Japan: Playing by Different Rules

SOMETHING IS peculiar about the way we discuss “trade wars.” When America and Japan really were at war, each country was trying to blow the other up. Now the threat from Japan is— what? That its companies will devise more appealing products than our companies can, and will then offer them to us at a lower price. Where’s the aggression or hostile intent? What makes this anything like Pearl Harbor?

Economists, of course, have comebacks to such questions. Maybe the Japanese are offering cut-rate goods today purely in hopes of squeezing out the competition and collecting big monopoly profits later on. Maybe we’ll be forced into a kind of peonage if Japan comes to control all the high-grade, sophisticated manufacturing and we’re left to sell soybeans and rent out our big-league ballplayers for service with the Hiroshima Carp.

Still, according to all the basic logic of our economic system, we shouldn’t worry about trade wars, any more than we worry about being offered a gift. If another country will sell us goods for less than it costs us to make them, why should we complain? It doesn’t really matter whether the supplying country is more efficient or is merely willing to “dump,” selling the goods at a loss. In either case, foreign trade leaves us with the steel girders or the color TVs we might have made ourselves, plus the cash we’ve saved by buying for less. If the Japanese want to exploit themselves and sell below their true cost, that’s their problem — all they’re doing is raising our standard of living at the expense of theirs. If the Koreans are willing to work for low wages, we should be happy to buy their shoes for $8 instead of $48 and use the $40 for something else. The extra wealth for America—the $40 we get besides the pair of shoes—will presumably give us leeway to invest in newer, more productive industries, or simply to make up the lost incomes of people who used to produce shoes.

So goes the theory of free trade, as I learned it in my economics courses and as it’s explained in America whenever someone wants to prove that protectionism is bad. I was steeped in the theory when I arrived in Japan, early last year. I still think it’s the right answer to most of what’s wrong with the world’s economy. But I no longer think that it tells us much about dealing with Japan.

It’s hard to make the objections to free trade with Japan sound as neat and elegant as the original theory itself. The objections center on this point: free trade assumes certain things about human behavior that may not be correct when applied to the Japanese. This is not because the Japanese are a separate species, as they sometimes contend, but because their society’s definition of the good life is different from Adam Smith’s.

The Adam Smith, free-trade view of life rests on three pillars:

1. Economic problems arc always solved by more trade, not less. When goods flow from low-cost production sites to markets in higher-cost areas, everyone is better off. The more smoothly they flow, the greater the all-around benefit, since each part of the world is doing what it can do best.

2. The desirability of more trade rests, in turn, on the assumption that the world is full of “economic men,” who go through life making rational cost-benefit decisions. Their appetites and preferences may differ—if wages go up, some people will work more, because the payoff is greater, and others will work less, because they can earn what they need in a shorter time. But everyone will respond to market signals to get the best deal for himself. As a result, everyone will naturally act in a way that promotes international trade. Everyone wants a bargain; the best bargains are by definition available from the world’s lowest-cost producers; freer trade will select the most efficient producers and make more goods available at a lower overall cost.

3. This picture of economic man, in its turn, rests on an even deeper assumption about what life, or at least the commercial part of it, is for. Efficient production is good because it leads to lower prices, and lower prices are good because they let people have “more”: more food, more clothes, more leisure, more variety, more of everything money can buy. And in providing more, the capitalist free-trade system offers its only justification for itself. Competitive capitalism is crueler than other economic systems—the bankruptcies, the unemployment. But in return it offers people more material wealth and a higher standard of living than any other system has done. For at least the past century America and most other developed nations have willingly accepted this bargain. No pain, no gain. By the logic of the market, competition is always good, because it offers people more, and a free world trading system is best, because it offers people most.

As long as all the participants are after the same thing—“more”—then the world trading system should work fine. Markets will clear. Like magnetism, sexual attraction, and other powerful interactions, free trade starts with two parties that have symmetrical goals and motivations, and it takes them toward a predictable result.

But suppose one participant doesn’t have the same goals as the others. Then the results won’t be what was expected—in an electromagnet, at a freshman mixer, or in the world trading system. Suppose, to stick to economics, that one country isn’t really interested in buying products from anywhere else, because it is not powerfully motivated by lower prices, because having more is not its principal goal. Then free trade’s solution to all problems—everyone should buy more from everyone else—won’t necessarily make sense.

