Americans across the country feel that our economy is broken, as stagnant wages and rising prices make it increasingly impossible to get by. In reality, the system is working exactly as designed. 

Current Affairs sat down with economist and University of Oxford professor Eric Beinhocker and venture capitalist and Civic Ventures founder Nick Hanauer—co-authors of Markets Built for Humans—to discuss why neoliberal economics was doomed from the start. Their free, downloadable booklet argues that a different future is possible, outlining a new economic framework for building markets "that serve people, the planet, and our democracy."

 

Watch the video on YouTube here. 

Nathan J. Robinson

I was just mentioning to Nick before the program that I was just in Michigan this weekend covering the Senate campaign there, and I talked to a lot of voters. It was interesting because there is, as I think we know, a lot of popular discontent about the state of the economy. People are angry. People are angry that they seem to be falling behind all the time. That everything costs more all the time. They feel powerless and alienated. And we saw in New York last year that these kinds of affordability concerns elevated a democratic socialist to the mayor's office, and we're seeing in Michigan right now that there's a populist campaign, Abdul El-Sayed, catching fire for the Senate.

But it's interesting because when you talk to people, they don't really understand why things are this way. So they understand that something has gone wrong, something is broken. They use words like "broken" and "rigged." The economy isn't working. But what you both are trying to do in this booklet is help people understand what it is that has gone wrong and provide some kind of theory and to look into history. So I want to start here with when you talk to people who feel that kind of ambient, inarticulate sense that something is very wrong in the economy, help us understand what it is that's gone so wrong.

Nick Hanauer

For most people, economics does not exist as an abstraction. It's really "my job" and "the expenses." And unfortunately, for most people, there's an underlying set of rules defined by the economic system that we broadly accept that kind of frames how the economy unfolds and who it works for. For 50 years or so, we in the West, and particularly in the United States, have adopted a framework of economics that we variously call "neoliberalism" or "neoclassical economics" or "trickle-down economics" that structured the rules in ways that advantage capital above all else and disadvantage everything else. And the theory behind that framework was that if you did that, everyone would benefit. That you would get more economic growth, which would benefit all citizens. That turned out to be wrong or a lie, depending on who was saying it.

I think Eric and I agree that there are two forces at play here. The first force that is as old as human civilizations is the broad intent of economically powerful elites to build narratives that advantage them. This is probably something that will never disappear. But I think the other thing that happened that we probably could have avoided was just a mistaken way of understanding economic cause and effect. I think that there were a lot of people who created that framework who didn't have ill intent. They were just doing their research and attempting to mathematize a framework of thought that probably wasn't helpful to mathematize. And so you end up with a way of understanding things that was bad for human beings. I'll give you just one example, which is that the contemporary sort of orthodox understanding of the economy is to conceive of it as an equilibrium system. That is to say, a system within which if one thing goes up, another thing has to come down. And so if you believe that, then it is effectively true by definition that if you raise the minimum wage, for example, there has to be corresponding job loss. And so if you believe that, if you think that is true, it sort of takes off the table things like raising the minimum wage as a sensible way of governing economic policy. This explains, for example, why the minimum wage is $7.25 an hour today, even though if it had simply tracked productivity gains, it would be close to $25. And so that framework of thought—and we could go on and on and on with examples: the idea that tax cuts for the rich create growth; that any kind of regulation of corporations harms productivity and growth. There were a bunch of ideas embedded in that framework that made it effectively impossible to enact policy that would benefit ordinary people. And any policy that benefited rich people was viewed to be an unalloyed good. And so for 50 years, policymakers from both parties, Democrat and Republican, enacted policies on that basis, and as a consequence, we have overseen the biggest transfer of income and wealth from the bottom 90 percent to the top 10 percent in the history of the world.

Eric Beinhocker

Nathan, you use the words "broken" and "rigged" to sum up what people are feeling, and I think that's exactly right. The problems created by the neoliberal ideas that Nick discussed go back much further than recent economic stressors. So this isn't just a vibe recession or cost of living crisis, as some people put it. This is a deeper, multi-decadal set of issues. And if we think about what the promises of the American dream are, it's a pretty simple social contract. If you work hard, play by the rules, and do the right things, you'll have a decent life, and your kids will have a better life. That social contract was fundamentally broken over these decades because of the ideas and economic thinking that Nick described, and the statistics have now become pretty familiar. Incomes stagnated, social mobility dropped, and the middle class hollowed out. Key elements of the middle-class life, like a decent house, healthcare, and college for the kids—all that stuff became more expensive and out of reach.

