A Thinking Reed

Month: April 2009

  • The Life You Can Save 5

    So, where have we traveled so far? Singer has argued that 1) we have a moral obligation to help those who lack access to sufficient food, shelter, and medical care and 2) that we can do this by donating to aid agencies. Assuming we agree with him, how much should we give? Part 4 tries to tease out an answer in detail.

    On its face, the book’s argument seems to imply a pretty demanding level of giving. After all, I could deprive myself of a lot of luxuries (and donate the money saved to aid agencies) before being in danger of not having enough to adequately meet my own needs and those of my family. Are we then obliged to sacrifice everything beyond what we need to live more or less comfortably for the sake of helping the very poorest people of the world? Singer admits that the logic of his argument seems to point in this direction, but he also knows that many (perhaps most) of us would balk at such an extreme conclusion and, human nature being what it is, maybe decide not to give anything at all. If such seemingly onerous sacrifices are called for, we might say, then there must be some flaw in Singer’s reasoning.

    Singer presumably doesn’t think his own reasoning is flawed, but he offers a kind of compromise position as a public standard that he thinks most people can aspire to, but which can still make a huge difference. To this end, he proposes percentages that people in the top ten percent of the U.S. income distribution should give to aid. Those making more than about $105,000 a year should give 5% of their income away; those making over $148,000 should give 10%; more than $383,000, 15%; over $600,000, 20%; and over $1.9 million, 25%. To avoid dis-incentives to move to a higher bracket, this standard could be made more progressive – e.g., someone making $500,000 would give away 5% of the first $148,000; 10% of the next $235,000; and 15% of the remainder.

    The amount of money this would raise–from affluent, or at least comfortable, people in the U.S. alone–is about $471 billion a year. For comparison’s sake, Jeffrey Sachs, author of The End of Poverty, estimates that it would cost $189 billion a year to meet the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. (Bracketing for the moment the question of how effective the MDGs themselves are.) Singer adds that there’s no reason to think that people in the bottom 90% of the income scale can’t also give something; if they gave just an average of 1% of their income, this would add about another $40 billion. While it’s obviously difficult to generalize about how much any of us can give, which will depend a lot on circumstances, when I did the math it was pretty clear that I could give according to Singer’s scheme without being seriously deprived.

    As is often the case with Singer, there’s a tension between what consequentialist morality seems to require of us and what our own particular attachments–to our family, friends, compatriots, etc.–seem to demand. This isn’t to say that Singer opposes all particular attachments; he thinks there are good (consequentialist!) reasons for preferring that parents raise their own children rather than society trying to institute some kind of communal parenting arrangement. But many of us will balk at this rather cold-blooded argument. It just seems right, we say, that we should prefer our own children to the children of others.

    But you don’t need to buy completely into Singer’s utilitarianism to feel the force of his argument. Even granted that we have special duties to our own kith and kin, isn’t there some point at which showering them with luxuries seems grotesque given the magnitude of human suffering in the world? Is it really OK to spend tens of thousands of dollars to send your kid to a fancy private school, or to buy him a new car for his 16th birthday, or send him on a European vacation when there are millions of children in the world who lack access to the basic necessities of life? Surely our particular duties to those we love don’t trump all claims that others might have on us.

    The book ends with a consideration of how giving to others can be a way of finding meaning in one’s own life. He cites ancient wisdom and modern research to suggest that helping others is actually a source of deep satisfaction. It almost goes without saying that, from a Christian perspective, it’s well-attested that it is better to give than to receive.

    Whatever else Singer has accomplished here, I think he has, at the very least, put the burden of proof on those who deny that we have obligations to do a lot more than we currently are to alleviate world poverty. The fact that this often barely registers as a blip on our political or personal radar screens is a scandal. There are groups doing good work that make a difference in people’s lives, even if it’s sometimes difficult to say how much difference they’re making. And the sacrifice required for most of us to make a significant difference would be comparatively small.

  • Boldly going

    A buddy of mine scored some tickets to an advanced screening of the new Star Trek movie last night, and was kind enough to invite me along. I enjoyed it a lot. I consider myself a fairly serious Trek fan, if not a true, hardcore Trekkie, and I thought it was great fun. It also takes a pretty clever approach to re-booting the series without disregarding past (future?) continuity.

