A while back, I had a blog post on a report for ActionAid, written by Alex Evans, on critical uncertainties for development between the present and 2020. One of the big uncertainties Alex identified were environmental shocks, though in that version of the report he limited these shocks to climate-driven environmental shocks. In my post, I suggested to Alex that he widen his scope, for environmental shocks might also include ecosystem collapse, such as in major global fisheries – such environmental shocks are not really related to climate change, but are still of great importance. The collapse of the Gulf of Guinea large marine ecosystem (largely due to commercial overfishing from places other than Africa) has devastated local fish hauls, lowering the availability of protein in the diets of coastal areas and driving enormous pressure on terrestrial fauna as these populations seek to make up for the lost protein. Alex was quite generous with my comments, and agreed with this observation wholeheartedly.
And then today, I stumbled on this – a simple visualization of Atlantic Fisheries in 1900 and 2000, by fish haul. The image is striking (click to expand):
Now, I have no access to the datasets used to construct this visualization, and therefore I can make no comments on its accuracy (the blog post on the Guardian site is not very illuminating). However, this map could be off by quite a bit in terms of how good hauls were in 1900, and how bad they are now, and the picture would still be very, very chilling. As I keep telling my students, all those new, “exotic” fish showing up in restaurants are not delicacies – they are just all that is left in these fisheries.
This is obviously a development problem, as it compromises livelihoods and food supplies. Yet I don’t see anyone addressing it directly, even aid organizations engaged with countries on the coast of the Gulf of Guinea, where this impact is most pronounced. And how long until even the rich really start to feel the pinch?
Go here to see more visualizations – including one of the reach of the Spanish fishing fleet that makes clear where the pressure on the Gulf of Guinea is coming from.
Category: globalization
And now everyone is implicated . . .
Updated 7 June 2011: I can find no evidence that any of my TIAA-CREF funds are holding Glencore. So far, so good . . .
aaannnnddd
No Glencore in my Vanguard 2025 Fund (kid’s college fund). Sadly, though, there is Gazprom. And probably a hell of a lot of other problematic stuff . . . nobody is clean, I tell you.
As a geographer, I spend a lot of time thinking about interconnections – how events and processes in one place influence events and processes in other places. I use these interconnections as a teaching tool in my courses, to help students understand how, for example, our levels of consumption here in the US preclude similar levels of consumption for the rest of the world (not enough resource out there to make that happen). I am always careful to make sure that the students understand that I am as bound up in these linkages as they are – I certainly do not live off the grid, walking/riding a bike everywhere and eating only food I grow (or that is grown locally). But it still hurts every time a find a new way in which I am bound to, and therefore a cause of, some of the processes I find most frustrating in the world. So, this excellent post on FairPensions was a bit tough. Simply put, Glencore, a well-known problem company that trades heavily in the food commodities markets (and appears to be making those markets, as it were, to its own advantage) has been fast-tracked into the FTSE 100, and therefore is now likely part of a lot of the mutual funds and pension plans to which we all make contributions. I’m going to have to check on this, and pray that TIAA-CREF has some sense, but . . . dammit.
For an earlier discussions of food insecurity and the commodities markets, see here, here and here.
On field experience and playing poor
There is a great post up at Good on “Pretending to be Poor” experiments, where participants try to live on tiny sums of money (i.e. $1.50/day) to better understand the plight of the global poor. Cord Jefferson refers to this sort of thing as “playing poor”, at least in part because participants don’t really live on $1.50 a day . . . after all, they are probably not abandoning their secure homes, and probably not working the sort of dangerous, difficult job that pays such a tiny amount. Consuming $1.50/day is one thing. Living on it is entirely another. (h/t to Michael Kirkpatrick at Independent Global Citizen for pointing out the post).
This, for me, brings up another issue – the “authenticity” of the experiences many of us have had while doing fieldwork (or working in field programs), an issue that has been amplified by what seems to be the recent discovery of fieldwork by the RCT trials for development crowd (I still can’t get over the idea that they think living among the poor is a revolutionary idea). The whole point of participant observation is to better understand what people do and why they do it by experiencing, to some extent, their context – I find it inordinately difficult to understand how people even begin to meaningfully parse social data without this sort of grounding. In a concrete way, having malaria while in a village does help one come to grips with the challenges this might pose to making a living via agriculture in a rather visceral way. So too, living in a village during a drought that decimated a portion of the harvest, by putting me in a position where I had to go a couple of (intermittent) days without food, and with inadequate food for quite a few more, helped me to come to grips with both the capacity and the limitations of the livelihoods strategies in the villages I write about in Delivering Development, and at least a limited understanding of the feelings of frustration and inadequacy that can arise when things go wrong in rural Africa, even as livelihoods strategies work to prevent the worst outcomes.