And at the same time, people felt the loss of control and autonomy as corporate power concentrated. You start getting your job schedule by text message the day before. You're a contractor without any rights, as opposed to an employee. There are a whole set of changes in the relationship between employees and employers. And so you put all these things together, and it took a while for things to kind of brew, but it's no wonder that people are feeling that the system is broken. It is for them, and also that it's rigged. At the same time, we see the ultra-wealthy living in a completely different system with entirely different tax rules and vastly different standards of living. The psychology research shows when we feel screwed over, when we feel a contract is violated, we get really, really mad. We seek to strike back, and we seek to also find people who will help us correct the situation, and that's led a lot of people to reach out to the angry populist candidates who promise to fix all this, even though you know those promises are empty.

Robinson

Right. People understand that something is wrong, but because they don't understand what it is that's wrong, they're susceptible to explanations that say, "Well, it's those Haitians down the street who are eating your cats and taking your jobs."

Beinhocker

Exactly.

Robinson

But as you point out, that is not what happens. We understand what happened. I think one of the really important things about what you do here is that you help us understand counterfactuals. It's kind of hard for people to think how things could be different or could have been different, because they see they're upset with their lives, especially young people, but they haven't known any different kind of world. I get a glimpse of a different kind of world every time I talk to my dad because he went to work in the '50s, and he's been living off a pension for 30 years of the kind that you never get now.

Beinhocker

Exactly.

Robinson

Recently Elon Musk became a trillionaire. Many defenders of Elon Musk online were asking, "Well, how does what's in his bank account affect what's in my bank account? I don't see how there's a link between those two things." But one of the things that you do here is you trace the last 50 years, and you show, actually, if we hadn't had this concentration of wealth, the average American would be making a huge amount more money right now. So can you talk a little bit about this incredible kind of counterfactual that you show and think about what could have been different?

Hanauer

Right. So one of the pieces of work that we think is very important is that the Rand Corporation, which is a nonpartisan think tank mostly oriented around foreign policy research but very reliable, analyzed income shares over the last 50 years. So, the median full-time worker in America earns around $60,000, a little bit more today, but if that person had simply maintained their same share, effectively, of the economy since 1975, instead of earning about $60,000 a year, they'd earn about $120,000 a year. So that's the counterfactual that we live with. And I think it's fair to say that if the median worker earned $120,000 today instead of $60,000, we would live in a very different society. We would live in a society that, first, both federal and state deficits, or the tax receipt circumstance in both the federal and state levels, would be much different because there would be so much more income, so deficits would be much lower.

Obviously the economy would be much larger because people would be buying effectively twice as much stuff, so you would have GDP growth rates back to where they used to be before the neoliberal takeover took place, which is in the 4 percent range rather than the 2 percent range as it is today. Perhaps most consequentially, I think it's fair to say that we would have a fraction of the political polarization that we face today, because most people would be doing great. People would feel it's going pretty decent. There's no earthly reason why we couldn't have had that society. We just collectively decided not to do that.

Beinhocker

An economic theory was sold to us that people adopted that dramatically increased the power of capital, decreased the power of labor, and shifted this income share. I should just note that, wearing my economist hat, there are lots of reasons income shares can change. One is productivity, for example, but in the case of this period, actually worker productivity kept going up. Just more and more of that productivity was captured by the shareholders and owners of capital and not captured in workers' wages. The Economic Policy Institute has done some great work on this.

Likewise, the other thing you often hear is, "Well, it's technology change and globalization—can't do anything about those. Tough luck, workers." We have this thing called skill bias technical change. But when you look at the data, these trends started back in the mid '70s and early '80s, and the trade and technology stories are very real and have had a powerful effect on the economy, but they don't really start until the 1990s. So something else was going on during this period, and that something else, we believe, was the changes in policy wrought by the neoliberal economic revolution.

That, in essence, kind of rewired the economy and also rewired how corporations are run that caused this. And I can also speak to this personally. Well, Nick can too. I worked for McKinsey and Company, the consulting firm, for a number of decades during this period, and my job was basically to suppress wages and raise productivity and shove the difference to shareholders, and we were pretty good at it. And so were lots of companies and other entrepreneurs.