  • Tortured reading

    I haven’t been blogging on the torture issue, mostly because others are doing it far more justice than I even could.

    But, in case you aren’t already reading them, Glenn Greenwald, Andrew Sullivan, John Schwenkler, and Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings have been my regular sources of info and analysis on this.

    Also see: this piece by Dahlia Lithwick. And here’s the website for the National Religious Campaign Against Torture.

    UPDATE: First Things–yep, First Things–has a top-flight essay here.

  • The Life You Can Save 4

    While chapter 6 of The Life You Can Save was concerned with identifying individual programs that make a real difference in the lives of those they aim to help, chapter 7 looks at criticisms of aid at what we might call the “macro” level.

    One prominent critic of international aid is William Easterly, author of The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. Singer quotes Easterly:

    The West spent $2.3 trillion on foreign aid over the last five decades and still had not managed to get twelve-cent medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths. The West spent $2.3 trillion and still had not managed to get four-dollar bed nets to poor families….It’s a tragedy that so much well-meaning compassion did not bring these results for needy people. (p. 105)

    However, when you break out the numbers a bit, there doesn’t seem to be quite as much “well-meaning compassion” here as Easterly suggests. For starters, $2.3 trillion over five decades amounts to $46 billion a year, and the average number of people in the affluent nations over that five-decade period is around 750 million people. So, the aid given amounts to about $60 per person per year, or about 30 cents of every $100 earned. Not exactly a staggering proportion of the affluent world’s wealth (see pp. 105-6).

    Beyond that, though, much of the aid included in Easterly’s $2.3 trillion figure did not go toward poverty relief, but toward buying political influence. For instance, the West poured money into the coffers of African dictators during the Cold War in order to get them to tilt toward the West. And the countries currently receiving the lion’s share of U.S. foreign aid are places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Colombia, Egypt, and Jordan. You can tell just from the list that this is politically-directed aid, not aid aimed at maximizing poverty relief. “Only about one fifth of U.S. aid goes to countries classified by the OECD as ‘least developed,’ while about half of all U.S. aid goes to ‘lower-middle income’ nations” (p. 107). Singer also points out that much of the aid that is given is self-interested, such as food aid that, by law, must be grown by U.S. farmers (essentially a domestic agricultural subsidy), which often has the result of depressing local markets in recipient countries.

    Moreover, while Singer concedes that much government-to-government aid is corrupt and inefficient, Easterly, he says, doesn’t reckon with the effectiveness of non-governmental charity and hasn’t shown that more of this kind of aid is a bad idea:

    Because it hasn’t been tried, no one really knows whether poverty on a global scale can be overcome by a truly substantial amount of aid provided without political interference. The political and bureaucratic constraints that encumber official aid only make private donations to effective nongovernmental agencies all the more important. As Easterly himself says, the annual total amount of foreign aid for the world’s approximately 3 billion poor people (this figure includes those who are living on less than $2 per day, as well as those who are living on less than $1.25 per day) comes to only about $20 per person. Should we be surprised that this paltry sum hasn’t ended poverty? The worst that can be said with any certainty is that in the past, a lot of official aid has been misconceived and misdirected and has done little good. But it scarcely seems possible that, if we truly set out to reduce poverty, and put resources into doing so that match the size of the problem–including resources to evaluate past failures and learn from our mistakes–we will be unable to find ways of making a positive impact. (pp. 110-111)

    The balance of chapter 7 discusses some other common objections:

    “Trade, not Aid”–It’s sometimes argued that the key to lifting people out of poverty is to include them in the global market, rather than giving aid. Singer agrees, to a point. He singles out rich nations’ agricultural subsidies in particular as causing great harm to the world’s poor. However, aid is still necessary “for those who for whatever reason are not benefiting from economic growth.” Those who just want us to focus on expanding the economic pie are peddling a global version of trickle-down economics where the poor will (someday!) benefit from policies that currently seem to favor the rich.

    Bad Institutions Undo Good Projects–Some nations seem to suffer form endemically corrupt and fragile institutions, which can undermine aid projects. This provides a good reason, not for abandoning aid, but for making certain kinds of aid conditional on government reform.