THIS, I’VE COME to think, is the basic story of Japan and the United States—really, of Japan and the rest of the world. Japan is not mainly interested in a higher standard of living for its people; America is. Given those different starting points, free trade will almost inevitably lead to chronic trade surpluses for Japan, chronic deficits for the United States. That outcome is not necessarily bad in itself, but it forces us to make a choice that few politicians have yet offered to us. Which really bothers us more: the chronic “failures” in trade with Japan, or the violence we’d have to do to free trade to correct them?

Let me clarify what I’m not trying to say. To argue that Japan tends toward surplus does not mean that its industries, managers, and workers are the “best” in the world. Some of them may be; even so, free-trade theory assumes that trade accounts would still balance out. If Japan really were better at manufacturing than any other country, its exports would keep rising and so (because of supply-demand forces on the currency exchange) would the value of the yen. Goods from the rest of the world would become cheaper; its people, wanting “more,” would recognize and seize these bargains. Equilibrium would be restored. This is essentially what happened to America in the generation after the Second World War. Our industries were world-beaters; our dollars grew strong, and we spent those dollars—and spent and spent. But the chronic trade imbalance reflects something more than Japanese manufacturing skill.

I also don’t mean to say that the United States bears no responsibility for its trade and budget deficits. We’re more responsible for the size of the deficits than anyone else is. The U.S. trade deficit was about $150 billion last year, or more than five times larger than the normal rate in the late 1970s. It could never have gotten so large so fast if the federal budget deficit had not been booming at the same time. (To summarize a long but now standard explanation: Japan and Germany had to run big trade surpluses with the United States in the 1980s, to earn the dollars they then lent us to cover our budget deficit.) Moreover, eliminating all identifiable trade barriers in Japan would, in the short run, eliminate only part of the U.S.-Japan trade deficit, since so many “imports” are really Japanese-made components for American products and subcontracts for American firms.

Finally, I would never deny that American business, American culture, American habits—let’s face it, Americans—are to blame for many of our export failings. Our children don’t learn enough about math or science, our smartest people end up planning hostile corporate takeovers or designing attack submarines, we don’t naturally think of export markets, but our managers and unions do naturally think of getting all they can out of a company in the shortest possible time. Lee Iacocca tried to make himself the symbol of America’s industrial rebirth, but by paying himself $20 million in a year when Chrysler’s earnings declined, he has become as grim a symbol as Ivan Boesky of what the Japanese think is killing us.

This cultural-doom analysis is very familiar, and it can be overdone. Do U.S. companies think of the U.S. market first? That may say less about our parochialism than about the size of our market—a lot of Taiwanese companies think of America first too. Still, the charge that we’ve become culturally unfit is true enough to make us re-examine our schools, our management ethics, and ultimately our values. Unless we start correcting our own failings, we’re in no position to hector the Japanese.

But even if America solved its cultural problems, even if our students joyfully tackled extra homework and employees strove always to enhance the honor of the firm, I suspect that Japan would still be involved in trade wars against us and others. The deficits would be smaller, but the tensions would still be there. The reason is that the free-trade solution—everyone buying more from everyone else—runs counter to a deeper value in Japanese life: the non-capitalist desire to preserve every Japanese person’s place in the Japanese productive system. In the United States and in most of the world that Adam Smith described, people suffer indignities as producers— through layoffs, job changes, shifts into new businesses—in order to improve the welfare of the society’s consumers. In Japan it’s the other way around. The Japanese consumer’s interest comes last—and therefore so does the motivation for buying from overseas.

Of course, the Japanese market is not as self-contained as Albania’s, or as obviously tariff-bound as Taiwan’s or South Korea’s. One of the first things American visitors to Japan see, as they stumble bleary-eyed through Narita Airport, is the sign on every luggage cart reading IMPORT NOW!, conveniently in English. American brand names—McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, (Tokyo) Disneyland—are ubiquitous in Japan. Kenichi Ohmae, the author of Beyond National Borders, and the managing director of McKinsey & Company in Japan, has pointed out time and again that American-owned companies sell about as much to Japan as Japanese-owned companies do to the United States. (The difference, of course, is that most of the “American” products are made in Japan, in Japanese-American joint ventures, thereby protecting the Japanese producer’s interests.) Japanese trade officials have a standard anyone-can-succeed-inJapan presentation for foreign visitors, usually starring Mister Donut, Schick razors, and BMW cars. Its moral is, you can sell as long as you make a truly highquality product (strike one against America) and strive earnestly to meet local tastes (strikes two and three, we’re out).

