All Terrain Thinking

A Compendium of things I think are Important

Economics: It's not just whats' in your wallet

 

 

Introduction

The first tragedy is that man allows himself to be victimized by the artificial environment that has created for himself by his technological prowess. The second tragedy is that he could save himself from at least the diarist of the consequences if ... he were to allow his foresight to get the better of his inertia. _{Arnold Toynbee}
 

 

 

Overview: Rhetoric or reality

In the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, there was talk about the three "Big Ones" identified as risks by the Federal Emergency Management Agency listed it in early 2001 - >a hurricane in New Orleans that was built below sea level, a terrorist attack in New York City, and an earthquake in San Francisco that straddles the San Andreas fault. If you can do the math you note that there is only one left on the list, the earthquake in San Francisco that lies on the boundary between the Pacific and North American tectonic plates.  The image of a gradual movement in these plates that will suddenly cause a Big One in San Francisco is the image I want you to keep in mind because we live in a remarkable time where slow moving trends are converging, and the effects will be nothing short of catastrophic. If there is a word to describe our current situation, it would be unsustainable, which means your world will be immeasurably different from the world of your parents. It is time to heed Arnold Toynbee's warning of two self-inflicted tragedies.

The first tragedy is that man allows himself to be victimized by the artificial environment that has created for himself by his technological prowess. The second tragedy is that he could save himself from at least the diarist of the consequences if ... he were to allow his foresight to get the better of his inertia.

We - you and me - are at a point where we need to overcome our inertia and take our heads out of the dark place it has been and help shape the coming world with good policy choices that will help define a sustainable world. It could be the next energy policy that will replace the truly awful energy plan of 2005, or an environmental plan that will replace the abandoned Kyoto Protocol, or a Social Security reform plan that improves upon the outdated existing plan and the poorly designed Bush privatization plan, or the tax policies that have strapped today's young - and that means most of you - with unfunded liabilities approaching $50 trillion. We need good policy choices, and those of you in colleges and universities offer the best hope of helping us make those choices. Today we will begin a discussion of the trends that possess the power to truly rock our world as well as the policies that will play an important role in shaping it.

It is also true that your individual success will depend upon your making good choices. If you live in the US at the outset of the 21st century then you live in a society dominated by those who believe that individual happiness is maximized in a world where individuals are free to choose - both in the marketplace or at the ballot box. Milton Freidman, a well-know conservative economist who died in 2006, wrote a book entitled Free to Choose, in which he extolled the values of the capitalist system that produced the greatest good for society. It was a disarmingly simple concept; you know best what you want, a good entrepreneur soon recognizes this demand and supplies it, and competition ensures you get it at the lowest price. Gary Becker received a Nobel Prize for his work in advancing the idea of "The Economic Way of Thinking" and Steven Levitt coauthored a best-seller in 2005 called Freakonomics built around the premise that incentives drive behavior and that changing incentives will change behavior. Even if you have never been in an economics course you certainly understand the logic in the expectation that an increase in the price of gas will reduce demand for SUVs which is based on that view of behavior.

These are not new ideas, they have been around at least since Adam Smith penned The Wealth of Nations in 1776. What is new today is that the US is vigorously trying to remake the world in its image. The policies of the US, including its invasion of Iraq, are based on the premise that the problems of the world can best be solved if the world becomes more like us, if the rich countries of the world make the move from their version of capitalism to ours, and the poor countries of the world make the move from totalitarian to democratic governments, and from command and traditional economies to capitalist ones. How many times did we hear in the Bush Administration state that "freedom was on the march" - a freedom to choose elected officials, the fast food they eat and the movies they watch? In fact, if you listen carefully, it sounds very similar to what Lenin was preaching nearly a century ago: Communism was on the march and support for some revolutions around the world was justified on the grounds that it was simply jump-starting the inevitable. Maureen Dowd called it self love, and I suggest you think of it as Empire 3.0, a significant upgrade on England's version 2.0. Whereas in Empire 2.0 you found that "the sun never set on the British Empire," in Empire 3.0 the sun never sets on the golden arches, and we know from Thomas Friedman, that countries that have McDonalds never make war with each other.