    “The Planet Can’t Hold Them”–Does giving aid just encourage a reckless population growth? Are people like Paul Ehrlich right that we’re facing a population explosion and there’s simply not enough to go around? Unsurprisingly, Singer disagrees. First, any “food crisis” could largely be solved by shifting away from a meat-intensive diet to a plant-based one, considering that meat production is a highly inefficient use of the world’s grain. Second, the best way to reduce fertility is to reduce poverty. Not to mention that it would be morally repugnant, as suggested by, for instance, Garrett Hardin, to simply adopt a “lifeboat ethic” and leave starving and sick people to their fate.

    The bottom line here is pretty clear: we simply can’t claim that we’ve yet made a truly serious effort to combat global poverty. There are clear examples of programs that make a difference, and the objections that aid is distorted by politics constitute an argument for more and better-designed aid, not giving up. So, if that’s right, what kind of obligation does each one of us have? That’s the topic of part 4.

  • “it’s hard, if not impossible, to be a meat-eating environmentalist”

    Via John Schwenkler, Rod Dreher interviews James McWilliams, who Dreher calls a “contrarian agrarian.” He is a fierce critic of our system of industrial agriculture, but he also slaughters some sacred cows (pardon the expression) of the organic food and locavore movements. He has some kind words for GMOs and particularly questions the sustainability of even “free range” meat operations. Overall, though, he’s suspicious of any silver bullet for food sustainability:

    The future of food production must achieve a balance between high yields and high sustainability. The only way I see this happening is if we stop polarizing our discussions of food into big industrial and small organic, and start seeking common ground over compromises that split differences. We’ll have to eat much less meat, many more whole grains, fruits, vegetables and legumes; tolerate the judicious use of chemicals in the production of our food; keep an open mind to the potential benefits of biotechnology; and worry less about the distance our food traveled than the overall energy it took to produce it.

    McWilliams book, Just Food: How Locavores Are Endangering the Future of Food and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly, comes out in August.

  • The ecological promise of an orthodox theology

    I was flipping through H. Paul Santmire’s excellent book Nature Reborn: The Ecological and Cosmic Promise of Christian Theology, and discovered that he takes Matthew Fox’s (no, not that one) “creation spirituality” to task on many of the same grounds that I criticized J. Philip Newell. Like Newell, Fox embraces a form of nature mysticism, disdains talk of original sin in favor of “original blessing,” and embraces a “Christus exemplar” account of the atonement, wherein the “Cosmic Christ” reveals to each of us that we are already one with the divine.

    Santmire has some sharp words for Fox’s view:

    His approach resonates all too disquietingly with the anti-urban, romantic individualism of the Thoreauvian tradition. When all is said and done, Fox leaves us in the sweat lodge. His thought is not fundamentally at home in urban America. We can see this deficiency from the vantage point of any inner-city neighborhood. (p. 21)

    Santmire goes on to consider, as an example, an inner-city neighborhood called Asylum Hill in Hartford, Connecticut and wonders what Foxian creation spirituality would have to say to a welfare mother, a pregnant teenage girl, or an unemployed veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome.

    The message of Fox may speak to an elite, largely affluent few. What does it have to say to the impoverished urban masses around the globe, who must struggle every day for their sustenance, often against overwhelming odds? What does it say to a global society that is increasingly urban, for better or for worse? (p. 21)

    He points out that the vast majority of people in the world are well aware of the reality of radical evil–a reality that Fox downplays; what they need is a message of hope and liberation. And the “Christian masses” throughout the ages have been quite aware of their own bondage to sin and evil, which is the experiential ground of the power of other atonement images: the Christus victor and Christus victim motifs. Christ the victor defeats the powers of darkness and death; Christ the victim reconciles us to God:

    …the faithful in the Asylum Hills of this world are all too aware of their own mortality and their own sinfulness to make any sense at all out of the claim that they themselves, not just the Christ of their salvation, are somehow divine. They do not want to be told that they are divine. They do want to hear that they have been delivered and that they have been forgiven, so that they can then engage in the struggles for justice in this world, liberated from hopelessness and freed from the burdens of their own alienation. (p. 23)

    Santmire agrees with Fox that “Cosmic Christology must be an urgent theme for contemporary theology” (p. 23), but “creation spirituality” glosses over the profoundly ambiguous nature of the created world and fails to do justice to Christian eschatological hope. The vision of the Bible is not a protological one, calling for the return to some primeval paradisical state, but an eschatological one, looking toward a future consummation and redemption:

