 The Harris Family Professorship, which we inaugurate today, reflects the Harris Family's commitment to the continued excellence of the University of Michigan in general and the Ford School in particular. The Harris's have many connections to the University. Ira is a graduate of the Business School and currently serves as a member of the President's Advisory Committee, the Investment Advisory Committee, the Athletic Advisory Board and the Athletic Director's Cabinet Campaign Committee. That's just his current involvements. Nikki Harris, who is active in numerous cultural and philanthropic endeavors, has also become an engaged supporter of the University. Two of their children, Jonathan and Jackie, are UM graduates and John currently serves on the New York Major Gifts Committee for the University. And in doubt, Professorship is one of the most meaningful gifts that a school can receive. It's a strong signal that the faculty here are our greatest resource and that their contributions are of great value. And we join the Harris Family in viewing this Professorship as an ongoing tribute to President Ford. The Professorship gives the school the flexibility to support faculty in any area of public policy and thus ensures that over the long run we can use this particular gift to hire the best people in the most important fields. We are grateful for this gift as both a recognition of the school's accomplishments and expression of faith in our future. I am truly delighted that the first holder of this Professorship is Jim Levinson and that this Professorship was available to us as a way to keep him here at Michigan and to demonstrate how important his presence here is at the Ford School. Jim represents the excellence in teaching and in research that the Harris's I'm sure had in mind when they established this Professorship. He is recognized as one of the very top economists whose work spans issues of industrial organization, trade and development. His research covers a range of topics from how the auto industry works to how families in Indonesia cope with economic crises. When you read his papers you see both a deep curiosity about how things work and an deeply deep commitment to figure out how things might be better. As a teacher Jim is also well known among our students. He regularly teaches our core course in microeconomics and this is not a subject that comes naturally to everyone. Jim's effectiveness in the course is best demonstrated by our graduates who report quite proudly that when their employers need economic analysis done they ask the Michigan person to do it. I should also note that Jim is a first-rate colleague as well at the Ford School and I've been very privileged to have him serve as the Associate Dean here. Perhaps the most illustrious example of Jim's work is the distance learning project for South Africa that he designed and leads. This is a multifaceted program that includes data collection and archiving in South Africa, training students here to work with South African officials in the use of data, and training South African officials in the techniques and the applications of social science. Jim's entrepreneurial ability pulled this project together and found the foundation funding for it. The students he involves every year typically describe this as the high point of their learning experience at the Ford School. The program represents the best of what we strive to do here, to apply our knowledge effectively to improve the work being done out there within the public sector, the private sector, and the not-for-profit sector. It is Jim's combined interest in theoretical research, excellent teaching, and an applying knowledge to practice that makes him such an excellent choice for the Harris family professorship. Becky, thank you very much. I'd like to thank the Harris family. I'm deeply grateful for all that you've done. Dean Blanks done a wonderful job making the Ford School the kind of place that brings all of us here together today. Thank you very much. People who know me know just how much a really nice, sunny, warm afternoon this late in the year means to me. And I know it means a lot to you too. So I'm deeply grateful to you for being inside and for showing up here today. Thanks a lot. Before jumping right in, I'd like to provide a little bit of an overview of what I'll be talking about. We're fortunate to have a very diverse group here. We have people who day in, day out think about trade policy. They do this for a living. And we have people here who probably don't give a whole lot of thought to international economic policy. What I want to try to do is give you a flavor for what I'm going to talk about. I think it was Mark Twain who said that it's not what you don't know that'll hurt you, but it's what you think you know that's wrong that'll really get you. And I'm going to try to make the case that that's what this talk is about. I'm going to try to make the case that economists as a profession have taken one too many short cuts in trying to convince ourselves of what we think ought to be correct. We tend to think that more open countries grow more quickly, that their incomes are higher. That in a nutshell is why we tend to think that trade by itself is a good thing. I personally suspect that that may well be correct, but in an effort to convince ourselves that this is in fact the case we, and here I mean economists, have been doing some sloppy science. This is sort of a grumpy talk in a way. It's about how hard it is to convincingly make the case that trade enhances growth. And it's about how we as a profession have been too willing to accept short cuts in an effort to convince ourselves of what we think we already know. The work that I'll talk about today is work that's joint with Juan Carlos Hallock. He's here today and I wouldn't be able to give this talk and think through all this stuff if it wasn't for the benefit I've gotten from talking to him about this stuff. So what's the question that's been addressed in the trade and growth literature, and more importantly, why do we care about it? Well, the first part's pretty easy. The question broadly defined is whether countries that trade more tend to grow faster and or have higher per capita incomes. The