But the key part of that last sentence was “at least a limited understanding.” Being there is not the same thing as sharing the experience of poverty, development, or disaster. When I had malaria, I knew what clinics to go to, and I knew that I could afford the best care available in Cape Coast (and that care was very good) – I was not a happy guy on the morning I woke up with my first case, but I also knew where to go, and that the doctor there would treat me comprehensively and I would be fine. So too with the drought – the villages I was living in were, at most, about 5 miles (8km) from a service station with a food mart attached. Even as I went without food for a day, and went a bit hungry for many more, I knew in the back of my mind that if things turned dire, I could walk that distance and purchase all of the food I needed. In other words, I was not really experiencing life in these villages because I couldn’t, unless I was willing to throw away my credit card, empty my bank account, and renounce all of my upper-class and government colleagues and friends. Only then would I have been thrown back on only what I could earn in a day in the villages and the (mostly appalling) care available in the rural clinic north of Eguafo. I was always critically aware of this fact, both in the moment and when writing and speaking about it since. Without that critical awareness, and a willingness to downplay our own (or other’s) desire to frame our work as a heroic narrative, there is a real risk in creating our own versions of “playing poor” as we conduct fieldwork.
I'm a talking head . . .
Geoff Dabelko, Sean Peoples, Schuyler Null and the rest of the good folks at the Environmental Change and Security Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars were kind enough to interview me about some of the themes in Delivering Development. They’ve posted the video on te ECSP’s blog, The New Security Beat (you really should be checking them out regularly). So, if you want to see/hear me (as opposed to read me), you can go over to their blog, or just click below.
Optimism in numbers
Tom over at A View from the Cave has a really interesting observation at the end of his post on the Mortensen scandal the other day:
I have been conducting interviews with the Knowledge Management team with UNICEF and the one today go to discussing the access of information. I was struck when the gentleman I was interviewing said, “There are hundreds of offices and thousands of people in UNICEF. Any idea that I come with has likely been already done by 50 people and better than what I had imagined.” We need to access this information and share it with each other so that a story like this will not go the same route.
I know that this is not a new observation – hell, it is practically the mantra of the ICT for development crowd – but I want to point out something that gets lost in its common repetition: optimism. The interviewee above was not disparaging the idea of access to information, but instead showing tremendous humility in the face of a vast, talented organization. Tom’s point was to move from this humble observation to (quite rightly) point out that while great ideas may exist within the organization, until they are accessed or shared they are just potential energy.
This is the same thing I tried to leave readers with as one of the takeaways from Delivering Development. As I argue:
We probably overlook significant problems every day, as our measurements fail to capture them, and we are likely mismeasuring many of those we can see. However, this is not failure; this is hope. If we acknowledge that these are, indeed, significant problems that must be addressed if we wish to build a sustainable future, then we can abandon the baggage of decades of failure. We can open ourselves up to innovation that might be unimaginable from within the echo chamber of contemporary globalization and development . . .
This uncertainty, for me, is hope. There are more than 6.5 billion people on this planet. Surely at least several of them have innovative and exciting ideas about how to address the challenges facing their lives, ideas that might be applicable in other places or be philosophically innovative. We will not know unless we ask, unless we actively go looking for these ideas and empower those who have them to express them to the world.
In short, Tom’s interviewee sees 50,000 people as a hopeful resource. I see the nearly 7 billion people on this planet in the same way. I am optimistic about the “potential energy” for addressing global challenges that exists out there in the world. That said, it will be nothing but potential until we empower people to convert it into kinetic actions. Delivering Development provides only the loosest schematic of one way of thinking about doing this (there is a much, much more detailed project/workplan behind that loose schematic) that was presented to raise a political challenge the the status quo focus on experts and “developed country” institutions in development – if we know that people living in the Global South have good ideas, and we can empower these people to share their ideas and solutions, why don’t we?
