often turns into the next one’s anathema. Learning proceeds from difference, as the great anthropologist Gregory Bateson put it, and there is no such thing as ‘best practice’, only hypotheses to be humbly refined and modified in the light of experience and experiment. For any organisation like CVT, human difficulty and dilemma are part of daily life, but it has experienced none of the scandals of the regulated sector. Indeed, it is now becoming clear that regulation is part of the larger problem. More alternatives like Botton are needed, not fewer. And respect for the evidence that for many people a caring, structured community provides a better and happier life than a flat on their own, whatever the dogma of the day says.

The dark heart of Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley is the envy of the world. The flywheel of US capitalism, it hums with energy, ambition and wealth that are magically transmuted into a seemingly endless stream of start-ups that want to change the world.

But what if is it’s gone into reverse?

The Financial Times recently carried two op-ed pieces, one querying the direction of capitalism and the other querying the direction of Silicon Valley, on the same day. They made a hint of a link between the two. But it’s time to spell it out.

To be plain, the real issue that’s emerging from Silicon Valley is not the gentrification of San Francisco and the disdain of überrich nerds for the area’s ordinary inhabitants. It is that the Silicon Valley innovation machine is increasingly focused on enterprise that is at best socially useless (does anyone need another social network or photo-sharing app?). You can go further. Scratch the shiny high-tech veneer and the Big Tech companies that we are in awe of are increasingly looking like something much grubbier, sucking sustenance out the economy rather than enriching it. Like the banks, in fact.

The engines driving the rogue flywheel are Moore’s Law, a polarising economy and a perverted sense of corporate purpose.

Moore’s Law, whose consequences continually take us by surprise, describes the exponential growth of computing power, doubling every 18 months for the last 50 years. It has given us the internet and Big Data; coming soon to a fridge, thermostat and waste bin near you, the ‘internet of things’ which will turn homes and indeed whole cities for good or ill into interconnected devices.

Meanwhile, thanks again partly to the internet, we live increasingly in winner-takes-all economies. Globalisation and naked power have help to strip out self-correcting feedback; for winners and losers alike, the process of winning or losing has become self-reinforcing.

Finally, partly as a result of the exercise of this taken-for-granted power, the tacit assumption has grown up that the economy exists to serve companies, rather than the other way around. Profit has become its own justification. But the decoupling of corporate from the wider social welfare has had consequences that are only now becoming apparent. One of the most important is the wholesale outsourcing that has savagely depleted what Gary Pisano and Michael Shih call the ‘industrial commons’, the technological and institutional infrastructure that supports innovation. The result is a hollowed-out economy in terms of both techology – Amazon couldn’t build a Kindle in the US if it wanted to – and, increasingly, employment.

To this fermenting brew Silicon Valley has added its own special, and diabolical, ingredient. Ironically, it stems from the hippy-libertarian mantra that ‘information wants to be free’. Dutifully following that idea, Google’s Sergey Brin took a momentous sideways step: by giving away the service and making money from advertising, he reasoned, he could have it both ways – information stayed free and he could have his money-making business too.

As it turns out, despite Google’s ‘Don’t do evil’ mantra, this was a pact with the devil. At a stroke, making information free altered the relationship with users from customer to product: Google’s (and Facebook’s, Yahoo!’s and Twitter’s) real customers are advertisers to whom they sell personal data gleaned from us as users. In effect, the business model of some the most powerful companies in the world is surveillance. (As The Observer’s John Naughton has noted, tapping into the servers of the internet giants ‘must have seemed a no-brainer to the NSA. After all, Google and Facebook are essentially in the same business’.)

The second consequence, warns internet seer and virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier, is that it bodily removed whole swathes of information from the formal, monetised economy and dumped it in the informal one where the only entities that could profit from it were the owners of the massive computers where it was centralised. The first casualty was the press – why would anyone buy a newspaper when you could read it free on Google or Yahoo!? But consider also something like Google translation.

Google translation is powered not by a marvel of artificial intelligence but by anyone who has ever translated a phrase, article or book from or into a foreign language. A giant mash-up, it works by comparing all the similar translations it can find and choosing the most appropriate. In other words, it takes the real work of human translators and moves it ‘off the books’. Writes Lanier: ‘The act of cloud-based translation shrinks the economy by pretending the translators who provided the examples don’t exist. With each so-called automatic translation, the humans who were the sources of the data are inched away from the world of compensation and employment.’

In this way the internet companies are benefiting from shrinking the economy across a whole raft of the ‘creative industries’ which were supposed to thrive online – publishing, music, video, photography – but whose denizens now find themselves subsisting on the margins of the paid economy. At its peak Kodak employed 45,000; when Instagram, today’s photography poster-child, was bought by Facebook for $1bn, it had a payroll of 13. Even computer jobs are in retreat as the benefits of economic activity accrue to a tiny number of massive concentrations of computer power at the apex of internet commerce.