second part, the so what part, is a little trickier. If it were the case that countries that trade more grow faster and that the level of trade were somehow God-given and immutable, we might still find the relationship between trade and growth sort of intellectually interesting, but I don't think it would be the hot topic that in fact it's become. We care about this relationship because of its implications for policy. We care because of the idea that government might somehow adjust their trade policies so as to enhance growth. And looked at this way, there's a behavioral aspect to the issue. It's not just a statistical relationship. If countries change their policies in certain ways, are they likely to in fact experience higher growth? I'm going to argue that the existing literature and the way economists have been thinking about this doesn't really answer the question. I'm going to argue that the approach taken in the literature has missed the boat and that while the question being asked is the right one, the methods and the data that have been used to answer that question are the wrong ones. If what we care about are the policy implications of globalization on economic growth, then we need econometric methods that on a good day stand a chance of actually answering the question. And that question is, does trade policy operate as development policy? I don't really plan to give a comprehensive overview of what economists think we know about trade and growth that's too big of a task. Probably the most systematic and influential set of results out there come from cross-country evidence, typically using country-level data. The literature is looking for the relationship, if there is one, between measures of openness to international trade and measures of economic performance. The particular choice of variables and the exact econometric methods used, they vary a lot from study to study. There's been a progression such that it is in this literature and I think it's fair to say that the set of results are dissonant. There's no consensus on this one. Interestingly, most of the people who look at this come up with firm conclusions. So if you were to ask any individual researcher, does trade enhance growth? Many people firmly believe the answer is yes. There's a more heterodox view that says the answer is no. I just don't find this stuff convincing. In talking about the existing literature, I'm going to try to organize my discussion around three topics. I'd like to say a little bit about the early literature that ignores what I'm going to call or refer to as the endogeneity of trade policy. Say a little bit more about some recent work that's attempted to deal with the shortcomings of the early work. This literature uses econometric techniques known as instrumental variables estimation. And then I want to spend some time, especially spend some time on what I think of as the so what question. That is, how relevant are these results for the actual practice of trade policy? Well, a natural place to start is to look at the statistical relationship between measures of openness to trade and measures of economic success. If trade policy acts as development policy, then we should observe countries that are more open grow more quickly. That's basically what the early literature has done. It's looked at measures of openness and it's looked at economic growth. And as it looks at that, it asks, you know, do countries that are more open grow more quickly? These studies tend to find that in the post-war period, more open economies do in fact tend to grow faster. The idea is that countries with more open trade policies tend to trade more and the countries that trade more grow faster. However, it's not just trade policy that leads some countries to trade more than others. Geographic factors such as where they're located, whether they're close to other countries, whether they're a country like New Zealand that's far from everything. These types of things also certainly would impact how much a country trades. And this has led a number of researchers to focus on trade intensity, which is usually measured as trade, the ratio of trade to GDP, instead of trade policy as the relevant variable determining growth. Measures of trade intensity are going to capture the effective geography-induced trade as well as policy-induced trade and the role that plays in explaining growth. And these studies too have tended to find that more trade meant faster growth and or higher per capita incomes. The problem with both of these early sets of studies is that trade policy itself is endogenous to economic performance. Sort of put another way, the causality might run the other direction. The story could go something like this. Countries with lousy economic performance have a propensity to close their countries to international trade. For example, countries might increase tariffs in order to supplement faltering tax revenue. And in the data, I would observe bad performance correlated with high protection, but the causality would be going the other direction. Economic performance would be causing trade policy and not the other way around. Another issue here is that omitted variables in the regressions could explain the observed correlation. Maybe governments that are able to implement sound economic policies are also able to resist the pressures for protection from interest groups. Again, I'd observe a correlation in the data even if it wasn't really trade policy that explained growth. So these issues create problems with the econometrics and they render the estimated positive correlation that we tend to find between openness and growth a little bit suspect. There are two directions. One could go from here. One is what economists call instrumental variables estimation. The other is to step back and think hard about just why it is that trade should enhance growth. Most of the literature has taken the former approach and I'm going to try to make the case that the better way to go is to step back, focus less on outcomes and think harder about the mechanisms by which trade might enhance growth. Let me tell you a little about what people do. I'll explain this in kind of a heuristic way. I've got a lot of colleagues here who are