Unfortunately, it is not quite that simple, and sometimes the world does not seem to operate as expected. It turns out McDonalds is not a get-out-of-war-free pass, and those elections and markets do not always work quite as expected. Anyone who followed the election of 2004 knows that all potential voters were not free to vote, it was very clear that not all of New Orleans' residents were free to leave the city before Katrina hit, and anyone reading Kozol's article "Still Separate, Still Unequal" could not believe all children are given a chance for a decent education. It also turns out that in the summer of 2005 demand for SUVs remained strong in the face of substantially higher gas prices, which raises questions about how those markets really work - or do not work. It turns out that the free-market utopia pushed by the neocons, those providing the theoretical foundation for the Bush administration's policies, is not quite what was advertised. The Bush administration had been engaged in a "battle for the hearts and minds" of those around the world, and if you listened to the administration it was going pretty well. Once people had a chance to view the images of the devastation of New Orleans in Katrina's wake, however, the tide of battle turned against the administration and its policies. This was not the America that had been seen in American movies, TV shows, or commercials watched by billions around the world, and it was not the America that been promised if we just passed those massive tax cuts targeted toward the nation's wealthiest. The horrors of New Orleans, following closely on the heels of the corporate scandals, revealed to all, including The Economist, a publication not to be confused as liberal, that "the gap between rhetoric and reality is growing..."

So how do we explain the widening gap between the rhetoric of the conservatives who keep telling us we are on the leading edge of a great new world of wealth, prosperity, and power, and the grim reality of what we see in New Orleans? How can a world view that seems so reasonable, a world of freedom, produce something so grotesque as New Orleans, a city where more than 95% of the population is black, where 50% of the children do not graduate from high school, where more than 25% are poor, where the homicide rate in 2003 was about ten times the US average and eight times the average in New York City, and where in 2005, before the hurricane, police fired 700 rounds of blanks and no one called in to the police to report gunfire. It was just another day in the city of New Orleans that we only knew through those Mardi Gras pictures.

There is no easy explanation. What we do know is we can end up far from the promised world if people are making bad choices. The failure of high gas prices to dampen SUV sales begins to make sense if you accept the fact that many individuals might not be good at the "math" needed to allow them to compare higher future gas costs against the price discounts which would be necessary to make rational choices. It is also very possible that people - you and me - systematically under-represent future costs in decision making, and in recent years the economics profession has grudgingly begun to accept the fact that individuals do not always behave rationally. At the outset of the new millennium the Nobel Prize in Economics was given for research into the nonrational behavior, and one of the hottest sellers was Irrational Exuberance, a story about how some irrational behavior can show up in wide swings in stock and homes prices. For those of you who like finance, you might take a look at Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes where you will read about how these behaviors affect investment choices. Or you might watch the Bush administration which has been remarkably successful at manipulating the flaws in individuals' decision making. The American people are promised HUGE tax cuts and lots of pork today that will be financed by borrowing money- that pesky budget deficit - to be repaid in the future.  The administration received all of the benefits at the polls from individuals enjoying their tax cuts and the spending programs today and is able to ignore the negatives associated with paying off those debts in the future.

And it gets worse if you believe that the limited ability of individuals to process information is compounded by the fact that good information is in fact a scarce commodity. Think about the information you have when choosing an airline, a surgeon, a restaurant in a city you are visiting, a pair of jeans, or a personal finance book? Do you know the on-time record or safety record for the airline? How about the surgeon's success rate in the operating room or the quality of the dining experience, or the workmanship in the jeans? If you are like many individuals you probably know very little about important information that should guide your choice, and you develop techniques for dealing with the imperfect information. Let's look at the choice of restaurants - something I had to deal with when I was traveling this summer. How do you choose between two Indian restaurants in a city you have never been to? My preferred technique is to check out the crowds and choose the more crowded restaurant. It may sound reasonable, and maybe even familiar, but we know nothing about these people - what they like and do not like - so why would we make the choice based on their choice of restaurant? And what about those jeans? We do not know where they were produced and we do not know much about the quality of the sewing and material, but we can recognize the brand name which will surprise no one who has read Juliet Schorr's book, Born to Buy  where you see how corporations have spent countless billions on branding. By the time you are buying those first jeans for school you are not asking for jeans but Diesel, Polo, or Lucky jeans. As for that personal finance book, would you be surprised to hear that the author of one such book attempted to improve sales by buying up tens of thousands of copies of the book so that it would appear on the New York Times list? Not if you realized that very often consumers use a ranking such as this to make choices. In the case of limited rationality and limited information individuals do some "strange" things, things that might not seem so rational, and as we will learn in economics, this raises some interesting questions about public policies and the proper role of government - something we heard much about in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina that devastated New Orleans.