    Original blessing is not the ending, but the beginning for the Bible. Eschatology as a yet-to-be-fully realized dawning of a New Heaven and a New Earth, in the midst of which the New Jerusalem is to be situated–this is the driving biblical vision. But there is always what Ernst Käsemann called the “eschatological reservation,” the witness to the “crucified God” (Jurgen Moltmann), as the sign of “God with us” in our struggle to hope and to love in the midst of this oppressed and alienated world God creates and blesses as good. (p. 24)

    In a neat turnabout, Santmire argues that it’s actually the often-demonized Augustine who can provide some resources for an adequate theology of nature and creation. The mature Augustine, he maintains, abandoned his Manichean roots and attendant distrust of the material world, and situated his narrative of fall and redemption within the context of a story of an unfolding and yet-to-be-consummated creation. For Augustine, creation is good and overflowing with blessings from its Creator, and yet the cosmos waits for its fulfillment in the end times. Within this process, human beings act out the drama of alienation from and reconciliation with God, the latter achieved by the incarnate Son. Augustine provides resources for a theology that does more justice to the goodness and ambiguity of both creation and humanity than Fox’s creation spirituality or the popularizers of an idealized Celtic spirituality.

    Also, be sure to check out Marvin’s posts on the topic of Celtic Christianity and Pelagianism (this one and an older one here.)

  • The use and abuse of Celtic Christianity

    Last night–somewhat against my better judgment–I went to hear a talk given by “Celtic Christianity” guru J. Philip Newell at a “faith forum” sponsored by a group of Capitol Hill churches, including ours. Though I didn’t know too much about Newell going in, my fears that it would be fuzzy feel-good New Ageism were, alas, mostly confirmed.

    In Newell’s telling, we’re living at the birth of a “new consciousness.” This involves something like overcoming the dualities of earth/heaven, matter/spirit, male/female, nature/grace, the One/the many, etc. and realizing the essential oneness of all things.

    Christianity’s contribution to this new consciousness will best be served, according to Newell, by rehabilitating the Celtic tradition and rejecting much of the standard-issue Western tradition. The most interesting part of Newell’s talk was an attempted rehabilitation of the much-maligned Pelagius. According to Newell, Pelagius was a gender egalitarian, appreciated the wisdom of the pre-Christian Druid tradition, and rejected the Augustinian view of original sin. (Confusingly, Newell seems to think that the Augustinian view holds that we are evil by nature, and that the Pelagian view rejects this; but Augustine certainly didn’t think that, which is not to say that his view of original sin doesn’t have problems.) Newell said that we have had the doctrine of original sin beaten into us and need to recover a doctrine of our essential goodness, as well as a sense that grace perfects nature rather than being in opposition to it (he didn’t use the exact phrase “grace perfects nature,” which might’ve given away the error that the evil Western tradition is uniformly anti-nature).

    Although the talk (and Newell’s most recent book) was called “Christ of the Celts: The Healing of Creation,” there was actually very little talk about Jesus. Christ, he said, reveals the “heartbeat of God” which is also found in every person, and in all nature. But we didn’t hear much about the specific shape of Jesus’ life, much less his death and resurrection. In his scheme, Jesus seems to serve as an exemplar of a kind of nature mysticism, and this can lead Christians to embrace the “new consciousness.”

    To some extent, I’m sympathetic to an attempt to rehabilitate Pelagius. I have no doubt the historical Pelagius probably got something of a raw deal at the hands of his theological opponents. And I don’t accept a full-throated Augustinian doctrine of original sin/guilt. But Newell’s view just doesn’t seem to have the resources to grapple with the reality of evil. I guess if you spend most of your time leading workshops at idyllic retreat locations like the Isle of Iona, off Scotland, and Casa del Sol in New Mexico, you might have a benign view of the world as good through-and-through. But, beyond those surroundings, we have a world that is full of a lot of brutality, violence, cruelty, suffering, and frustration. It calls for a more radical solution than attaining a new consciousness.