Robinson

And became somewhat infamous for it, I think it's safe to say. McKinsey did.

Beinhocker

And the theory said what we were doing was good for society. But it hasn't worked out so well.

Robinson

Eric, can I ask you as an economist, when someone says to you, "I don't see how what Elon Musk gets affects my bank account," or "how what happens at the top affects what happens at the bottom," how do you respond to that?

Beinhocker

Part of you might say, "Look, Elon Musk is a very successful entrepreneur. Successful entrepreneurs should be rewarded." I don't disagree with that. But there's another aspect to it that he's being an entrepreneur within a structure of a system—the structure of an economic game—and the way that game has been structured creates this strong bias to capital and has reduced the power of labor in some quite fundamental ways that lead to the outcomes that we've seen over the past couple of decades. An example we use in the booklet to show how the rules of the game can affect the outcomes is the game of Monopoly, which most of your friends will be familiar with.

And the interesting thing about the game of Monopoly is, no matter how many times you play it and who is playing it, it always ends up in the same result—a plutocrat. There's always one very rich person in Monopoly, and everyone else is really poor, and that's not because of the skill of the players. It's because of the structure of the game. And there's actually some mathematics behind this and so on that always leads to that outcome. And even if you send everyone to Monopoly school and the game has perfect equality of opportunity, you still get the same result. So part of the argument we're making is the rules of the economic game have been structured in such a way that we end up with plutocrats like Elon Musk.

Robinson

One of the most fascinating things that you say in the book, or at least to me, is that there are lots of little kind of revelations here throughout. But one of the things that really struck me is when you start talking about Monopoly, Eric just mentioned "equality of opportunity." It's so interesting because everyone talks about wanting equality of opportunity, but you point out that in the Monopoly case, everyone starts with perfect equal opportunity. It doesn't change how the thing ends up. And if you run a game like that across many generations, wealth is going to concentrate because the first generation has equality of opportunity, the second generation has whatever resulted from the playing of the game, and that's where it starts. So unless you have constant interventions, adjustments, and redistributions, your equality of opportunity lasts one second.

Hanauer

Exactly. And what we point out is that a market economy is a game like Monopoly. That's the takeaway. In the absence of material counterforces, a market economy will always end up as a plutocracy, and that means that a thriving middle class is a purposeful construction. A thriving middle class does not emerge naturally from a market economy. It is something that has to be made through policy. And we used to understand that, and we used to have rules in our economy that ensured that the value created by enterprise was reasonably fairly shared among all citizens and that the concentrations of power and wealth were broken up, or at least moderated. The difference is that we threw all those rules away, and now we end up effectively in a game of Monopoly where a few people are winning and everybody else is losing.

The reason that we wrote this booklet and the work that we've done is you can think of market humanism as what you get when you build an economic framework from the evidence up rather than sort of ideology down, and when you do that, you end up with a very different way of understanding economic cause and effect and a very different perspective on policy. And rather than this idea that if you just make rich people richer, everything will all trickle down and we'll all be better off, I think all the evidence supports the view that's effectively wrong and backwards. Smart economic policy is always focused on effectively the median family. When the middle class thrives, that's what creates economic growth. The thriving middle class is the cause of economic growth, not its consequence.

Robinson

Nick, you said something very important about the difference between crafting policy based on ideas versus evidence. To go back to the minimum wage, as you pointed out, there's a framework under which it never makes sense to raise the minimum wage.

Hanauer

Correct.

Robinson

And that's certainly what Milton Friedman might have said. But if you say, "Well, okay, if we raise the minimum wage, there's going to be job loss; it's going to be bad for people," that's a set of ideas, but you could come about it a different way, which is to ask to look at it empirically and say, "Well, what actually happens in the real world?" If we look at lots of different societies, what happens when they have minimum wages? What happens if they have strong unions? Let's build the theory based on our observations rather than assuming the observations we're going to have are based on the theory.

And so, Eric, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how, because as I understand it, the profession of economics itself has changed a bit. Some of the ideas that you're talking about in this book reflect changing understandings in the economic profession itself. Economists have changed their views on the minimum wage, for instance, as more evidence has come in.