Technically, the trade officials are right. With enough work, almost anything could be sold in Japan, even American rice or Korean cars. The difference is the natural tendency of the system. The United States, putting the consumer’s interest first, naturally buys up whatever offers the best value, unless some lobby or cartel stands in the way. Japan, putting the (Japanese) producer’s interest first, naturally resists importing anything but raw materials. Selling to America is like rolling a ball downhill. Selling to Japan is like fighting against guerrillas, or bailing against a siphon, or betting against the house. You can win, but the odds are not on your side.

None of the illustrations of this point is conclusive in itself, but together they suggest a deviation from the logic of capitalism and free trade. Capitalist societies are supposed to respond to price, so as to get “more.” Japan does not.

Food is the classic illustration. Japan imports about half its calories, but if it cared mainly about price, it would import much more food. By refusing to import rice and blocking many other imports, Japan protects its farmers (and avoids antagonizing the gangsters in the beef industry) but penalizes every consumer in the country, through grotesquely inflated prices for food and land. Food may seem an exceptional case: it’s an emotional issue; every major country protects its farmers to some degree; most Japanese still have a sentimental tie to the soil. What makes it so intriguing is that there’s almost no complaint from the victims of the policy. Last spring a coalition of Japanese consumer groups protested food policy— but what concerned them was the suggestion that Japan should import more cheap food. They recommended that Japan’s superexpensive rice should “never" be exposed to foreign competition.

The retail network is another famous example. A hundred years ago the United States had a retail system much like Japan’s today: fragmented, diverse, family-owned, and inefficient. America doesn’t have many Mom-and-Pop stores anymore (except for immigrant-run groceries), because they’ve been bulldozed under by Sears, Safeway, K-mart, and other large-scale, low-cost operations. The Mom-and-Pops put up a political fight in the 1920s and 1930s and tried to outlaw the chain stores. But, as Thomas McCraw and Patricia O’Brien wrote recently in America versus Japan, they were snubbed by courts, legislatures, and even voters in referenda. Chain stores offered lower prices; therefore they were good. Japan has followed just the opposite course. In the past fifteen years government directives have made it harder to open discount stores, supermarkets, or other low-cost outlets that would improve the consumer’s standard of living but would threaten the tiny greengrocer down the block.

Right-thinking Americans know that monopolies and cartels are bad, because they hurt the consumer. Japan likes cartels and some monopolies, because they strengthen Japanese producers against foreign competition. Japanese steelmakers, in the 1960s and 1970s, and semiconductor makers, in the 1970s and 1980s, have invested more heavily in advanced production equipment than any of them would have dared to on its own. It would be cheaper, in the short term, to keep using the old machines, which is what many American companies have done. The Japanese companies could take this “risk" because of their cartelbased faith that the famous Ministry of International Trade and Industry, MITI, would divide up the work fairly whenever the market went slack.

Japanese taxpayers would save money if they bought military aircraft direct from American producers. Although our own military budget may make this hard to believe, it is cheaper to buy the next F-15 off the production line than to set up a production line of your own. Nonetheless, the F-15s that the Air SelfDefense Force flies are made in Japan, under American license. Japan is scheduled to introduce a new fighter plane late in this decade. Buying an existing American model would be cheaper— that is, would hold down Japanese taxes, would give Japanese consumers “more.” But unless the trade-war pressure from America becomes too intense, Japan seems almost sure to build its own fighter, at up to twice the cost of an imported plane.

One last, humble illustration is soda ash. This is an important chemical used for making glass, other chemicals, and detergents. Japanese soda-ash producers use petroleum-fired boilers that even in the cheap-oil days seemed to be burning money, American-made soda ash is cheaper. The American trade association that has been trying to sell it in Japan claims that it could be offered for significantly less than the made-in-Japan price. For years the association made no headway whatsoever. Then, in 1983, Japan’s Fair Trade Commission found that Japanese companies were colluding to keep the Americans out. American suppliers quickly expanded their share of the market from three to 15 percent, but then got very little more. The yen has gone up, dollar prices have plummeted, but the market share has barely budged. An executive of Asahi Glass, a major purchaser, recently announced that he’d never leave his high-cost Japanese supplier—they’d been friends in school. “This isn’t exactly collusion,” an American diplomat told me. “It’s simply a refusal to act on price.”