superb econometricians. They'll be offended by this explanation. You'll have to forgive me. The trade intensity of a country depends on both geography induced and policy induced barriers to trade. The problem with policy induced barriers to trade, as I just mentioned, is that they're influenced by economic performance. That's the endogeneity problem. And they're also influenced perhaps by factors omitted from the usual growth regressions. That's the omitted variables problem. So instead of looking at how policy induced barriers to trade impact growth, this approach, the IV approach, basically focuses on how the geography induced barriers to trade impact growth. Now the nice thing about this is it's easier to make the case that while geography causes trade, trade isn't going to cause geography. So the IV approach essentially uses the relationship between geography and trade to then infer the relationship between policy and trade. And so long as geography induced trade barriers and policy induced trade barriers work the same way, this is probably okay. The problem is it's a maintained assumption and it's not one that I find really compelling. Now another problem with this initial literature is what I call the omitted variables problem. And a way to address leaving variables out of your regressions, things that you don't control for, of course, is include them, put them in. And this has led to an exploration of the role of institutions in explaining growth. So for example, by institutions I mean things like does having a good court system or having a government that's not corrupt does having a well-defined sort of infrastructure. Do these things tend to lead to higher economic performance? And the literature, it seems to me, this literature is subject to a lot of the same problems. It's subject to the endogeneity problem and it's subject to the omitted variables problem. But the results of the literature here are pretty clear and that is that institutions matter and they matter a lot. When you include controlling for the role of institutions, many people find that trade no longer is very important. What really matters is institutions. The converse isn't true. Well, let me leave it at that. Before leaving behind the literature, there's another issue that strikes me as a little bit problematic and this one's a little more technical. So putting aside the notion which I think is kind of implausible that geography-induced trade impacts growth the same as policy-induced trade and putting aside the sensitivity of the results to what variables get included and what countries are included, all the sort of practical problems that one has to deal with in actually doing this stuff. There's still a problem with the empirical specification that's used in this literature. In particular, people almost always or perhaps always use a linear regression in which a measure of economic performance is regressed on a unidimensional measure of trade policy or openness. The problem with this is that the relationship between trade and growth is forced to be monotonic. What that means is that it doesn't depend on whether the country is a rich country or a poor country. The other problem with using a single variable to capture trade policy is it gives us no insight in choosing among different trade policies. Either openness is good or it's bad and I think the real world is probably a little more complicated than that. I've been a little too generous though in talking about the existing literature in case you couldn't tell. By taking it on its own terms, I'm a little bit like someone who worries about the color of the used car they're about to buy without noticing that the engine's missing and the exhaust system's gone. I started off saying that I wanted to discuss what the literature has done and why we care about this stuff. So far I've only focused on the former. I think we care about this because we want to make policy inferences. We want to know is the free trade mantra, does it really work? Does trade liberalization really promote growth? And I think the approach taken so far by economists who have looked at this really can't answer this question. There's a problem with the type of data being used in the literature and more fundamentally there's a problem with the intellectual approach. Now the problem with the data is that it tends to be country level macroeconomic data and these data just aren't sufficiently informative. It turns out countries don't actually produce anything and countries don't even trade with each other. It's firms and it's households that do these kinds of things. And exactly how one econometrically is going to measure the impact of trade on incomes without any reference to firms and to households is something of a puzzle. The impact of trade on incomes isn't uniform within a country and it sure isn't uniform across countries. The idea behind using national level data is presumably that on average it gets these things right. That while some firms gain and some firms lose, that while some households benefit and other households suffer, that while some industries benefit and other industries lose, that on average this all works out and here I'm completely unconvinced. I think we've tended to use country level data in this literature because it's easy because you can download this stuff off the internet nowadays, you can put it on your laptop and you can run Stata files until your eyeballs glaze over. It's easy to do this stuff and the fact that it's easy has led a lot of people to take this approach but the fact that it's easy doesn't make it right. Using this sort of data lets us write papers with titles like Does Trade Enhance Growth? 