Sometimes optimism requires a lead blocker. I’m happy to play that role . . . hopefully someone is following me through the line.
The Echo Chamber is showing up everywhere!
Either drawing directly on Delivering Development, or working in parallel to it, people seem to be circling around the idea of development as an echo chamber from which we have great difficulty escaping to see the world as it is, not as we want it to be.
A View from The Cave approaches this issue through a discussion of skepticism in aid:
For some people, aid and development endeavors seem as simple as serving up a spoonful of sugar that is brimming with kindness, energy, compassion and good intentions. Simply add sugar to the prescribed medicine and we can save the world!
Unfortunately, we know that it is not so simple. Communicating this is even harder. Telling a women that her favorite clothing distribution organization could be preventing growth and contributing to the poverty cycle is not received well. Speaking with a gentleman about orphanages being filled with children who have been orphaned not due to the death of parents, but voluntarily after an orphanage has been established, will make you seem cold-hearted and uncaring.
This, of course, extends past outreach to the general public – the research and policy worlds are full of this sort of problem. Marc Bellemare has a post up that addresses this through the idea of confirmation bias, which he eloquently defines as the phenomena in which “people tend to give much more importance than is warranted to whatever evidence confirms their beliefs, and they tend to discard whatever evidence contradicts their beliefs”. He then extends this to the policy world:
Over the last decade, development economists have developed a number of methods aimed at establishing the validity of causal statements. But what good are those methods when policymakers have their own ideas about what works and what does not?
As an economist in a policy school, this is one of those things I don’t really like to think about. I nevertheless think social scientists in general — and economists in particular — should carefully think about how to engage with people who suffer from confirmation bias, as it is no longer sufficient to just put our findings out there for policy makers to use.
Too right! This is exactly my point from one of the panels I sat on at this year’s Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting in Seattle – our responsibility as researchers does not end with publication. It starts with publication, as that evidence is treated as nothing more than another viewpoint in the policy world, and can/will be used and abused to all sorts of ends if left undefended.
Finally, H-5inc. has drawn directly on Delivering Development in a recent post, arguing that a passage in the book “rather nicely sums up what I think is really at the root of our struggles to make productive and appropriate use of data” (that is a very nice thing to say, honestly):
We expect the world to work in a certain manner. Therefore, we gather data to measure the expected workings of the world and analyze those data through frameworks founded on the very understandings of the world they are meant either to affirm or to challenge. In addition, by our choice of data, and our means of analysis, we end up affirming that the world does indeed work the way we thought it did.
Lots of voices circling around the same subject, lots of different ways to intervene and start to tear down the echo chamber that limits us so severely in our efforts to productively engage the world. I choose to interpret this as evidence in support of my hopelessly realistic optimism about development and the world in general.
Future challenges, future solutions
On Global Dashboard Alex Evans discusses a report he wrote for ActionAid on critical uncertainties for development between the present and 2020. Given Alex got to distill a bunch of futures studies, scenarios and outlooks into this report, I have to say this: I want his job.
The list he produces is quite interesting. In distilled form, they are:
1. What is the global balance of power in 2020?
2. Will job creation keep pace with demographic change to 2020?
3. Is there serious global monetary reform by 2020?
4. Who will benefit from the projected ‘avalanche of technology’ by 2020?
5. Will the world face up to the equity questions that come with a world of limits by 2020?
6. Is global trade in decline by 2020?
7. How has the nature of political influence changed by 2020?
8. What will the major global shocks be between now and 2020?
All are fair questions. And, in general, I like his 10 recommendations for addressing these challenges:
1. Be ready (because shocks will be the key drivers of change)
2. Talk about resilience (because the poor are in the firing line)
3. Put your members in charge (because they can bypass you)
4. Talk about fair shares (because limits change everything)
5. Specialise in coalitions (and not just of civil society organisations)
6. Take on the emerging economies (including from within)
7. Brings news from elsewhere (because innovation will come from the edges)
8. Expect failure (and look for the silver lining)
9. Work for poor people, not poor countries (as most of the former are outside the latter)
10. Be a storyteller (because stories create worldviews)
I particularly like #10 here, as it was exactly this idea that motivated me to write Delivering Development. And #7 is more or less the political challenge I lay out in the last 1/4 of the book. #9 is a clear reference to Andy Sumner’s work on the New Bottom Billion, which everyone should be looking at right now. In short, Alex and I are on the same page here.