But we are not done with the bad news. Did Enron, Tyco, and World Com really want investors to have good information about company operations that would eventually cost those investors billions of $s as a result of their manipulations of the company books? If you watch Supersize Me you pretty much know that American fast food companies really do not want American consumers to know what the caloric content of its food. Or how about state governments - do they really want people to know how much they can be expected to lose on those state lotteries that they heavily advertise? Do American drug companies want Americans to know about the side-effects of some of their most successful drugs, or do they want American consumers to know about how much less those drugs cost in Canada? Certainly the Texas jury that awarded $250 million to a woman whose husband had taken Vioxx - 90% of which was for punitive damages - did not believe that the company was interested in full disclosure. Did the Bush administration want Americans to know about the government's role in 9/11 when it initially fought against establishment of the 9/11 committee to look into the disaster, or did it want Americans to have complete information in the days prior to an important vote on its much heralded energy bill when it suppressed a report that was critical of the poor track record of gas mileage for US vehicles? Did the Reagan administration really want to let people know about the true fiscal impact of the massive tax cuts if the Reagan's Council of Economic advisors conducted meetings "to come up with a rosy economic forecast to help the administration defendant is huge tax cut, which budget director David Stockman referred to as 'pigs feeding at the trough,'" which is what one of those advisors, Laurence Kotlikoff, writes in The Coming Generational Storm. Did the Bush Administration want the American people to know the full impact of its tax and spending policies when it suppressed a study initiated by US treasury secretary Paul O'Neill to examine the long-term liabilities of the US government that was supposed to be part of the 2004 budget? (Kotlikoff p 64) We shouldn't be surprised that Treasury secretary O'Neill's was relived of his duties as for questioning the budgetary implications of Bush's taxes, just as Martin Feldstein lost his post as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors after questioning Reagan's budgetary math. Did George Bush really want American voters to look into the hidden billions of $s that his "solution" to the Social Security crisis would cost when he happened to ignore the trillions in transition costs central to his plan; the true cost of the drug coverage extension of the Medicare legislation he sponsored when the estimates of future drug costs were revised sharply upward shortly after passage of the legislation; or the true cost of the war in Iraq when "he [Bush] presented a budget that that is so dazzlingly deceitful it does not even attempt to include the bills for our presence in Iraq." (Nicholas Kristoff, "Sex, Lies, and Bush Tapes," NYT 2/4/2004). And then there was Condelezza Rice who wanted the American people to believe her when she suggested there was no way to anticipate terrorists flying planes into US buildings, just as George Bush wanted people to believe there was no way to anticipate the collapse of the levees in New Orleans, but the documents exist that suggest these were well-known threats that were simply ignored? The fact is that Harry Frankfurt was pretty close to the mark when he wrote the following in “On Bull Shit” in 2005.

“One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much [bull]. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize [bull] and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, nor attracted much sustained inquiry.”

The reality is that we live in the information age where advances in communications technology such as the Internet and satellites were supposed to have given more people access to more information, and because information is power, they should have had more power. But what if those in positions of power do not want to give up that power? Robert Hormats, suggests that "the lesson of the last five centuries is that information confers political, economic, and social power on those who have access to it," which suggests the control of that information will also confer power, and no one will willingly give up that power. ("Technologies of Freedom," Wall Street Journal.) And what happens if the media that control the flow of information to American households are controlled by a very few who use it to disseminate their "version" of truth, to retain their control over the media?  Didn't it bother you to hear about those TV and radio stations that refused to air anti Bush shows during the run up to the election, or what about the expulsion of the Dixie Chicks from Clear Channel for their anti war sentiments? The fact is the world is awash in facts, but decisions are based upon knowledge or information that is created, so it is critical to know something about the individuals and organizations that provide that information. Think about the networks that bring you the news and imagine the meetings that take place where the choices are made about what gets on the air, meetings such as the ones at Disney's where the decision was made not allow distribution of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 film prior to the 2004 election because release of the film would be against the company's best interest, or watch the movie The Insider to see how networks can be manipulated and / or intimidated by corporate America. Think about Washington, DC where, in the words of one insider, "the production of official disinformation about artificial obligations has developed into an art form requiring skill, dedication, and a finely honed sense of what's politically feasible?" (Kotlikoff p 42) Unfortunately it is far too easy to accept the following quote of Republican strategist Frank Lutz that appeared in a New York Times editorial: " should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue." (The Last Critique, Harpers April 2004) No pursuit of truth here.