162 Country Study of the World since 1963. It sounds good but I think actually the path forward is more in thinking about writing papers like The Impact of Globalization on Groundnut Farmers in Senegal and the Gambia and looking at whether, for example, NAFTA has helped or harmed corn growers in southern Mexico. This is the way that I think we ought to be going but it's perhaps a matter of taste. I think that as a profession though we risk our credibility when we overreach, when we make grand claims that might make the economics focus column of the economist but which aren't really backed up with careful science. The more fundamental problem with the intellectual approach that this literature is with the intellectual approach that this literature has adopted. It's an approach in which researchers presumably have some kind of model in the back of their minds but they seldom if ever get around to actually writing it down. It turns out to matter. A well specified economic model could answer the following sorts of questions. Which variables need to be included in these regressions and what role do they play? Which variables are omitted and hence captured in what economists call the disturbance term of the regression? Which variables are exogenous and which ones are not? To sensibly answer this stuff one really needs some kind of an economic model, not just plausible stories. Through exactly which avenues does trade impact growth? What are the dynamics? How do these relationships change over time? These are the kinds of questions that we need to answer and absent a formal model, it's pretty hard to do that. The risk that we run is believing plausible stories and as a profession there's a lot to be said for sort of forcing ourselves to be a little more rigorous and a little bit more formal about this. What could one do with a model? Well for starters we could start to explore the ways in which trade might actually impact growth and examine the empirical validity of these particular avenues. When we better understand exactly how trade impacts growth we'll be better able to make sound policy recommendations. Furthermore if the econometrics are carefully tied to a well specified model of economic behavior we can engage in the iterative process whereby when things don't fit well or we find results that puzzle us we can go back and ask what are the underlying assumptions that are giving rise to this strange result? There are a lot of ways in which trade might impact growth. Suppose for the sake of argument that it is in fact right that more open countries grow more quickly. Well this could be true because trade keeps domestic markets competitive and it forces price cost margins down and it forces the more efficient allocation of resources which then leads to higher incomes. There might be something to the story we read about that says international competition somehow forces domestic firms that would otherwise be lazy to be a little bit more productive and that higher productivity contributes to higher incomes. It might be that liberal trade policies are typically accompanied by other macroeconomic policies and that this contributes, this stability contributes to higher growth all by itself. It could be that goods trade transmits knowledge and that the accumulation of knowledge is what gives rise to greater growth. It might be that more liberal trade policies may be associated with increased foreign direct investment and that it's the foreign direct investment that transmits this knowledge or the capital that goes with it that enhances growth. And the list goes on. In short there are a lot of good reasons to believe that globalization might be good for growth. The point is there are well defined models out there of how trade and economic growth might interrelate and there's something to be said for testing I think the mechanisms through which trade enhances or restrains growth. These models make it clear how trade impacts growth and once we work through the mechanisms I think we'll be better able to investigate the empirical role that trade plays. By examining just how trade impacts productivity, allocative efficiency, market structure, all this stuff it becomes a lot easier to draw policy implications. This is one branch of what I think of as the trade and growth literature. It's a branch that almost always is going to take questions on a country by country basis and it's going to be really hard to come up with broad general answers. But I don't see this lack of generality as a particular drawback. I wouldn't expect trade to impact all countries the same way. Furthermore I'm going to be a lot more confident I think drawing policy implications or policy inferences about the role of trade on growth when I know just how it is that trade interrelates with growth. The last point I'd like to make is that there's something of a disconnect between the measures of trade protection that economists typically use and what's actually being used in the real world in terms of the measures that governments use to either encourage or discourage trade. The trade and growth literature as well as the more careful country by country studies they tend to measure protection by things like tariff rates or coverage of non-tariff barriers things like that and these are the archetypical instruments of trade policy and in the past countries have used these and they've used them widely. The first part of the talk though I argue that there's not clear evidence there's not a lot of evidence about how these policies impact growth. A lot of studies find that they do, a lot of studies find that they don't. I think a bigger point to take note is that trade policy as it's practiced today isn't really focused on these particular tools anymore because of international treaties, the role of the WTO and other things, tariffs aren't that big a deal for the most part. Trade policy takes a lot of other forms. What are some of these new instruments of trade policy? They tend to be policies focusing on export promotion, things like trade missions, trade fairs, providing information about external markets, policies aimed at attracting export oriented foreign direct investment. These are policies that are mostly export promotion or FDI attracting in nature and it's worth asking whether these policies, the policies that are actually used help or harm a country's growth potential and here it's not that the jury is out it hasn't even convened. These are the sets of issues that we haven't even started to look at. I think I'll stop here. If there are questions or comments I'd be happy to try to answer them. Again, many, many thanks to the Harris family and thank you all for attending. I'd be happy to try to answer questions on anything having to do with trade and development, stuff