I have two bits of constructive criticism to offer that I think would strengthen this report – and would be easy edits. First, I think Alex has made a bit of a mistake in limiting his concern for environmental shocks to climate shocks. These sorts of shocks are, of course, critical (hell, welcome to my current job), but there are other shocks out there that are perhaps not best captured as climate shocks on such a short timescale. For example, ecological collapse from overuse/misuse of ecosystem resources (see the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment) may have nothing at all to do with climate change – overfishing is currently crushing most major global fisheries, and the connection between this behavior and climate change is somewhat distant, at best. We’ve been driving several ecosystems off cliffs for some time now, and one wonders when resilience will fail and a state change will set in. It is near-impossible to know what the new state of a stressed ecosystem will be after a state change, so this is really a radical uncertainty we need to be thinking about.
Second, I am concerned that Stevens’ claim about the collapse of globalization bringing about “savage” negative impacts on the developing world. Such a claim strikes me as overgeneralized and therefore missing the complexity of the challenge such a collapse might bring – and it is a bit ironic, given his admonition to “talk about resilience” above. I think that some people (urban dwellers in particular) would likely be very hard hit – indeed, the term savage might actually apply to those who are heavily integrated into global markets simply by the fact they are living in large cities whose economies are driven by global linkages. And certainly those in marginal rural environments who are already subject to crop failure and other challenges will likely suffer greatly from the loss of market opportunities and perhaps humanitarian assistance (look at contemporary inland Somalia for an illustration of what I am talking about here). However, others (the bulk of rural farmers with significant subsistence components to their agricultural activities, or the option to convert activities to subsistence) have the option to pull back from market engagement and still make a stable living. Opportunity will certainly dry up for these people, at least for a while, as this is usually a strategy for managing temporary economic fluctuations. This is certainly a negative impact, for if development does nothing else, it must provide opportunities for people. However, this sort of negative impact doesn’t rise to “savage” – which to me implies famine, infant mortality, etc. I think we make all-to-easy connections between the failure of globalization/development (I’m not sure they are all that different, really, a point I discuss in Delivering Development). Indeed, a sustained loss of global connection might, in the long run, create a space for local innovations and market development that could lead to a more robust future.
So to “be ready” requires, I think, a bit of a broadening of our environmental concerns, and a major effort to engage the complexity of engagement with the global economy among the rural poor in the world. Both are quite doable – and are really minor edits to a very nice report (which I still wish I wrote).
Adaptation, Development and Occam's Razor
Adrian Fenton, writing on the website of IIED (whose work I generally like), seems to be pushing the idea that community-based adaptation (that is, adaptation that builds upon/strengthens strategies employed at the local scale) and microfinance go hand-in-hand. I am not so sure this is a good idea – I feel like IIED has missed a fundamental point here – for most of the developing world, livelihoods are about avoiding and managing risks and challenges – and then capitalizing on any surplus that might come about after managing those risks. As many have noted, this largely risk-averse approach to making a living hugely constrains opportunity because you cannot employ all of your resources in an effort to engage in markets/work off the farm/what have you – you have to effectively waste a bunch of them guarding against events that often don’t happen. One way in which this happens, which I lay out in my book and have discussed on this blog, is when people set up their livelihoods in a manner that allows them to temporarily deglobalize when markets turn against them. This effectively requires holding back resources from market sale in case you have to rely on them directly. For example, farmers who keep the deglobalization option open in their livelihoods hold back a portion of their labor from market engagement as they dedicate time to planting and raising food crops that might be used for subsistence purposes if the markets turn.
Given this fundamental characteristic of so many livelihoods that we see in the Global South, it seems to me that coupling adaptation (current community- and household-level livelihoods are, in effect, adaptation efforts that go on continuously) with microfinance applies the wrong medicine to the problem – people don’t need more capital, they need a way to free up the various resources they already have from the necessary conservativism of their current livelihoods strategies. Adding loans, even small loans, to the current livelihoods mix simply increases risk without necessarily providing benefits that offset that risk.