If anything, the process is speeding up. At Davos, no less than Google’s Eric Schmidt warned that automation was eating its way up the food chain. ‘The race is between people and computers, and the people need to win. I am definitely on that side in this fight, it is very important that we find the things that people are really good at,’ Schmidt said, which in the circumstances is a bit like a fox simultaneously licking its lips and sobbing over the mysterious death rate of chickens in the hen coop.

Many, including Lanier, believe that part of the answer to what he sees as the hijacking of the internet must be to give individuals property rights over their personal data. Without such a reversal, he foresees the demise of a middle class steadily squeezed out of employment – and, when the 1 per cent can outspend the rest of the 99 per cent, the end of democracy too. Another, and critical, part is to challenge the assumption that what’s good for business is automatically good for society and the relentless economic and technological determinism that go with it. Otherwise, unthinkable as it might sound, Silicon Valley could turn from miracle into the economy’s black hole – a zone of (highly profitable) economic destruction from which only a fortunate 0.01 per cent get out alive.

Learning, to survive

It was Reg Revans, the begetter of action learning, who asserted that ‘for an organisation to survive, its rate of learning must be equal to or greater than the rate of change in the external environment’. The observation is as pertinent now as it ever was; but apart from a period in the 1990s, when Peter Senge introduced the idea of the learning organisation in his (temporarily) influential The Fifth Discipline, it has never really fired the corporate imagination.

One reason is that it seems abstract and difficult. Senge wants managers to become systems thinkers, for a start; and while children instinctively ‘get’ systems thinking, managers schooled in solving problems by mechanistically reducing them to their smallest components and then putting them together again, just start looking for the exits as soon as it is mentional. Yes, of course it’s necessary to learn, but we’re busy – can’t it wait till tomorrow? As a result the learning organisation is today’s management equivalent of the Higgs-Boson: while its existence is proved in theory, no one has never actually spotted one.

It’s not least of the merits of Donal Carroll’s new book, Managing Value in Organisations (full disclosure: I wrote the foreword), which is shortlisted for the CMI’s 2014 management book of the year award, that among other things it resurrects the problem of learning. Carroll’s contention is that alongside a business model, every organisation, whether consciously or not, also has a management and a learning model. While the three are interdependent, it is the way and degree to which the organisation learns that decides whether it will observe Revans’ law – that is, survives.

Carroll makes the essential and often ignored point that the issue is not one of learning or not learning. Everyone learns at work; the question is what. Unfortunately, in the absence of consciously positive ones the dominant lessons that people pick up in most organisations are negative: how to avoid attracting unwanted attention (not rocking the boat), why change is impossible (learned helplessness), at worst covert resistance (as in the case of the airline pilot who noted, ‘I can raise their costs faster than they can reduce my pay’) – compensatory feedback, in Senge’s terms. In effect these are non-systems-thinking, non- or anti-learning organisations in which individuals learn to survive but not the organisationas a whole.

These learnings are mostly unspoken; their visible manifestation is the cultures of disengagement and apathy that characterise so many workplaces, particularly larger ones. Often non-learning organisations are the result of egregiously flawed work designs. For instance, learning is often linked to feedback. But feedback, as the late Peter Scholtes pointed out, is a systems term, referring to a loop in which one part of the system relays information to an antecedent part (such as customer to supplier) so that the collective function can be improved ie, the organisation learns. By definition managers can’t give feedback in the strict sense because they aren’t antecedent – they are further away from the customer than the frontline worker. This is why in practice targets have such disastrous consequences: being set by managers they impart false feedback that prevents the organisation learning from its proper teacher, the customer.

Paradoxically, while it is thus essential for an organisation to think about its learning model, the most effective one is where, like Monsieur Jourdain in Molière’s The Bourgeois Gentleman who doesn’t realise he is speaking prose, people do it in the course of their job. This happens in production and service designs where the work is closely coupled to customer; iTunes allows Apple to learn about your taste in music, Toyota’s famous production system learns how to build better cars to order, in days.

As Carroll rightly warns, however, the way the organisation learns (if it does) is not independent of its management and business models. By definition, a company that is outward-facing enough to learn systematically from its customers can’t be managed in the traditional top-down command-and-control manner, and the closer it gets to the customer, the more it moves from a business model of ‘push’ (make the product, then sell it by advertising and price promotion) to ‘pull’ (basically making it easy for the customer to take the value they want, as in iTunes).