that I think about. I don't know that I'll have answers but if people have questions or we want to talk about some of that stuff I'd be thrilled. This is where when I'm running the show I always plant a couple questions because you want to get things started. Yeah, Bob. What is the theory of comparative advantage? The theory of comparative advantage of course tells us that countries that specialize or move towards specializing in what they do best tend to grow and you can imagine that trade policy, in a real simple model trade policy might either enhance or restrict that. That's more of a one-off thing though. That's not really a story about growth over time. It just says your income will be higher if you specialize in what you're good at. It's a simple model too. The same, the results about comparative advantage. A lot of, in fact, what we know about comparative advantage comes from Alan Dyrdor who's here today. It's very general findings but those are findings that are predicated on things like perfect competition sometimes and a lot of assumptions that may or may not accurately capture the world. Yeah, please. Can you comment at all on how increasing trade polarization might impact other republic policy issues like human sovereignty or security or formation? Sure. So one of the things that makes trade policy really interesting to talk about but really hard are exactly these interactions. So some of the questions that are really hard to answer, I'm not going to be able to answer them, are things like should countries that agree to free trade still be able to call their own shots when it comes to genetically modified food? Because that is arguably a public health concern. How about intellectual property? Should a country like South Africa which agrees to play by the rules change its mind and allow free importation of generic drugs, generic antiretrovirals produced allegedly illegally by Indian pharmaceutical companies? At some level I think these questions kind of leave, economics doesn't have a lot to say. I think we can lay out the issues but I'm not sure that economics is the right place to look for in terms of answers. Yeah, Marina. Jim, sorry, you talked at the very end about the need to take account of certain kinds of activities or kinds of behavior which have not traditionally been the ones that people got data on when they talked about trade policy. Sure. But if you look at the way trade negotiations are going on these days it looks as if the concept of trade policy or of policies which restrict or distort trade have been extended to a whole lot of things which used to be considered domestic policy. Absolutely. And trust policy or environmental policy or labor policy you could just go on forever expanding that list. And if those things in fact are also major determinants of the intensity of trade then does that make the whole issue of the relationship between poor trade policy and growth move from difficult to intractable because it ends up sending everything, it bends out of everything else? I think calling it, your points are well taken. I think calling it intractable, you know, once we write a question off as intractable we put ourselves out of business, okay? So we don't want to do that. You're absolutely right. I mean if we think about the most recent round of trade negotiations they fell apart over a policy that 20 years ago we would have called domestic and that's agricultural subsidies. The United States wants to subsidize its farmers. You can argue that's a U.S. policy decision and why is that anything to do with international trade? But European Union and American agricultural policy was at the heart I think of why things fell apart in Cancun. I don't think it's intractable. I think the right way to go about this stuff is to think really hard, is to ask questions like well what is the impact of U.S. cotton subsidies on cotton growers in Egypt? We know how to answer questions like that. There's good data out there. There's wonderful household data and farm data from Egypt. We know roughly what these subsidies do to world prices and I'd encourage students to go out there and get this data and look at what's really going to happen because unless you look at the data we're going to be, I don't want to say hell hostage but people who have an agenda are going to be able to say these subsidies are really harming poor farmers or these subsidies are so small they have virtually no impact on world prices you're just trying to make a mountain out of a molehill and we know how to answer that stuff. Please. You mentioned early on in your talk that institutions are more important in terms of where shadow trade is developed in. That seems to be what the literature is finding and I don't have any, I find that totally believable, yeah. I think that's exactly right. The problem is we know how, at some level we know how to fix trade policy. The IMF knows how to go into a country and to say, hey guys, okay, those 43% tariffs you have on imported machinery they're going to six. That's the way it's going to be. We're not so good, international organizations aren't quite as good at walking into a country and saying you know the corruption that we think is going on throughout this country, clean it up. It's not that the IMF and the World Bank, especially the IMF, they're well aware of this and they're trying, but it's hard. It's hard to measure this stuff and once it gets ingrained, it's hard to make it go away. But your point's a really good one. I think at the end of the day, institutions are immensely important. The other thing that, is there hard to measure? Anyone who's tried to do business in Nigeria knows that things get complicated quickly. But it's hard sometimes to get data that allows you in a systematic way to compare these things across countries. Please. I'm wondering if there are unilateral actions that the poor countries and the underdeveloped countries can take in absence of a promotion on part of the EU of the United States that can help. If the United States is changing their underdeveloped policies, what's underdeveloped countries? Well, one thing they can do is what they did six weeks ago, which is stand up and say, we're not going to take it anymore. Now, it