Instead, it seems to me we ought to be shifting our focus toward microinsurance and away from microfinance – microinsurance provides the safety net that enables risk-taking at the household and community level, and therefore empowers people to use their existing resources in the manner they best see fit. In short, it allows us to meet some of the financial requirements for adaptation without having to create new financial vehicles, and new forms of risk in already-stressed livelihoods. This is a much more direct means of addressing the challenges to local livelihoods posed by climate change impacts and raising the capital needed to address future risks, rather than offering seed capital, hoping the business/effort works out with enough profit to pay back the loan and provide a large surplus that might then be employed to address climate change.
This strikes me as the adaptation and development version of Occam’s razor – when evaluating plans for future adaptation efforts, select the one that requires the fewest new institutions and steps to raise the capital/resources necessary to meet future challenges.
Thinking in parallel on unfettered globalization
I’ve not posted a lot on globalization, per se, on this blog of late . . . but I was really taken by Steven Pearlstein’s review of Dani Rodrik’s The Globalization Paradox in last Sunday’s Washington Post. I have not read Rodrik’s book, but if Pearlstein’s review is accurate, I think I find myself in his camp on the subject. There were a few passages in this review that I really liked, if for no other reason than they sound a lot like what I wrote in my book. But I particularly liked this bit of Pearlstein on Rodrik:
Globalization, by its very nature, is disruptive—it rearranges where and how work is done and where and how profits are made. Things that are disruptive, of course, are destabilizing and create large pools of winners and losers.
Now, from chapter 1 of Delivering Development:
The integration of local economies, politics, and society into global networks is not the unmitigated boon to human well- being presented by many authors. Those living along the shores of globalization deal with significant challenges in their lives, such as degrading environments, social inequality that limits opportunity for significant portions of society, and inadequate medical care. The integration of these places into a global economy does not necessarily solve these problems. In the best cases such integration provides new sources of income that might be used to address some of these challenges. In nearly all cases, however, such integration also brings new challenges and uncertainties that come at a cost to people’s incomes and well- being.
This is some interesting thinking in parallel – anyone got Rodrik’s email? I need to get a copy of the book, and the hours needed to read it.
Where Quant and Qual meet: On speculation, price instability and food insecurity
UPDATE: Marc Bellemare pointed out some issues with this post, which I have addressed here. These issues, though, strengthen the argument about strategic deglobalization . . .
§§§§§§
There have been an interesting series of blog posts going around about the issue of price speculation in food markets, and the impact of that speculation on food security and people’s welfare. Going back through some of these exchanges, it seems to me that a number of folks are arguing past one another.
The most recent discussion was spurred by a post on the Guardian’s Global Development blog by John Vidal that took on the issue of speculation in food markets. In the post, Vidal argues that food speculation is a key driver of price instability on global food markets, which results in serious impacts for the poorest people in the world – a sort of famine profiteering, as it were.
The weakness of this post, as I see it, are twofold. First, it doesn’t take the issue of price arbitrage seriously – that is, how speculation is supposed to function. Aid Thoughts, via one of the comments on Vidal’s post, takes Vidal to task for this. As Aid Thoughts/the commenter point out, the idea behind speculation is to pull future price impacts of shortage into the present, stimulating responses to future shortages before they occur. Thus, a blanket condemnation of speculation makes very little sense from the perspective of one who wants to see food security enhanced around the world – without speculation, there will be no market signal for future shortage, creating a world that addresses shortages in a reactive instead of proactive manner. This is a completely fair critique of Vidal, I think.
However, neither Vidal nor those responding to him actually address the evidence for significant market manipulation, and the intentional generation of instability for the purposes of profiteering. This evidence first emerged in a somewhat anecdotal manner in Fredrick Kaufman’s “The Food Bubble: How Wall Street starved millions and got away with it.” In this article, Kaufman uses a fairly limited number of informants to lay out a case for the intentional manipulation of wheat markets in 2008. It is an interesting read, though I argued in an earlier post that it suffers from trying to be a parable for the pervasive presence of complex investment vehicles in the modern world. And in the end, its findings can hardly be called robust.