Beinhocker

Yes, exactly. In the 1990s, when the first really careful, controlled analyses of the impacts of the minimum wage in the real world were done, people literally couldn't believe the results, and they were heavily criticized. And the Nobel Prize economist James Buchanan even wrote a letter to the Wall Street Journal, calling any economists that accepted these results "camp-following whores," if you can believe it. That's how visceral the reaction was. But the economists doing the empirical work kind of carried on, and they addressed the questions about the studies and did more studies and more studies and more studies, and they kept getting the same results that basically the minimum wage has no real negative impact on jobs, but has significant positive impacts on the wages of low-income workers, not just those on the minimum wage, but it also transfers up to other low-wage workers.

It also increases spending in local communities and has no negative impact on prices that anybody's been able to find, and so on. And over time, those results have now been largely accepted in the economics community. But because it contradicts the theory and the worldview, it's kind of created this tension. And so now people have been questioning and looking at the theory and coming to the kinds of ideas that we summarize and talk about in the booklet. The economy really is not this kind of static, machine-like system that Nick described, but is a dynamic system where when wages go up for workers, they have more money to spend in the economy. That helps create demand and investment and positive economic activity.

Also, workers on higher wages tend to be more productive, tend to stay in their jobs longer, and have all kinds of other effects. But the broader point is that until we change the paradigm, the theories, it's very hard for people to see the evidence that's right in front of their eyes. The economic paradigm acts like a giant filter that we process all this information through, and when things contradict that filter, what seems to be common sense, we tend to reject it or ignore it or so on. So evidence in all kinds of other areas, like tax cuts for rich people, doesn't stimulate investment and growth. Or there's lots of evidence that smart industrial policy can actually work and do positive things. These findings, which contradict the neoliberal theory, have been very hard for people to accept without a new set of explanations, a new kind of economic common sense. But the good news is that's coming. It's changing. And what we've tried to do in this booklet is synthesize a lot of this academic work for a general audience.

Hanauer

We still live in a world of just remarkable asymmetry of scrutiny. So when it comes to the minimum wage, there have been literally hundreds of studies to determine whether those increases have created job loss. But the $50 billion a year in Wall Street bonuses—no one has ever studied the job loss created by that. And I can tell you, you can do a pretty simple economic analysis. If you run $50 billion a year through the normal economy, that's in the range of half a million jobs. That's as many jobs as there are in some of our states. It's a lot. But no one has ever done a study on that because we live in a world where anything good that happens to rich people is an unalloyed good, and anything good that happens to ordinary working people requires us to affirmatively prove that it will do no harm, which is completely insane when you think about it. It's like literally upside down, but that is the world that we live in today, and that is why everyone is struggling.

Our entire policymaking apparatus has been captured by this set of ideas that are embedded so deeply in people's consciousness and unconsciousness that they can't see anything else. You can think of the economy effectively as the matrix. Economics is the matrix, rather. It's just this way of seeing, to Eric's point, that frames how you see the evidence, frames how you see cause and effect, and frames how you see what's good and what's bad, and that way of seeing has led us astray for 50 years. Again, we can't fix this problem without tearing that set of ideas down and replacing them with what the empirical evidence shows is true, and that is what market humanism is.

Beinhocker

And we should note that these ideas didn't just capture the political right. Some of the ways we describe them, this sounds like Reaganism, Milton Friedman, and all that, which is true. They kind of first colonized the political right, but they were very much adopted in a maybe kinder, gentler form on the political left, where the theories were accepted, but maybe we take different sides of the trade-off.

So sure, minimum wage will hurt jobs, but it's more fair to poor people, so we should do it even if there's a cost. Or helping the environment will hurt growth and jobs, but we love polar bears. Or making public investments in infrastructure and education will crowd out private capital, but we need that stuff. So, there was this acceptance of these supposed trade-offs that were kind of baked into the theory by the left as well. They just had come at it with different value sets in the trade-offs. But the key point is the paradigm, the giant filter, was also operating on those sides, and so Nick can tell you stories of battles he's had with folks on both sides of the aisle on these issues.

Hanauer

Yes, I was in discussion yesterday, Nathan, with a prominent left-wing economist about this stuff, and he admitted to me that when we cooked up the $15 minimum wage, he thought it was stupid and nuts and was going way too far. But clearly it wasn't! We could have gone way farther with no job loss! But if even left-wing economists are against you on stuff like that, it is very hard to make progress helping people. This is the problem.

