 Thanks for showing up this morning. So I'm not sure if you have noticed. There's been a pandemic. OK, it was this virus and a disease and maybe some politics involved, too. So I'm going to talk a little bit about the economic after effects of this pandemic and what it actually looks like now and what the data looks like. So as Austrians, we like to talk about theory quite a bit. And theory, of course, comes first. But studying data is not wrong. We're not opposed to data. It's just that we use theory to understand what the data actually tells us. And the data tells something about the specific situation. They don't tell us anything about theory. They don't tell us anything about how the world works. It just tells us about this situation. It tells us about this phenomenon at this point in time and this place. So there are really two sides to this story of what the effects of COVID are or were or might become. One is the actual pandemic, the virus, the disease, people's reactions to it. So it is, of course, when there is a pandemic, there is a disease. What do people do? Well, they stay at home a little more. They get sick, sure. But they also might stay away from other people. They might not go to work as much. They might start wearing masks, whatever it is. They take all kinds of precautions. This is only natural. This is expected. This is not all that happened. This will definitely have an effect on the economy and on society and how everything works. So we should expect some sort of slump, some sort of loss of productivity due to people being sick is one thing. But also because people stay away from work, people maybe they take some extra sick days or they have to care for a child or what have you. All of those things, of course, affect the economy. And you would see perhaps people ordering things for delivery much more than they go to the store because they want to hang with people and risk getting infected by the virus. All of these things, of course, are perfectly normal. We would expect these to happen. That's not necessarily a business cycle. But it's a temporary slump that we would expect. So that's not what happened in most of the world. But we do have one case where it's close and it happens to be the country where I'm from, Sweden, where they didn't actually have a lot of lockdowns or restrictions or anything like that. There were restrictions, sure, but they were recommendations. They were not mandated. There were some, so it's not a clear-cut case, but that's our counterfactual, right? It shows us what it would possibly be like if we had not also had a pandemic policy, which I would argue is the bigger effect on the economy and non-society. And as an Austrian, I would look also at the long-term effects as well. So this is from Bloomberg, a very trusted source. I wasn't ironic, but maybe I should have been. Anyway, so this is from May, 2021. So one year after the pandemic, pretty much. And they report that, oh, look at this. Sweden's economy, GDP, as we usually use in statistical analyses of countries and economies, Sweden's GDP is back to pre-pandemic levels after just a year. So this is possibly what we would have expected in other countries as well if they did not lock down, if there were no shelter at home, and things like that. Of course, that's not the end of it, because another year later, this is May, this year, GDP is falling. So we can see that GDP actually went down in Sweden. But of course, other things happen, too. So you might have heard of a war in Ukraine. So that's the next thing, the flag on your profile picture in Facebook that will end the war. So all these things, of course, affect an economy as well. And that's why we as Austrians rely on theory, because that means we can separate these effects and look at what actually happens. But looking at the real world, anything can affect these data. So as we saw, GDP recovered after one year, but it's lower after two years. Who would have thought? Well, plenty of other things happen. So this is sort of the counterfactual. So as you can see, it's not a perfect picture, because there were effects. Now the other side of the story, of course, is in pandemic policy, not the pandemic itself. And that is, as I'm sure you agree, the more destructive story. And if you listened to my lecture yesterday, you know that regulations are pretty destructive, much more so than destruction of capital. And pandemic policy was all about regulation and pretty severe ones at that. So what we had was lockdowns, stay-at-home orders, people not allowed to leave their homes in countries like Australia, for instance. You might have seen that at Spain in the beginning. You might have seen clips online with this lone lady jogging in a park. And then you have a couple of police cars chasing her down and wrestling her down, because oh, pandemic. That's not the pandemic, because jogging alone in a park doesn't change anything in terms of disease. Wrestling her to the ground and putting her in jail might. But that's a different matter. So we had all these kinds of policies. Of course, we had the government and government agencies suddenly declaring what business is an essential business and what business is non-essential. This, of course, has effects too, because as part of this decree, the non-essential businesses were not allowed to do business. But the essential ones were. This, of course, means that this whole policy is right for any sort of influence from corporations. They can buy favors from the government to be favored and essential. And maybe their competitors not so essential. Of course, in a highly specialized economy under the division of labor, what is an essential business versus a non-essential business, if you think about it? And the same thing with workers, because that was the same thing. What is an essential worker versus a non-essential worker? Is an essential worker a farmer producing grain that becomes the bread that feeds the factory worker or a hospital worker? Because these are all specializations. And of