turns out that's not an obvious winner. There are pretty good arguments that say, you know, a bad deal is better than, I mean, walking out may be even a worse deal. Maybe they're going to be better off accepting, you know, what the wealthier countries were willing to offer. I think the jury's out on that one. In terms of unilateral things, I think it's really hard. There are some things that I see happening that give me pause that I think are troubling. Developing countries are catching on to some of the tricks of the trade that the United States has practiced. We see more and more developing countries, for example, coming up with their own anti-dumping codes, which is a kind of nefarious way of keeping imports out. So one thing they can do is not do stupid things, but in terms of things they can do to really make things better off, you know, economic theory tells us probably free trade might be the best thing that they can do, and yet the political calculus is such that countries decided not to go that way. They're going to, you know, when they walked out of Cancun, they decided they're going to raise their voice on this one. Yeah. Let me ask a question regarding the implications of your talk about how we study economics and how we study new science. If the effects of trade-off in this differ across countries and then within countries across industries, what does that mean for how we study what we study? Do we risk crossing the line from a mission that involves producing generalizable knowledge into just a description of cases? That's a great question. I don't know how we walk that line. I look at things and I think we've, to my eye, we've gone too far in one direction. Case studies, that's too far the other direction. You know, how do you balance these things out? So it's a great question. I don't know. I think you pick the policies of the industries that really matter to a country. You know, if I'm going to think about agricultural policy in South Africa, I'm going to think about sugar. If I'm going to think about agricultural policy in West Africa, I'm going to think hard about cotton. And, you know, your point's well taken. You know, as economists, as political scientists, we like generalized results. And, you know, I wish I found this stuff in some ways more compelling, because I tend to believe the theory that underlies it. Please. So, is something that there's, why don't you studies out there to do what you think ought to be done? What do you learn from those? Do you get any results that are different from the large network of 960 countries? Sure, you do. You can do things, for example, like look at the impact of, say, a financial crisis on a country. And when you look at the household level data, you know, in this case, or firm level data, you can learn about whether or not, for example, the things that are the first to go are expenditures on education and kids' health. Those are going to be the kinds of things that have long, long-term impacts. If you cut back on feeding two to four-year-olds, or one to three-year-olds, I guess, those are the kinds of impacts of policy that a country's going to feel for 10, 20 years. Whereas if you see people are spending less on jewelry, you're not going to worry as much about that. I think we learn a lot by looking at these individual studies. One of the arguments that was put forth earlier is that U.S. agricultural subsidies are really harming poor farmers. That's not obvious. When you look at the data, a lot of the farmers that actually engage in international trade aren't tiny. And in the U.S., the argument is, you know, the typical farm is corporate-owned and so on. There may be some of that in other parts of the world, too. And again, I think until one looks at the data, it's hard to make the case. Oh, I'm nervous calling on Alan, because he knows so much more about this than I do. He was at Cancun. So, please. Well, I just... You're not sure whether we're trading for most growth and we have good reasons for that. But if you're approached by a random policymaker from a developing country wanting to know whether to liberalize, what do you say? Well, don't do anything for about 10 years until we've done the research or do you give them an answer? And there's so much to answer. You know, it's funny. My phone ring's probably 10, 15 times a day and nobody ever asked me that. I think it's hard. Sometimes I think that actually it doesn't take 10 years to do this stuff. I think we can understand the impact of, say, cotton subsidies, which were a huge role in Cancun. I think we could figure that one out on a rough pass in a week. I don't think these things take 10 years to do. They might take 10 years to do really carefully, but there's reasonably decent data on a lot of this stuff. I'm nervous making... My inclination would be, oh, go ahead, do free trade, okay? Because we think that works. But in the back of my head I've got the experiences of, say, South Korea, which did anything but free trade and grew like crazy. And I've gotten the back of my head the experiences of a number of Latin American countries that followed the Chicago School advice. They liberalized their economies and things went down the toilet. So, you know, I'm not sure what you're telling. What I don't say is I know the answer for sure. You know, that gets you in the newspapers and it might even get you employed for a while. In fact, one of the cool things about this is you can give really bad advice and people just keep calling. It's a good question. I don't have a great answer. Thank you. There is a tradition in some places when you have these sorts of things where people put medals. And I'm sure enough I never want to put medals around people's necks and I'm never quite sure where people ever wear those medals. So instead, we've decided that our tradition of the Ford School is to give people a plaque. And this plaque reads, The Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan awards to James Levinson the distinguished title of J. Ira and Nicky S. Harris, Family Professor of Public Policy in recognition of his scholarly contributions to economic policy research and his deep commitment to education in the field of civil service. Jim, I hope you'll...