    This is the truth contained in the traditional doctrine of original sin, however much we might need to re-think some of its cruder explications. Sin isn’t just a matter of limited knowledge or faulty perception, but a profound distortion of the will. The good that we want to do, we don’t do, and the evil we don’t want to do–that we do (to paraphrase St. Paul). This is why a New Age nature-mystic Jesus isn’t the solution to our problems, emphatically including the problem of our despoiling of the earth. Our ignorance isn’t the only–or even the major–reason that we take more than our share of the earth’s goods, crush the poor under our heels, and drop bombs on villages in faraway places. Rather, “we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves,” in the words of the Lutheran Church’s confession of sin. A Christ who can’t liberate us from the principalities and powers that hold us in thrall isn’t going to be much help.

    The problem with appeals to “Celtic Christianity” is that the history of the Celtic church is shrouded enough that it enables modern liberals to project onto it pretty much everything good in opposition to everything they find bad about the “Western Church” (this is the term Newell used – why the Celts are not part of “the West” wasn’t clear to me). Such a construct is rarely going to be more than a reflection of whatever values we happen to hold, like the image of the “historical Jesus” at the bottom of the well of history, who simply reflects the image of the scholar peering down into it. Only the living Christ can actually stand outside of us to both judge us for and liberate us from our sin.

    ADDENDUM:     My wife tells me that saying “if you spend most of your time leading workshops at idyllic retreat locations like the Isle of Iona, off Scotland, and Casa del Sol in New Mexico, you might have a benign view of the world as good through-and-through” was a low blow. And she’s right. I have no idea how Newell spends the rest of his time and it was unfair of me to suggest otherwise. I think the point stands, though: I really don’t see how Newell’s brand of benign nature mysticism can account for radical evil in the world and in the human heart.

  • The Life You Can Save 3

    In part 3 of The Life You Can Save, Singer tries to answer the question whether we each really can save a life (or several) by donating more to overseas aid. Specifically, how much does it take to save a life, and is aid actually effective in improving the lives of the world’s poorest people?

    Chapter 6 looks at the cost of saving a life and how you can tell which charities do it best. Singer spends much of this chapter telling the story of GiveWell, a nonprofit group dedicated to determining the effectiveness of charities. As Singer points out, groups like Charity Navigator look at charities’ program costs vs. their administrative costs, but this is not necessarily a good proxy for the impact charities have on the lives of those they’re trying to help.

    GiveWell, by contrast, actually tries to measure this impact, which–not surprisingly–turns out to be pretty difficult. The organization gives grants to charities based in part on its assessment of their effectiveness. The founders, two former hedge fund employees named Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld, found that the information provided by most charities on the effectiveness of their programs was nowhere near the level of the information they would’ve expected to be provided with for a prospective investment.

    Karnofsky and Hassenfeld undertook a study of organizations working to save lives and improve health in Africa, and, of the fifty-nine organizations who applied for GiveWell grants, only fifteen provided what they considered adequate information. Of these, they gave their top rating to Population Services International, a DC-based group that “sells condoms, bed nets, water purification treatment, and treatment for malaria and diarrhea, and educates people on their uses” (p. 88), all at nominal prices. Other highly-rated organizations were Partners in Health, a group that started in Haiti to provide health care to poor people, and Interplast, which provides surgeries to correct cleft palates, among other things. GiveWell also looked at poverty-relief programs and high marks (and a $25,000 grant) to Opportunity International, a microfinance organization that gives very small loans at low interest to poor people.

    The point here is that proving effectiveness is a pretty tricky thing to do. Virtually all aid organizations can offer descriptions of the kinds of activities they undertake, but not their effectiveness or efficiency. Singer discusses some attempts to quantify the effectiveness of aid programs, but he also recognizes that not all benefits can be so easily quantified. For instance, Oxfam ran a program that helped organize a group of Indian “ragpickers” (“women who make their living by sifting through the town garbage dump to collect not just rags but anything else that can be recycled” (p. 94)), enabling them to demand higher prices, avoid harassment, and receive entry to apartment buildings to collect residents’ recyclables. This resulted in not just more money for these women, but a greater sense of dignity, something that’s pretty hard to reflect in numbers. Singer also discusses another Oxfam effort, one to improve the legal rights of women in Mozambique, as providing hard-to-quantify but still undeniable benefits.