course, the economy is a tight web of interdependent expertise and professional workers. We're all contributing, and that leads to the end results. So just the idea of having an essential versus a non-essential part of the economy, especially when it's decreed by the really non-essential ones. It's lunacy, right? And then, of course, to make up for this problem, there was a lot of subsidies, a lot of extra money being found to support those who were no longer essential. So all these businesses that were not allowed to do business anymore, all these businesses losing workers who were not essential anymore needed to get funding from the government, well, needed or needed. But they got funding from the government to cover these losses. This, of course, causes all kinds of distortions in the economy overall. Overall, I would say the effect has been, well, the impact is that we have top-down planning of the whole economy. So basically, in Washington DC, in whatever agency, or the White House, or Congress, or what have you, has declared not only who can do work, but what work is essential, how to pay them, how much money they should get, whether they should stay at home or go to work and all these things. And we'll see some examples of how nasty this is. So this is their theory of the economy. This is the control panel for how to steer the economy. So you just pull these levers to push those buttons, and then you get exactly the result you want. It's not only about tweaking. It's about just making sure that it produces what we want it to produce. So I found this image, but I needed to add something. So there we go. So there's a play and pause button. So whoever is in control who runs the economy from the top down pushes this button when it's necessary, just press pause on the whole economy, and then you just wait until the virus magically disappears, and then we just press play again, and all businesses, like this, they just start producing again. So everything is just on hold, which of course is crazy because the market is a process. This would potentially, at least in theory, or as a hypothesis, work if you do the whole mainstream thing. If we're in an equilibrium system where everything is static, you of course press pause or press play. It doesn't really matter. You can rewind a little bit, maybe go fast forward. It's the same thing. Well, you can even shift the curves a little bit and improve the results. But if it's a market process that is cumulative, it's very different. What does it actually mean to pause the economy? The economy is producing food. The economy is us satisfying our wants. It's us acting. How do you pause an action? That doesn't even make sense. OK, so let's look at some of the effects using beautiful statistics. So I've gotten this from the Federal Reserve in St. Louis, also a trusted source. And we're going to look at a few of these just to give you an idea of what actually happened. So this is GDP, a measure of the size of the economy. We, of course, don't want to use this measure because it's a crappy measure. But it tells us something still. And this is the measure that most economists and politicians and what have you, they use it. So these ones, what was inside these circles, that's the financial crisis. So that was, you might remember, that this was a cost for panic, a lot of stimulus packages because the economy was imploding, everything was going down the tubes. This is pandemic policy. Both are marked in gray, meaning that these are recessions. And there's a whole lot of discussion now what actually makes a recession. Let's not go there. Let's just use the Federal Reserve's numbers. But if you look at this, pandemic policy, the pandemic, so to speak, had a much greater effect on GDP than the financial crisis did. And it's not a small difference. It's a huge difference. Look at that. And yes, of course, after the pandemic, when we pushed play again on the economy, we recovered some. But look at the difference there. And look at the difference in the financial crisis. We're much worse off after the pandemic than after the financial crisis by this measure. So here's another one, the effect on employment. And you can't see the shaded area that makes the recessions. So you can't really see where the financial crisis is, which actually makes a good point. Can you point out where the financial crisis is? You can't really see it. Because you can see the employment area is going down. It's downward trending throughout this time period from 2007. But you can't really find it. Can you find the pandemic? Yeah, it's pretty clear where the pandemic is. Can you see the recovery? We recovered sort of half of the fall. Nothing more, right? It's increasing a little bit in the end, but still we still have some ways to go. What about earnings? Well, you can see. Let's see if you can see this. Yeah. So this is the financial crisis right here. You see there's an increase in weekly earnings for those people with jobs. Well, this is the pandemic. It's much greater effect. It just spikes up like that. It's crazy. OK, so what are we seeing here? What does this mean in terms of if you're looking at the structure of the economy, the production apparatus overall? Well, we're seeing a restructuring really of the whole economy of how it works. So of course, with essential versus non-essential, we have a restructuring of who gets to work and who does not get to work. That's one thing. But also, it has an effect on what businesses are there. So this is from a very recent paper published just a week ago, I think, by NBR. And they're looking at the permanent closures among businesses. So the top, the dashed line, is small businesses. And the lower line are big businesses. You can't see this, but small is defined as taxable sales of less than half a million. So they're pretty small. But still, you can see where the effect is. So these are how many businesses went bankrupt, quarter by quarter. And among small businesses, what you can see here, this is a little out of the ordinary. It's