At a time when arguably the most urgent task for management is unlearning what passes for conventional wisdom, the learning-management-business model frame is thus a potentially fruitful starting point for reexamining many of the perennial business issues around creating energy, engagement and purpose. Carroll scores too by using appropriately fresh new examples – start-ups, social enterprises and public sector institutions – as test-beds for his ideas. As he would be the first to point out, awareness of the models is the start of the journey to make them useful in the daily practice of management, not the end. But if learning in organisations was easy, they would be doing it already. As Einstein is supposed to have said, ‘If we knew what we were doing, we wouldn’t call it research, would we?’

Why skyrocketing share buybacks spell bad news for the rest of us

Share buybacks have reached their highest level since the financial crisis – $450bn in the US over the last year. Many companies, such as 3M, are bumping up dividends too. That’s the equivalent of a deep corporate sigh of relief that it’s back to business as usual – and unfortunately the worst possible news for the rest of us.

Buybacks are Exhibit A in the corporate financialisation that has progressively unbalanced Western economies since the 1980s. They are financial engineering in its simplest form. There is only one reason for companies to buy their own stock, and that is to drive up the share price and return on equity without the tedious business of investing in plant, people or customers. Under current assumptions, this course of action is not only justified but recommended. If, under the efficient market hypothesis, the current share price contains all relevant information about the company’s present and future prospects, then that’s the only thing that managers need to worry about. Being paid substantially in stock, of course, simply redoubles their encouragement to do so (this is the reason that despite all the handwringing executive pay just keeps on going up – that’s what it’s designed to do). Indirectly, share buybacks contributed to the severity of the crash in 2008 and its aftermath. William Lazonick, one of the foremost researchers in the area, found that in the early noughties companies in the financial sector were among the most avid stock repurchasers, often spending more than 100 per cent of their earnings on buybacks and dividends, leaving them with precious little to fall back on when lightning struck. They have been dependent on bailouts and QE ever since.

Buybacks at that level, of course, do not just exhaust the kitty for a rainy day. They are monies the company consciously chooses not to invest for the longer term in the business or the workforce in the shape of higher wages. Thanks to Ed Milliband, falling wages and living standards are now on the political agenda – remarkably, an embarrassing enough problem to provoke even the CBI to call for change (‘In my day’, muttered Vic Keegan on Twitter, ‘unions used to push for higher wages. Today it is employers’). One reason for wage stagnation is the swelling of the reserve army of the unemployed caused by the globalisation of the world economy (there are others, too, which will be the subject of a future article). As Peter Wilby pointed out in a perceptive recent piece in The Guardian globalisation is also a factor in what he terms today’s investment strike which is helping to drive the race to the bottom in salaries and social benefits.

‘Organised capital is more powerful than organised labour,’ he writes. ‘Thanks to the global loosening of capital controls over the past 40 years, investors can take their money where they like. They seek the highest returns. The more that costs such as wages and taxes can be forced down and prices pushed up, the higher the profits and the happier the investors. If they are not happy, the investors will take their money elsewhere.’

For Harvard’s innovation guru, Clayton Christensen, it is the ‘doctrine of new finance’ (ie financialisation) which is behind the investment slowdown that now endangers national competitiveness as well as general living standards. Instead of channelling investment into ‘empowering’ innovation (whole new classes of products and services that create jobs and put capital to productive use) or even ‘sustaining’ innovation (product advances such as hybrid cars), managers are putting such small amounts as are devoted to investment into efficiency gains, which cut the cost of producing existing products and services. Efficiency innovations release rather than use capital and, net, eliminate jobs. If the capital released is not recycled back into empowering innovation to take up the slack, the economy just churns. Sure enough, Christensen calculates that whereas in previous postwar recessions the US economy regularly took six months to get back up to speed, in 1990 it took 15 months, in 2001 39 months and this time five years and counting, even with massive amounts of quantitative easing, one of whose side-effects, according to Manifest’s Sarah Wilson, is ‘printing money for CEOs’ by refloating (and reflating) the economy and stock markets.

Against the incentives pushing in the opposite direction, pleading with companies to raise wages and invest more is about as effective as King Canute ordering the turn of the tide. All the things we’re now seeing – burgeoning share buybacks, the enrichment of the minority at the expense of the flatlining other ranks, dismally low investment and declining rates of innovation – are interlocking facets of the same Rubik’s Cube, all locked in place by a seamless web of vested interest at whose heart lies the ideological assertion that directors are agents of shareholders, whose interests take precedence over all others. Almost everyone in politics is in denial about this, but the puzzle can’t be unpicked without attacking this sacred central tenet. Unless and until it is, a return to ‘business as usual’ will continue to be cause for regret rather than optimism for all except the privileged few.

Happy New Year.