    The chapter ends with a list of forms of aid that, in Singer’s words, “we can reasonably judge to be highly cost-effective, even without formal studies” (p. 97). These include

    –providing well-drilling equipment to villages in Ethiopia, relieving women from having to walk miles each day just to get clean drinking water

    –providing arsenic filters to families in Nepal

    –providing cooking stoves that shorten cooking time, allowing girls time for school

    –helping residents in a slum of Kathmandu build indoor toilets

    –helping villagers in remote mountain areas of Nepal to build a school

    –providing inexpensive surgeries to correct cataracts

    –providing surgeries to help women with fistulas (a hole between a woman’s vagina and either the bladder or rectum that is sometimes produced by the pressure of a baby’s head during labor)

    Singer writes:

    It’s difficult to calculate how much it costs to save or transform the life of someone who is extremely poor. We need to put more resources into evaluating the effectiveness of varoius programs. Nevertheless, we have seen that much of the work done by charities is highly cost-effective, and we can reasonably believe that the cost of saving a life through one of these charities is somewhere between $200 and $2,000. (p. 103)

    He notes that, by contrast, the median cost of saving a life in the U.S. is around $2.2 million, and the EPA estimated the value of a generic American life at $7.22 million. Given the money we spend on saving lives here, and the money we spend on what can, by any reasonable accounting, be considered luxuries, nearly all of us could make a huge difference to the life of someone very poor by giving away more of what we have.

    This doesn’t mean that aid as it exists doesn’t need to be improved, which is the subject of chapter 7.

  • You too can be a right-wing hack!

    This piece at Reason.com is really kind of embarrassingly bad, but it does serve a useful purpose in collecting many of the right-wing anti-environment tropes in one place for easy reference:

    Point out that environmentalists want to run your life and take away your money (they’re basically communists in other words).

    Feign(?) misunderstanding of scientific claims (e.g., Those crazy greens think CO2 is a “pollutant” – but we exhale CO2, so obviously that can’t be right!).

    Explain that environmentalists are Luddites who hate modern life and the blessings of capitalism.

    Compare environmentalism to religion (n.b.: this is a bad thing).

    Quote dubious figures from a corporate-backed “nonpartisan” think-tank about the catastrophic cost of addressing global warming.

    Pretend to be for “sensible” and “common sense” (preferably “market-based”!) solutions to (nonexistent) environmental problems.

    Optional: make disparaging reference to Al Gore.

    You might want to print this out for easy reference in case you’re called upon to a) write an angry letter to the editor of your local newspaper about some positive coverage of Earth Day they ran, b) argue with someone in a blog comment thread, or c) write an op-ed for a major conservative or libertarian magazine/think-tank.

  • Greening the Bible?

    Ben Myers at Faith & Theology has a post that may be trying a bit too hard to be contrarian, poking fun at the “Green Bible” recently published by Harper Collins. This version of the NRSV is printed on recycled paper with a cotton/linen cover and features green-lettered passages that deal with themes of the earth or creation and contains essays on environmental topics from Christian figures like N.T. Wright, Pope John Paul II, and others.

    I’m of two minds on this. On the one hand, I deplore both niche Bible marketing and “green” consumerism. On the other hand, too many American Christians still have a very individualistic and anthropocentric understanding of the Bible’s message. So, if this version inculcates some awareness of “green” themes in the Bible, is that so bad? For example, a Bible study organized around “green” passages could be a fruitful thing for a congregation to pursue.

    Myers quotes a piece from First Things by Alan Jacobs (not online) that suggests the Green Bible is trying to force the message of Scripture to serve a pre-approved secular agenda. But I think a better way of looking at it is as using something akin to Paul Tillich’s method of “correlation” in theology. To oversimplify greatly, this involves bringing our deepest questions into contact and conversation with the gospel message. It’s only now that we see ecological devastation being wreaked around us that we’re beginning to realize that this is something the Bible speaks to. This isn’t imposing an alien secular perspective on the Bible, but allowing the Bible to illuminate issues that weren’t as relevant to our forbears (largely because the human capacity for wrecking the environment was constrained by technological limitations). That doesn’t mean that the biblical message will line up neatly with the agenda of modern environmentalists, but the current focus on the environment can allow us to see aspects of that message that we may have overlooked.