a lot. These are bigger businesses. You can see there's always failure rate. There's always a round here, which you also can't see. But it's about 5% of businesses go bankrupt every quarter of the really small ones. And down here, it's about 1 and 1 half percent or so. With the pandemic, this is much more. So let me see here. That's about 8 and 1 half percent per quarter. That makes a huge difference. So let's look at what this means in terms of market concentration. So this is the Heurfinn-Dahl Index, which is a measure of how concentrated is a market in terms of big business having a huge market share and how many big businesses are competing for market share. All you can see here again is a pretty flat curve. And then, guess what happened here? The pandemic. Suddenly, it just spiked, which would tell you that you have few large businesses compared to many small businesses competing. If you are a believer in this religion, then you would expect a free market to consist of numerous small firms producing exactly the same thing competing, like in the equilibrium. This would not exist. If you're an Austrian, you understand better that there are big and small businesses depending on the value they actually create for consumers or their value contribution. But something happened here. And it's not that some businesses were like, we're creating a lot of value. And everybody else was like, oh, we can't find the value. That's not what happened. This is something else. So this is really the opposite of this one I showed. Because a lot of small businesses went under. And therefore, the remaining ones have more market power, as they were. So this is what we're seeing. We're seeing the centralization of the economy overall through the pandemic. And of course, the pandemic policy, it's strongly augmented this tendency. You would see businesses go bankrupt because of the virus itself, because of the pandemic. Because people stayed at home and whatnot else. So you would see retail stores not being able to cover their costs anymore. So maybe they would go bankrupt. But if someone tells them, you cannot open the store, it's a different matter. And you would still have costs. OK, so it's a huge overall centralization of the marketplace, which means, of course, that you have some businesses with a large market share, which would not have as large market share, were it not for these policies. And you would have very few small businesses competing for this market share. Because it just happens that when you regulate a marketplace, you get bigger players. They just seem to have more influence over politicians and over the policies themselves. And there's this weird trade going on between big business and the government. You might have heard of that. OK, so we have fewer small businesses. Of course, this also means that we have less entrepreneurship. You have fewer people starting businesses. Of course, if you're not allowed to start a business, you won't start a business. But it also means if you had a business and you wanted to start another one, and that business that you already started is not allowed to continue operating, you're probably going to lose a lot of that capital. So you will lose that business and you can't start the other one. That's quite problematic. And instead, you would have decision making at the top level of these larger corporations, basically administrating the market rather than inventing and innovating in the market. That's a huge difference. And as Austrians, we understand this. It's not merely about how many businesses and how large are they, but the dynamics of the whole thing. So this is from inside the government trying to fix the economy and run the economy, make it a little better than it was before, and trying to make sure that people are safe and that the right kinds of jobs emerge. OK, so you might recall that people were talking about a meat shortage a long time ago and how the government tried to solve that problem by giving more money to food processing plants, which is a weird thing to do because processing was not really the problem. And giving more money to food processing plants where workers were staying home because they were sick, that's not going to magically create new workers. But it's the government's solution. So we had plenty of farmers who could not sell their cattle to slaughterhouses and processing plants because they couldn't operate. So they were killing off their cattle and the government stepped in and gave the processing plants more money. So did this happen? Not yet. They're still talking about a meat shortage coming. And you will eat bugs and whatever else. But let's look at the government's attempt to solve this problem. So the USDA immediately get a lot of money, $500 million, to expand food processing capacity. These are private businesses who cannot operate, who have reduced capacity because the workers are home sick. Of course, then the Department of Agriculture steps in and goes, here's money for you guys. And then, bam, there are workers. No, that didn't quite happen. So instead, what happened was, well, I mean, you can see that there's something about leveling the playing field and something about that. There's always something else going on in policy. Well, $500 million, that was not really enough. So just after that, it was a billion. Well, actually, it was $4 billion. And $4 billion is not enough either. So there was actually $9 billion, if I recall correctly. And that created a lot of food, I suppose. Now, this is the government's solution to the problem. They're trying to, this creates workers, this creates food, all kinds of things. And, I mean, veggies are green, so maybe that's sort of confusion there. But this is how they're trying to solve the problem. This would help, I mean, this would explain how things work on the federal level, where the federal reserve and their creating the money. That's not it, though. There's something else that happened. And it was much larger than just the federal government stepping in