How did it get this way? Could it be that this was part of a larger plan as some would suggest? Is John Gatto correct when he writes in "Against School" that schools in the US have not been structured in such a way as to promote good independent thinking, or as Gatto says, “Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them ever really grows up?” When I read this I thought of an early 1990s op-ed piece from the Wall Street Journal entitled "This is Monika. I'm Over the Wall" where we meet Monika, a young teenager from East Germany who describes life behind the iron curtain as one where people are "always treated like children." It also made me wonder about the possibility that Jonathan Kozol is right when he writes in "Still Separate, Still Unequal" that too many schools teach "acquiescence. It breaks down the will to thumb your nose at pointless protocols - to call absurdity 'absurd." Was the young student Kozel interviewed correct when she stated, "You're ghetto--so you sew," her rather elegant way of saying that students in these poor schools are taught sewing rather than residential architecture or broadcast journalism because corporate America sees these students as new recruits for their sweat shops. Gatto picks up on the same theme, and then ads in an additional reason for the approach - not just docile workers but uninformed consumers.

“There were vast fortunes to be made, after all, in an economy based on mass production and organized to favor the large corporations rather than the small business or family farm. But mass production required mass consumption, and at the turn of the twentieth century most Americans considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn’t actually need. Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that account. School … encouraged them not to think at all. And that left them sitting ducks for another great invention of the modern era-marketing.”

And let us not forget the movement of corporate America into the nation's public schools that Juliet Schor describes in Born to Buy. Consider the following sequence of events, similar to what you would see in a wonderful book / documentary called The Corporation. You begin with the nation's largest corporations in need of customers and workers and a regulatory environment that allows them to do as they please. So let's start with a well-financed campaign to cut corporate taxes that will "starve" the federal government that will then call for cuts in federal spending - not on the $100+ million bridge to nowhere, but on Medicaid and levee construction - and on federal support for state and local areas. At the state level deals are struck with companies such as Pepsi to make sure students are given no choice but to buy their "healthy" products and at the local level fast food companies work the cafeterias to help provide inexpensive and nutritious for for the students and run TV ads on TV1 to better inform students of important world events - or maybe that is not quite the deal.

While I know that not everyone will agree with Gatto, Kozol, and Schor, we could all agree that disinformation works only if people, those who make the choices in the marketplace and the ballot box, are consistently fooled - and that is what this course is all about. In fact this is what all of my courses are about. Information is power, and the raw power of information can be seen in the statistics supplied by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in "The Disinformation Society." In the aftermath of a presidential election that was viewed as hinging on value differences between those red and blue voters, it may be that the values were not so different. For example, he notes that an October 2004 survey by the Program on International Policy Attitudes found 72% of Bush supporters believed Iraq had WMD and 75% believed that Iraq was providing substantial support to Al Queda, while the corresponding figures for Kerry voters were 26% and 30%, AND, "the majority of Bush voters agreed with Kerry supporters that if Iraq did not have WMD was not providing assistance to Al Queda then the US should not have gone to war." Maybe it was less about values and more about the knowledge of the voters, which could explain why so much has been spent on new "think tanks' churning out versions of the "truth" and on keeping the images of flag-draped coffins of America's war dead off the TV screens.