Though Kaufman’s argument might, by itself, be less than robust, it received a serious empirical boost from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in the fall of 2010. In a discussion paper that remains underreported and under-considered in food security circles (trust me, it is difficult to get anyone to even talk about speculation in program settings), Bryce Cooke and Miguel Robles demonstrate quantitatively that the dramatic price rises for food in 2008 is best explained by various proxies for speculation and activity on futures markets. Now, we can argue about how large an impact that activity had on actual prices, but it seems to me that Cooke and Robles, when taken in concert with the Kaufman piece, have demonstrated that the speculation we see in the markets right now is not merely a normal market response to potential future shortage – indeed, the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations has been arguing for months that there are no likely supply issues that should be triggering the price increases we see. In other words, while it is foolish to simply blame price arbitrage for food insecurity, it is equally blind to assume that all of those practicing such arbitrage are doing so in the manner prescribed in the textbooks. Someone will always try to game the system, and in tightly connected markets, a few efforts to game a market can have radiating impacts that draw in honest arbitrage efforts. There is need for regulatory oversight. But regulation will not solve all our food problems.
But this all leaves one last question unanswered: what is the impact of price instability, whether caused by actual likely future shortages or by efforts to game markets for short-term profits, on the welfare of the poor? Vidal, Kaufman and many others assume that the impacts are severe. Well, maybe. You see, where matters (again – yep, I’m a geographer). In a very interesting paper, Marc Bellemare (along with Chris Barrett and David Just) demonstrates that, at least in Ethiopia:
contrary to conventional wisdom, the welfare gains from eliminating price volatility would be concentrated in the upper 40 percent of the income distribution, making food price stabilization a distributionally regressive policy in this context.
This finding may be a shock to those working in aid at first glance, but this finding is actually intuitive. In fact, in my book (out tomorrow!) I lay out a qualitative picture of livelihoods in rural Ghana that aligns perfectly with this finding. In Bellemare et al, I would bet my house that the upper 40% of the population is that segment of the population living in urban areas and/or wealthy enough to be purchasing large amounts of processed food. Why does this matter? This is the segment of the population that typically has the most limited options when food prices begin to get unstable. On the other hand, the bottom 60% of the population, especially those in this cohort living in rural areas (it is unclear from the study how much of an overlap between poor and rural there is in the sample, but I am betting it is pretty high), has a much more limited engagement with global food markets. As a result, when food prices begin to spike, they have the ability to effect a temporary partial, or even complete, disengagement from the global market. In other words, much as I saw in Ghana, this study seems to suggest that temporary deglobalization is a coping strategy that at least some people in Ethiopia use to guard against the vagaries of markets. Ironically, those best positioned to effect such a strategy are the poorest, and therefore they are better able to manage the impact of price instability on food markets.
In short, I would argue that Marc’s (and his co-authors’) work is a quantitative empirical demonstration of one of my core arguments in Delivering Development:
2. At globalization’s shoreline the experience of “development” is often negative. The integration of local economies, politics, and society into global networks is not the unmitigated boon to human well- being presented by many authors. Those living along the shores of globalization deal with significant challenges in their lives, such as degrading environments, social inequality that limits opportunity for significant portions of society, and inadequate medical care. The integration of these places into a global economy does not necessarily solve these problems. In the best cases such integration provides new sources of income that might be used to address some of these challenges. In nearly all cases, however, such integration also brings new challenges and uncertainties that come at a cost to people’s incomes and well- being. (pp.14-15)
I’m not suggesting Marc endorses this claim – hell, for all I know he’ll start throwing things when he sees it. But there is an interesting convergence happening here. I’m glad I met Marc at a tweet-up in DC a few weeks ago. We’re going to have to talk some more . . . I see the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
In summary, while efforts to game global food markets do exist, and have very serious impacts on at least some people, they do not crush everyone in the Global South. Instead, this instability will be most felt by those in urban areas – in the form of a disaffected middle and upper class, and a large cohort of the urban poor who, lacking alternative food sources, might be pushed over the brink by price increases. The policy implications are clear:
- We need to be watching the impact of price increases on urban food insecurity more than rural insecurity
- Demanding that rural producers orient themselves toward greater and greater integration with global markets in the absence of robust fallback measures (such as established, transparent microinsurance and microsavings initiatives) will likely extend the impact of future price instability further into the poorest populations.
- We need to better understand the scope of artificially-generated instability and uncertainty in global food markets, and establish means of identifying and regulating this activity without closing price arbitrage down entirely.