Early this year the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, in Paris, offered an intriguing analysis of what the cumulative refusals to act on price meant for Japan. For 1986 as a whole, the average ven-dollar exchange rate was 169 to 1. At that rate Japan’s per capita income was just below America’s, and at the rates prevailing early this year, when the dollar plunged into the 140s, Japan was clearly the “richest” major country in the world. But the OECD went on to adjust incomes in each country for purchasing power and then recalculate the rate. In terms that matter to consumers, the “real" exchange rate was 223 to 1.

This is the single most illuminating statistic to come out of Japan. (Or maybe one of the two most illuminating. The other, which needs to be repeated as often as possible, is that at current market rates Japan’s land all together is “worth" more than America’s, even though the United States is twenty-five times as large.) It is important because of what it says about the repression of consumer interests in Japan. The gap between the official and “real” exchange rates—between something in the 140s to the 160s and 223—is the wealth that Japan has denied its own consumers in order to preserve its market share. To put it another way, the gap means that products from the rest of the world are available to the Japanese at astonishing bargain rates. For 140 yen a Japanese consumer can buy a dollar and use it to buy clothes, food, or machinery that would cost him more than 200 yen to buy at home. If Japan wanted to, it could even buy its way out of its domestic-housing problem. It can’t import land, but by importing more food it could free up precious flatland now used for farming and let the Japanese move out of their “rabbit hutches.”

The world would seem to be Japan’s bargain basement, but Japan is not interested. What makes Japan unusual is not that it sells so much to other countries— West Germany’s exports make up 34 percent of its gross national product, while Japan’s make up 13 percent—but that it buys so little. West Germany imports the equivalent of 30 percent of its GNP, Japan about 10 percent—mainly raw materials it can’t produce for itself. If the yen rises high enough, Japan will finally be priced out of its export surplus. But if it were a society of economic men, it would have begun buying its way out of the surplus long before now.

UNDERSTANDING WHY Japan behaves this way would be a life’s work. One theory, popular among the Japanese, holds that the trade surplus reflects the people’s inborn frugality, moderation, and unsurpassed productive skill. Perhaps it reflects the bias of the political system toward paternalistic decisions, made by small elites sheltered from life as the ordinary consumer knows it. Japan is an impeccably free society but in practice not a very democratic one. The most important political decisions are always made by committees, oligarchies, bureaucracies, party-leadership councils. In an article called “The Japan Problem,” published in Foreign Affairs late last year, the Dutch journalist Karel van Wolferen, who has lived in Japan for twenty-five years, argued that power in Japan was dispersed among a number of semi-autonomous baronies, each of which promoted its own interests and laughed off any attempt to change course. Prime Minister Nakasone, viewing the nation’s predicament as a whole, might understand that Japan needed to start spending more on itself. But, van Wolferen said, all the component parts of the system—the huge industrial companies, the labor unions, MITI, the farmers—were programmed to build market share, cut profit when necessary, resist foreign penetration, and export, export, export. Early last year the Japanese govern ment rolled the drums for the Maekawa report, an ambitious proposal to increase imports, improve living standards, shorten the work week to five days, and generally make Japan a nation of economic men. By the end of the year, according to a survey conducted by the Ministry of Labor, the number of firms with a five-day week appeared to have gone down. (On the other hand, in the wake of the Maekawa report the average Japanese worker was skipping out of the office at day’s end a minute and fifteen seconds earlier.) The rest of the world may think Japan is rich, but its people seem to regard the endaka— “strong-yen”—crisis as the occasion for yet another round of belt-tightening. From September of 1985 to December of 1986 the yen’s value against the dollar rose by almost 52 percent. But Toyota, Nissan, and Honda were so determined to hold on to market share that they swallowed most of the currency change and raised their dollar prices by only 15 percent.