and printing a lot of money and thinking that this will take care of it, MMT for everyone. That was not it. Everybody had money suddenly. All politicians at all levels, they had enormous amounts of money. So in Chicago, they suddenly said, ah, you know what? Let's give everybody a little money. If you're poor, let's just give everybody money. You might have heard of this before. It's a universal basic income sort of thing. I mean, a pandemic, a crisis, a problem in the economy, that's a great opportunity to speculate on these things, really costly program. Awesome idea. Well, and then gas prices soared. And they were like, oh, what the heck? I'm a mayor. So I'll just send everybody a purchase card for gas. Where does this come from? Does the city of Chicago print its own money? Well, maybe they do, but maybe she hired the guy with a Xerox machine in the previous slide. But they shouldn't be able to. So there's a whole lot more money that's just flooding the system on all levels. And they're all just pushing these policies that are expanding the reach and the power of the state at the expense of the private market. So what we have is a push overall to make the government the main player in the economy. And it's not like before the pandemic, government was a tiny player, a minor player in the economy. It was a pretty big player. But after the pandemic, it's huge. And it's also going into micromanagement, directing exactly what businesses can do business, directing what types of businesses are essential, directing how do we produce more food? Oh, yeah, these guys should have a little more money, not these guys. Now, this is central planning. It's nothing else. And of course, government expanded enormously on every level, like you saw in the city of Chicago. Suddenly, there's the Chicago Universal Basic Income program. So this, of course, is the state, this guy over here, the generous looking man. OK, so what does this mean in the long term, then? Well, we talked about that yesterday. The market process is cumulative. So what didn't happen, but should have happened, and everything that followed from it, that's the actual loss. So what we're building now is building off of what actually happened, which is the government stepping in everywhere and flooding some sectors with money, stopping some from operating their businesses. So when we talk about the death of small businesses, well, that tells you something, because there's going to be less local competition. There's going to be greater volume production overall. So we've heard of the economies of scale. That's a good thing, because the cost per unit goes down. Well, it also means differentiation goes down. It means standardization goes up. There's more standardization. So we're going to get standardized goods probably produced in China. These distortions put us on a completely different trajectory of what is being produced and where it's being produced, by whom it's being produced. So it's, in a sense, a power grab in the economy overall. OK, and of course, if you haven't bought my book yet, it's in the store. But the thing is that it's not only the economy. And of course, I would say that the economy and society, they're sort of two sides of a coin. Some people will say that society is greater than the economy, but society, too, is cumulative. And we understand this. I mean, when we talk about things like law and the evolution of law, the common law system, for instance, language had language changes with people's usage of it, things like that. And it builds off of what was before. And it changes some things. I mean, my favorite example is the word literally, which literally does not mean literally anymore. Which is very confusing, but that's how it's being used now, which means the next generation are going to use that word in this new sense. Now, what does figuratively mean? I have no idea. But maybe the next generation will figure out what that means. Maybe it can mean literally. Anyway, society is also a process. And it evolves over time. And what we've seen is society that has changed rather drastically in the pandemic through pandemic policy and through a lot of fear mongering, of course. So people think very differently about the state of the world and the dangers in the world. If you have progressive friends, they're not quite the same as your conservative friends. They think very differently about the world. So your progressive friends probably are still wearing masks and goggles. And they have only been vexed five or six times and this sort of thing. And they're staying at home, conservative friends. They're out and say, the pandemic is over. And then they vote. OK, so now you can see the problem. The issue, though, is because this sounds like a very bleak picture. I didn't quite focus on the good stuff. But things are really bad. The question is, is it all bad news? Because with evolution and the market as a process, it's still heading somewhere. There's still entrepreneurship. There's still innovation. There's still good people. People are still acting and trying to satisfy wants that they have. So it can't all be bad. So what's the good news? Well, let's look at some of the good news, or potentially good news, depending on your values and your value scale. Well, one is that I've long expected, but that it's been a lot of resistance to let workers work from home. We've had the technology. That's not been an issue. We've had the technology for a very long time. People have computers. They have broadband connections at home and all this stuff. They do the types of work that you don't need an office for that. You just need a couch, or in this case, a bed, and your computer. That's all you need to do work. Still, there's been a reluctance to let people work from home. And I think this is sort of a lot of traditionalist thoughts among managers, probably. They want to see people. They want to make sure that they are there, that they do work. So whether that means that they just keep the chair warm in their cubicle for eight hours a day, or actually do work, doesn't matter much. But if they can work from home, what we're seeing, they had to do this in the pandemic to get any work done at all, because people would not show up, or they were not allowed to show up. So they let go, the managers did. But we're also seeing a shift towards paying people for the work they do, not the time they spend. Because if you're at home, you can spend 24 hours and do basically nothing. And then your boss will say, well, you didn't produce anything. So why am I going to pay you? Or you're really effective, and you can spend one hour do as much work as you used to do in your cubicle in 10 hours. And then you get a lot of free time, a lot of leisure, and your manager is happy. So I think we're seeing a shift towards basically a better world in that sense, that you get paid for the value contribution more than your time contribution. That's a good thing. And this goes, of course, beyond technology, because it's a shift in how we think about these things. So it pushes us, in a sense, towards the gig economy, that you get paid for your actual inputs, your actual supply. So Sey's law is reaffirmed, in a sense. I think that's a good thing, because that means more market, and people are more exposed to the market. People will learn more about the market, how it works. Oh, if I'm a little more effective, I can get paid more. And if I am more effective and I do my work with this guy, I can use my time to produce this value for this other guy and get paid twice. People discover their value in the marketplace. That's not a bad thing. It's not necessarily the result of pandemic policy. But it's something that came out of the pandemic, because we were forced to change our minds a little bit. This then would mean that your job, your employer, is not really identified as the office anymore. I don't mean the TV series. But office buildings, you don't need as big an office anymore for your business. If people can work from wherever, why would you need an office? Maybe you need it as the small place with a conference room where your customers can show up and see a friendly face and see the logo and whatever. But you don't need all workers there. You don't need to have an expensive inner city floor in a skyscraper with lots of cubicles. You don't need that anymore, because people can be at home, or a lot of them can. Not everybody, of course, but a lot of them can. Well, what's going to happen with the office spaces? Well, the rents are going to go down, and many of them could be turned into apartments. So maybe this means that this formerly dead inner cities could be turned into rather dynamic live inner cities with people actually living there instead. It's a potential outcome, which sounds pretty good, doesn't it? And of course, we have a lot of investments now in logistics and delivery services. Anything from food from restaurants to food from grocery, stores to everything, everything can be shipped to you. That's also a good thing, because if you think about it, why would you need to go to the store to pick things off the shelves where someone had put things on the shelves? It's really just a big inventory. Why would you need to go there? You can just click, click, click and have it brought to you, which means the store does not have to be a store anymore. It just needs to showcase the products available, and they can ship them to you, or have them packed already in bags. That's also the case. You can just go there and pick them up, which means stores don't have to be as huge as they are, which means grocery stores, it's a very different type of market suddenly. It's more like a storage space or an inventory with a delivery service. So that changes things, too. Is that for the better? Yeah, I think it is for the better. It also means that people don't have to drive to the grocery store. You can have un-centralized logistics instead and do this much more effectively. So it's much more cost efficient. Not a bad thing, necessarily. It's part of the evolution, and some of these things, of course, what I want to show here is not that yay pandemic policy, yay lockdowns. That's not the points. The point is that it brought a lot of bad things, but in the economy, there's always a trade-off. There's always two sides to the story. So there are some good things, some things that were like working from home. It was not allowed before. Well, it's not allowed if you work for Elon Musk, either. But now it's allowed to a much greater extent, which serves a lot more people. A lot of people like to work from home, and they are discovering that they can do a lot of work in just a little bit of time, and they don't have to commute. If you're living in LA or something like that, your commute could be like six or eight hours a day. So that's a lot of time gained. And that, of course, affects infrastructure as well. So there are other effects, and we have to look at both sides to evaluate the outcome. Of course, the pandemic policy itself, the imposition, we can evaluate that pretty easily, because that's just a cost. But the economic structure is different, and the impact on the economy, how it works, and it's both good parts and bad parts. All right, I'm happy to take your questions. For some of the good effects you talked about, do you think some of those would have happened anyway if the pandemic never happened? Yeah, probably. I mean, I think we would have seen the office thing. We would see more people working remotely, but it would take much longer. Because what I think, and this is just my power of observation, which is not that great, is that there's been a lot of resistance just for, as I mentioned, traditionalist reasons among managers. So they have wanted to see people show up on time and be there in the office. There are other benefits to that, too, of course, like knowledge sharing and creation of a team and team spirit and things like that, too. But they've been reluctant to let people work at a distance. They've been reluctant to let people work as subcontractors rather than employees. And they've been pushed because of the pandemic to accept people to work from home. So I think it would have happened anyway, because the technology is already there. But it happened now suddenly because of the pandemic. Building on the previous question, you were comparing entrepreneurship to managership. And we see that managers are mainly resisting these labor-saving devices. Could we say that managers are actually holding back the productivity of their entrepreneurs and their employees, essentially? Yes. So let me elaborate on that a little bit. So the entrepreneur is the force or the function in the economy that shifts and allocates capital and other resources to create as much value as possible for consumers. The manager or the managerial role is hired by the entrepreneur to run the already existing business. Then, of course, there are agency problems and all this stuff going on. But the managers, when you have a professional class of managers in the economy, when you have these big businesses that are protected by all kinds of barriers to entry and regulations. So they have a market that is not affected by disruptive innovation as much as the otherwise would have. It becomes an administration of production overall rather than an evolution of the market process. So in that sense, I think there's way too much management in the economy the way it is and way too little entrepreneurship. When you speak of all these good things, which, of course, aren't to be confused with all the small things, do you mean these as a silver lining for the effects of the pandemic? Because I assume, given your talk yesterday, all these good things that we are seeing are going to be coming at the expense of a lot of unrealized aspects of the economy, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Because the first picture that I showed, that's a very bleak picture, and it was all downside. And there's definitely a lot of downside. That's not what I'm saying. But there is a silver lining, as you put it. So there are some things that come out of it that we would have expected later on, but maybe we got it a little earlier. I'm not saying that on net, it's not positive. There's no way I can see how it could be positive. But it's not just all dark. That's the point. You had a slide of, I think it was, earnings. And I just wondered the shape of the dips. Let's see. This one? Yeah. And it makes sense why you'd see a spike in large businesses in a drop in smaller. But what would have made, it seems to me like you would expect earnings to be going. And then when the pandemic hit and everybody was locked up and couldn't work, you would expect it to spike downward. And I'm just wondering, why does it spike up and then down? What caused the earnings to spike up like that before they went down? Yeah, that's a good question. I haven't looked into the details behind the data, so I'm not sure exactly how they measure this. But it is the median weekly income of people with full-time jobs. So if I were to speculate, I would think that a lot of businesses that were affected with the lockdowns, they had people with low salaries, and they were pushed out. And I mean, that's usually the case when you have regulations that whoever is in not good shape, let's put it that way, they are the ones sacrificed first, or they are the real victims. So that would explain why the median salary would go up because people with higher salaries, and sometimes they're called the laptop class in the media. They still had their jobs because they were at home anyway. And maybe we're seeing now that the laptop classes are expanding, but they kept their income, whereas a lot of working class people did not. So maybe that explains why it's shot up. And then when these businesses were allowed to operate again, it went down. Hello. Thank you for your talk. I was observing that Dr. Peter Klein pointed out a lot of the problems with middle management and HR. And you pointed that out as well. I understand, obviously, there's time changes things. It takes a while to catch up. But I'm wondering if there are so many problems coming from this middle manager class who are neither the workers nor the bosses, but just the fillers of these HR departments and stuff like this, where a lot of these issues are coming from, why are the bosses putting up with that? Can they innovate and benefit their company more by restructuring, thinking a different way about it? I guess they could. The issue is also, do the bosses, as you put it, benefit from the business running better? It's not necessarily the case. I mean, agency theory tells us that they can get a lot of benefits at the expense of the owners of the business. And maybe part of that benefit is that, oh, I'm the manager over a lot of people. And it could also be that the, I mean, of course, the mid-level managers, they have a role. I mean, they condense and aggregate information and report up. Do we need as many? Depends on the business. So we can't really say. I think, in general, a lot of organizational structures for businesses are inherited from the factory days. And I don't think we need it. We can have much flatter organizations. We don't need those hierarchies. But it also goes back to traditionalism. And unfortunately, a lot of managers have MBAs. And that's not a real education. So sorry, Connor. But when you study it to get an MBA, you learn a lot about what managers already do. And one thing that is sort of my pet peeve is that we teach them how to price goods using the cost plus method, OMG. I mean, talk about ruining the economy. Just teaching managers that, oh, just take the input prices and add the profit margin to it. And that's the market price. I would like to change every MBA program in the world, because that's just destructive. So there's a lot of inertia because of how these things are being taught to future managers. They should study more entrepreneurship, basically, in MBA programs. Oh, let's end it with thank you so much.