Beinhocker

We should say, by the way, that in the minimum wage going to $15, it wasn't too far; this doesn't mean that $100 is right. No. There is a sort of trade-off point somewhere.

Hanauer

A point of diminishing returns.

Beinhocker

Point of diminishing returns. The key point, though, is the old theory because it just automatically said even if we went from $7.25 to $9, it would hurt. We don't even think of looking at doing that. So it got us to ask the wrong question. The right question is a design question of, does the diminishing return start at $20, $30? Who knows? We should do some experiments and some work to find that out. But the neoliberal consensus shut down even asking those questions.

Robinson

Yes. When Milton Friedman died, Larry Summers had an op-ed in the New York Times saying, "We're all Friedmanites now." Universally. And he meant Democrats. We're not going to have time to dive into the book that is so rich and deeply endnoted, so people can spend a lot of time in the scholarly literature too. But you've made it available totally free online, so people can download it as a PDF.

But I want to ask a couple more things. You have a chapter specifically about climate change, and you use that as an area, a kind of case study, of where some of these bad economic ideas have failed us and left us with an enormous, worsening, unsolved problem. We're speaking during the middle of a pretty horrific heat wave across the United States and Europe. It's pretty clear that the countries of the world have failed to deal with climate change in the way that they should have. And you argue that this is a case in which our economic ideas actually prevented us from taking the kind of policy action that we should have taken. Could you explain what you mean by that?

Beinhocker

Yes. So we've talked about how these ideas have helped break our democracy. They've also broken our climate. And the fundamental framing out of neoliberalism of the climate problem was that it was a cost-benefit problem. That we would have costs of transitioning to cleaner energy sources, but the benefits would be less future damage from climate. This was the work that William Nordhaus got his Nobel Prize for. But there have been multiple problems with that framework.

First is that the assumptions about the costs of renewable energy that the neoliberal paradigm couldn't accept—that's something that could change dramatically over time because of technology innovation and because of things like learning effects, where the more we make of something, the cheaper it gets. So we have a chart in the booklet showing the International Energy Agency's projections of the future costs of solar and wind, and they got it wrong every year. Every year it was much, much cheaper than they could believe it would be. And at the same time, this positioned future damage as something kind of theoretical and hard to quantify and so on. So this gave a kind of structural advantage to forces that wanted to basically not do anything about climate change or go very, very slowly, and it created a political framing where fossil fuel interests and other interests could position it as basically jobs versus polar bears, economy versus climate.

In that political framing, if people have to choose between jobs and saving the polar bears, they're going to choose their jobs. This very damaging framing stands in sharp contrast to the reality of the problem, where, again, the evidence has showed us something very different—that there are lots of policies that actually really work in helping reduce emissions and increase clean energy deployment. So things like tax incentives, smart industrial policy, subsidies supporting R&D, and so on. And those policies in countries around the world have actually driven a 5,000 times decrease in the costs of solar energy, for example, and also huge decreases in the cost of wind to where those are now the cheapest energy sources on Earth. At the same time, science keeps finding that the problems of climate damage may actually be getting worse and worse. So we need to reframe this problem from this kind of neoliberal cost-benefit problem to one of transformation. How do we transform the system from one energy system to another? Work done by my group at Oxford and others shows that if we do that, there are huge economic benefits. We estimate the world would save $14 trillion in energy costs from a faster transition to clean energy, and that again completely turns upside down the conventional wisdom that's come out of neoliberal economics.

Robinson

Nick, can I ask you to finish us off here by giving us a little bit of a broad overview of the kinds of policies that the new paradigm leads us to? You have a list here of the neoliberal policy consensus. It leads us to tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, privatization, weakening labor, and financialization. If we think about the economy differently, if we set these ideas aside, and we look at the way things really work, what kinds of policies does it lead us towards under the new paradigm?

Hanauer

So I think that the easiest and simplest way to describe the policy agenda that emerges logically from a modern way of understanding economic cause and effect is, as I've said before, that a thriving middle class causes economic growth. That growth is built from the middle out, not from the top down. If you accept that basic heuristic as your guidepost for making economic policy, you cannot go far wrong.