There are other theories. For example, maybe the Japanese, with their rapidly aging population, are trying to sock their profits away in American investments even though it means short-term sacrifice. Someday they’ll have to start importing, but before then they can build a big endowment of overseas investments that will help pay their big, looming pension bill. Or maybe the Japanese truly reject the “creative destruction” theory of capitalism, since they mourn the destructive part (lost jobs and markets) much more than they welcome the creativity (higher standard of living). In the two years of endaka the Japanese press has harped endlessly on the misery of “small and medium size enterprises,” which are being squeezed out of their traditional export markets. Last summer I visited a few of these companies, including a knife factory in Seki. In a tinroofed, junk-filled shed in the mountains I saw Japanese retirees grinding butcher knives by hand on antique grind wheels. An old man and an old woman were hand-gluing the red plastic sides onto “Swiss” army knives. The plant manager, his eyes practically brimming with tears, was sure I’d share his sorrow about his tragic loss of market share. And yes, it was too bad for him. But by any normal standard this factory should have moved out of Japan fifteen years ago, to Taiwan or India. Much more impressive installations in the United States have been destroyed by Japanese competition. The parallel does not seem to have occurred to anyone in Japan.

Preserving the existing order—continuing to buy soda ash from your school chum—seems more important to Japan than anything else. The two kinds of foreign purchases that have boomed in Japan—tourism, and investment in foreign real estate—are different from other imports in that they pose no competition to anyone in Japan. The Nihon Keizai Shimbun, a distinguished paper comparable to The Wall Street Journal, ran an editorial last spring about low consumption levels, and pointed out that letting in more foreign labor would lower the cost of many services. But such a change would be too disruptive, the paper concluded. “Perhaps the high cost of living is the price we pay for social peace and harmony.” When they tire of lending money to Americans, or buying real estate, or going on tours, the Japanese have very little to do with their money since they’re so reluctant to import. Shares of stock are one thing they can buy, and prices on the Japanese stock market have been speculated up to stupendous levels. Nippon Telephone traded early this year with a price-toearnings ratio of 250, and the Tokyo Stock Exchange as a whole had a P/E ratio of 56, about three times higher than that of the New York Stock Exchange. Memberships in Japanese golf clubs are traded on an official exchange; a place in the most prestigious club recently went for 400 million yen, or about $2.7 million. A headline in The Wall Street Journal early this year said, “JAPAN: SO MUCH YEN, SO LITTLE ELSE.”

No one can say that it’s “wrong” for Japan to be a mercantilist society, piling up its trade profits rather than spending them. No one can say whether Japan will always behave the way it does now. Its biggest companies are rushing to set up factories overseas; unemployment is rising; profits are plunging; the strong yen is having its effect. (If Japan had been more consumer-oriented and willing to “act on price,” a gentler shift in exchange rates might have increased domestic spending.) Just before the economic summit in Venice, Japan announced a $4U billion public-works program to boost consumption. It’s conceivable that ten years from now warnings about Japan’s chronic surplus will look as premature as warnings about the “petrodollar" glut do now. But unless endaka or kokusaika (“internationalization”) changes Japan’s basic nature, “free trade" will almost certainly mean something like what it’s meant for the past few years: big surpluses for Japan, big deficits everywhere else, a big flow of profits out from Japan to buy companies, buildings, Treasury bonds (but not manufactured products), overseas. That near certainty gives us our choice: do we want to end the deficits or do we want to honor free trade? We can’t do both.

LIFE AS CHRONIC debtors (which is to say, as free-traders) might not be so bad. It would accomplish de facto what we could never manage officially: the merger of Japan and the United States. Our two economies are complementary (they make and save, we borrow and buy) and so are our natural resources, human talents, and even our foreign policies. The more deeply the Japanese become enmeshed in our society—owning much of the debt, the real estate, the market share—the more of a stake they will have in its well-being. Everyone in the United States feels bad about foreigners “taking over” American buildings and companies, but is anyone really hurt? When Japanese investors re-open old American factories, they bring new technology and create new jobs. When they buy real estate, they pay money to the (usually American) owners. Japanese investment has helped push the American stock market to its speculative highs, and has buoyed the real-estate market in New York, Honolulu, Washington, and Los Angeles. Some Americans resent the rising prices, but others enjoy the profits.

Permanent debtor status could also have its drawbacks. America would have less independence of action, since it would have to keep foreign investors calm and confident. Putting the United States on a leash might be better for the world, but we would never choose this course ourselves. As our interest burden mounts, we’ll have to slide down to a lower standard of living, consuming less and repaying more. (The Japanese are already underconsuming, of course, but they have never done otherwise.) And sometimes debt gets out of control, leading to inflation, panic, collapse.

If consumer welfare remains our goal, the United States would do best to stick to the free-trade route, despite the “deindustrialization” and debt. Restricting trade always means higher prices. We can resolve to work harder, teach our children more math, become more “competitive,”all the while recognizing that Japan will never love our exports as much as we do theirs. But if we decide that continued debt is too dangerous, we’ll have to go beyond “competitiveness.” We’ll need to change the rules.

This does not mean making Lee Iacocca speeches about the perfidious Japanese. They’re simply doing what comes naturally to them. American politicans have been quoted in Japan as warning that trade sanctions would be the “equivalent of the A-bomb” or “realiy winning the war.” The Japanese are too smart to let themselves be caught saying that a new car or computer chip of theirs will be the “equivalent of the Bataan Death March.” In an editorial last spring The New York Times urged America to “badger them relentlessly for more access to their markets. . . . ” What’s the point of badgering them at all? Threats not backed up by action annoy the Japanese, make America look weak and nervous, and leave the bothersome trade patterns unchanged.

Instead of yelling and badgering, we should decide precisely what bothers us about the trade balance and then act calmly, without noise or threats, to change the rules where we think we must. Are wc mainly worried about the overall trade balance? The Gephardt amendment, which would require sanctions against nations with chronic export surpluses, enjoys almost no respectable support, but it would force Japan to moderate its mercantilist behavior. Do we think there’s too much foreign investment? We can limit it, as Japan has. Japan makes it hard for foreign companies to move in and set up wholly owned subsidiaries. Foreign investment in the United States would seem to help us, by bringing new technology and jobs. But if we feel that it’s a threat, let’s not yell at the Japanese; let’s imitate them, with a change of investment rules.

Do we worry that Matsushita and Nissan will keep all the high-grade manufacturing work back in Osaka and Zama, leaving American workers to bolt parts together from a kit? The rising yen will put pressure on the Japanese to shift whole operations overseas; but if we’re concerned, let’s pass local-content laws.

Do we seethe about all the areas where American firms are competitive but are being frozen out of Japan? Let’s not give speeches urging a more open attitude: when Japanese society does open up, it will be for its own reasons. Let’s simply deny it markets reciprocally. For years American shipping firms complained about Japanese rules on “high cube containers”—the large metal boxes that are hauled across the country as truck trailers, loaded on ships, and unloaded in another port. Japan claimed that American containers were too big and dangerous; they had to be unloaded and their contents repacked in Japanese containers on arrival. The speeches and complaints went on; the Japanese stuck to their guns. But last year the U.S. Federal Maritime Commission started investigating the effect of Japanese restrictions, with a thinly veiled threat to restrict Japanese shipments to the United States in retaliation. Japan modified its rules, but after American shippers said the changes made no practical difference, the commission pursued its investigation. Recently the Japanese issued further-relaxed guidelines.

Stated that way, the story may seem to have a bully-boy moral, which is not my point. It’s juvenile and dangerous to think that if we just get tough with the Japanese (or Russians), we can make them back down. The point is that in this case, without speeches, our government changed the rules; without rancor, the Japanese adapted. The more typical pattern is for our politicians to yell at the Japanese, without changing the rules. We’ve yelled because we’re uneasy about the deficits, but we haven’t done anything, because it would hurt us as consumers and impinge on free trade.

Let’s be clear about it: changing the trade imbalance will hurt us as consumers, because consumers’ interests always suffer from any restriction on trade. Nonetheless, even the United States, consumer heaven, has restricted trade when free trade threatened other values. Child labor would make household help affordable again; totally unlimited immigration would probably take three dollars off the bill for a standard restaurant meal. Product-safety laws make everything cost more. Yet in all these cases our laws recognize that not even Americans live by the “standard of living” alone.

We may feel the same way about trade: that stable communities, predictable jobs, freedom from foreign interference, matter more than the best value for our money. If so, we can change the laws, mandating a different trade balance—and a lower standard of living. The Japanese have made a choice for their society, and we should make one for ours. That’s better than thinking that we can talk the Japanese into behaving more like us, or relying on “free trade” to reach equilibrium again.

—James Fallows