So here is THE problem - we are in the midst of a battle for the hearts and minds of the people in this country - and in the world - and we may be at a tipping point where the BAD guys are winning. On the one side we have the rise of incredibly bright people, armed with the best technology that money can buy and the latest research into how to get inside of people's heads, who are spinning their versions of the truth, and earning handsome salaries for doing so. On the other side we have the growing number of "schooled" people who no longer ask important questions, no longer evaluate statements for their internal logic, and no longer take the time to think critically about what they see and hear. As an educator and someone who spent some of his formative years in the 1960s, it was extremely painful to hear students accept a policy decision of the president because "only he has all of the information needed to make the decision." There was no questioning of his rationale and no questioning of his "ownership" of the information.

There also appears to be a low frustration threshold for solving problems, with students increasingly willing to respond "I can't" or "I don't know" when presented with a problem to be solved. Things look no better when we look at the comparative international "stats" on formal education. At the present time only a minority of students in the US reach proficiency, as measured by the Education Department's National Assessment of Educational Progress, but this is not a problem with just our high schools since about 70% of incoming high school freshmen are reading below grade level. This performance is reflected in the variety of international tests you have most likely heard about. Bob Hebert reports that "the Program for International Assessment, which compiles reports on the reading and math skills for 15-year-olds, found that the US ranked 24th of 29 nations surveyed in math literacy. The same results for the US -- 24th of 29 -- was found when the problem-solving abilities of 15-year-olds were tested" ("Left Behind, Way Behind," New York Times August 9, 2005) This shortcoming is reflected in the 2005 ACT data that revealed that less than 25% of 2005's high school graduates met the college-readiness benchmarks in reading comprehension, English, math, and science, which prompted an executive at the testing agency ACT to state that "it is very likely that hundreds of thousands of students will have a disconnect between their plans for college and the cold reality of their readiness for college." (Tamar Lewin, The New York Times, August 17, 2005). Carol Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, notes that the goals of critical thinking, social responsibility, reflective judgment, and evidence based reasoning, which are central to any university mission, are too often not being met. (Diane Ravitch, "Failing the Wrong Grades," NYT 3/15/2005) But these are the same skills you would expect someone to posses in a competitive labor force, so you should not be surprised that Fortune magazine, in the summer of 2005, ran a cover story entitled "America Isn't Ready" where the focus was on the tendency of our educational system to produce too many people unprepared to compete in the emerging global marketplace, or in more technical terms, "We're not building human capital the way we used to."

Critical thinking and the research project

So what are we going to do here? We are going to work on getting you ready for the "real" world, and we are going to do it by honing your critical thinking skills.  The General Education Program was designed to ensure that students develop "the ability to think critically in order to solve problems and question the nature and sources of authority." This sounds good, but what does it mean? One group that took a stab at defining critical thinking (CT) was the American Philosophical Association Delphi Group, and here is what they concluded. Read it carefully because it will give you some good insights into what this course is all about - the pursuit of truth in a world filled with disinformation.

In this course you will get some practice at many of the dimensions of critical thinking - interpreting, analyzing, evaluating - and we'll work on getting you closer to that 'ideal" critical thinker that is inquisitive, informed, reasoned, and persistent. A more detailed description of the critical thinker from the Delphi Group appears below.

 

 

Now let's pull all of this together. The ability to think critically is essential in conducting research, which brings us to this course. Conducting research is very similar to orchestrating a court case. The researcher, or lawyer, develops a compelling story based on the facts and certain assumptions, and the work is then evaluated on the validity of the assumptions and the logic of the argument. So let's look at the basic elements of the research process.

1. Develop research question: This is where it all begins, and your ultimate success depends upon making the right choices in this step. As you make your choices, you should keep in mind your audience - who will you be communicating your results to and why would they care about the outcome of your research. This is where being aware of what people are writing and talking about matters greatly, which is why it is such a difficult step for most students who read little. Think about a young child - maybe a sibling who constantly asks why - and this is what you should be moving toward. You should think about the significance of the work - why it is important at that time. You should also try to find something you are interested in since research is not easy. Everyone will go through those moments where you want to quit, and it will be much easier to quit if you are bored.

The question must be addressable within a reasonable amount of time. There is a time constraint - maybe XX hours a week or YY weeks a semester. As you begin your work you need to keep two words in mind - effectiveness and efficiency. The key to long-term economic growth has been the increased efficiency with which we produce things. For example, assume initially it takes one worker one day to produce one widget, the worker is paid $100, and the widget will be sold for $100. The worker is no different from you, however, and wants a raise. If the worker's wage is raised to $200, the cost of the widget will need to rise to $200. If all producers follow suit, then the price of all products will double and the increased buying power of the workers' higher wages will be eliminated. In fact, the worker will be back at the same level of buying power, except now the earnings will be double and the price off all things will be double. Now consider a second possibility. As a result of some technological improvement, new machinery or increased skill on the part of the worker, the worker's output rises to two widgets a day. Revenue from sales would now be $200 so the worker could earn $200 a day without any increase in prices. Again, if all producers were in the same situation, the average worker would be producing and earning twice as much as before while prices would remain at their same level.   

The situation is the same as we look forward to a world where increasing numbers of us will be producing information goods and success will be measured by the efficiency with which data can be transformed into information. To get a handle on the importance of the concept think about a time in a class where an instructor asks: what is 147 divided by 6. Some students will do the computations by hand very slowly while others will get out their calculators and produce the numbers quickly. If people were paid according to their output, in this case they were paid for each calculation, then those with the calculators will make a good deal more for an hour of work. But you must make sure it is the relevant number, which is meant by effectiveness.

Before we move on, let's look at some good research questions.

1. "to what extent does parental employment adversely affect children's cognitive development?"
2. do union jobs systematically pay higher wages than nonunion jobs?
3. are consumers willing to pay for organic vegetables?
4. what impact will price of gas have on demand for SUVs?
5. does pollution affect home prices?
6. is there a housing bubble?
7. does class attendance influence student performance?

2. Survey the literature: There is no real advantage to reinventing the wheel, which is why any good research project begins with a review of the literature. This is the part of the research project were you find out what we know - and what we don't know about the problem or issue at the center of your research project. To be successful in your search, you must be able to identify the sources you are interested in and search them effectively. The information comes in two "varieties" - popular and scholarly. The popular sources are the ones you have most likely used in the past and include newspapers, such as the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, and magazines, such as The Economist, Business Week, and Harpers. These are valuable because they contain timely stories or information. For example, if in the Fall of 2005 you wanted to do a research project in which you were investigating whether there was in fact a housing bubble, then you would search the newspapers and magazines for timely information. You might also use books that are less timely, but contain far more detailed information. In the case of the housing bubble, you might find a book that describes the nature of speculative bubbles, but there would certainly be no book with information about the bubble in 2005. A third source of information would be professional journals. These are generally written by professionals for other professionals in their discipline and are of value to upper level undergraduate students and graduate students. Because of long delays due to the refereeing process and publication backlogs, these publications are less timely than newspapers, but more timely than books. As with the books, I would be able to find articles that examined previous asset bubbles, but is unlikely that there would be much written in the professional press about the housing bubble in the early 2000s.

   Once you have decided on the material to be searched, you are ready to begin the search process and when you are conducting your search you MUST avoid the using Google searches as your primary search engine. Google is an amazing search engine, but it is not the best way to find the information you are going to need for a research project. Fortunately, you have access to some online databases that will prove invaluable. .

   
   
3. Analyzing the problem: this is a stage where you use your knowledge to develop hypotheses. For example, the research question "what caused US consumer spending during the 1990s to increase at a rate faster than income?" is translated into a testable hypothesis "US consumer spending during the 1990s increased at a faster rate than income because of a booming stock market."  You would approach the problem by using your economic theory of consumer behavior that identifies other factors - wealth, expectations, interest rates).
   
   
4. Testing you analysis: this is where you test those hypotheses - and here we will test hypotheses with data. In this stage of the project you will most likely use either heavy duty excel work or statistics, and in this course we will focus on excel. It is an incredibly valuable tool, and we will use it extensively in the course.
   
   
5. Interpreting the results and drawing conclusions: This is where you tell the story, and it must be grounded in the 'evidence' you assembled in the  earlier stages of the project.

Now you are set to begin, and as you do, you should know that the "thrill of victory" that can be yours when you produce that "perfect number" to help the reader buy into the story you are telling, is earned only through the "agony of practice." Efficiency and effectiveness in "pushing" numbers will only come with practice, something those of you who have played a musical instrument or an organized sport know all too well.  So let's get on with it.

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