And so there are some very obvious things. None of this is revelatory or that different. You have to have labor standards that ensure that workers get a fair slice of the value created by enterprise, and so that means labor standards like the minimum wage, which, in my opinion, in the United States, should be in the range of $30 an hour today, certainly for the largest companies. If it were me, I would impose them progressively. The biggest companies would pay $30, the medium companies would pay $20-25, and the smaller companies maybe $15-20. One of the reasons for that is I want to tilt the playing field towards small and medium-sized businesses to deconcentrate industries. We would want the overtime threshold to reach its former high watermark. Let me just say that a $30 minimum wage is about what it was in the '60s.

Robinson

Just to be clear, you're not talking crazy here.

Hanauer

No, I'm not talking crazy. I'm just talking about what it would be if we had just not squished it down. Same for the overtime threshold. If it was about $90,000 a year, it'd be at the same kind of level that it once was, and that's an enormously important protection. If employers have to pay time and a half for more than 40 hours of work for workers that earn less than $90,000 a year, you would create millions and millions of new jobs, because what people like me have done over the course of the last decades is turn millions of 40-hour-a-week jobs into three 40-hour-a-week jobs and into two 60-hour-a-week jobs by printing up business cards and giving people some sort of fake promotion.

Of course, we should reform our tax system so that rich people actually pay taxes. That's a pretty straightforward, obvious thing that needs to happen. I think we should have much more robust antitrust work. Another one of the terrible things that's happened to our economy over the last decades is the enormous concentration of power in industries, and concentrated industries are bad because they lower wages because workers have fewer options. They increase prices because consumers have fewer options, and they lower consumer choice and innovation because there are fewer enterprises competing for consumers. A variety of things like that would transform the economy. Here's the good news, Nathan: these are not revolutionary ideas. We are not talking about turning the entire economy into something different from what it once was. We are talking about relatively minor adjustments in how we operate this market economy that would make it work so much better for everybody. This is not that complicated.

And there are many, many other things that we could discuss. But I just want to emphasize that we are not that far away from an economy that really benefits pretty much everybody. That grows faster than it does now. That benefits a broader group of people. That has more innovation in it. That just generally works better. We can address climate change. We can have a functioning democracy. That we don't have to have a revolution to get those things; we just have to manage it better.

Beinhocker

And just to emphasize a lesson from history, as Nick noted, none of these policies individually are necessarily radical or new. But when you put them all together and point them in the same direction, you get a major shift. So the New Deal, which restructured the US economy, if you look individually at all those policies, none of them were particularly new. Many of them had been proposed before, but when the economic thinking changed, prompted by a crisis, and they were enacted together, they changed the trajectory of the economy.

And so we're arguing we need something of that scale again. The good news is, we do think if we do that, we can repair this broken social contract we talked about at the beginning of the conversation, and that would certainly help heal our politics as well.

Hanauer

A functioning democracy depends on social cohesion. It depends on people believing in the democracy. But in the United States, families have been waking up every day for 50 years, no matter who was in power, to a circumstance where they were worse off, while a few people at the very top were better off.

Well, if you experience that over 50 years, who the hell needs a democracy? So neoliberalism is incompatible with a functioning democracy, and that's why we think that market humanism needs to be taken very, very seriously.

Robinson

Nick, I mentioned early in the program that you were known for warning about the pitchforks. I couldn't help but think of your warning when the CEO of UnitedHealth was assassinated. Pitchforks is a comic image, but that was a real thing that happened. People cheered when that happened and were satisfied because they had seen a healthcare system that wasn't making them well, in which all of their money every month was going to the profits of the health insurance industry.

Hanauer

That's right.

Robinson

Over time, you can see how that leads to the breakdown in trust and an increase in violence. And what I wanted to emphasize here is it's not just that something like Medicare for All is good because it makes people well and makes healthcare more affordable, but we are at a political moment where around the world authoritarian fascists are on the rise, and when you have, I mentioned earlier, the pointing at villains—when you have people who are angry for good reason and who are waiting for answers—it creates that kind of opening for a very dangerous kind of politics. So it's not just that all this stuff is really nice and it makes us better off, it increases GDP, and it builds the middle class. It's that if you don't have an economy that takes care of people, you could be heading for a very dark place politically.

Hanauer

That's right. That is so true.

 

Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth.