Economics Needs More Women

that's the headline on this Wesleying post by econ major Kerry Nix '16 (and in the post there is a link to a longer report that is well worth reading).

First of all: yes.

Overall, as the report notes, about 25-30-ish percent of Economics students at Wesleyan are female; this is pretty consistent with national averages.  So, its not just us, but that doesn't mean that we can't do some things locally.

My colleagues are an extraordinarily conscientious group of people and I have no doubt that this will get careful consideration.  In the meantime, however, here are a few scattered thoughts on some of the issues raised:

There is quite a bit of concern about whether the atmosphere in classrooms with a relatively large number of students and a lopsided gender ratio is particularly off-putting to women.  I think this is plausible, though this is one of several concerns where it might be helpful to have some survey research to back up (or not!) our anecdotal impressions. 

Many of our classes rely primarily on lecture-based pedagogy; there are some suggestions in the report that other approaches - e.g., in-class problem-solving or inverted classrooms - might be more appealing to female students.

In this regard, at present, I think the situation at Wesleyan is that we're very constrained by class size: our enrollments (and majors) per FTE are among the highest in the university.  While the size of the department has increased slightly, it hasn't remotely kept up with the growth in enrollments.  What that means is that our sections of Econ 110 (our intro class for majors) typically have 40-50 students; sections of the lower-level electives and the core intermediate sequence for majors have enrollment caps of 35 (and are very often at or near this cap); it is only the upper-level electives that could be considered "small," and even these have 25 students per class.  While these numbers don't seem high in the universe of American higher education overall, this is in the context of an institution where 72% of class sections have an enrollment of 19 or fewer and where many of the incoming students have chosen a liberal arts college with the expectation of small classes.

In a large class, it will be inherently less comfortable for most to participate and ask questions and the report suggests this might disproportionately affect female students (though I think it's a concern for everyone).  As instructors, it also limits our pedagogy, and the preponderance of lecturing in economics is partly a reflection of our class sizes.  I have been able to integrate some in-class problem solving in Econ 270 (a lower-level international economics elective) and Econ 110.  In Econ 302 (the core macroeconomics course), I experimented with an inverted classroom in the fall; I think it went quite well, but I happened to have a section with a smaller enrollment - I doubt it will be as successful when (if) I have a more typical enrollment of 35.

Another issue raised is the mathematical intensity of our curriculum and how this might interact with lower levels of mathematical confidence in female students.  As a factual matter, I don't think a confidence differential is warranted; there's no lack of math ability in the women coming into our classes - this is true both relative to men and in an absolute sense.  However, I suppose stereotypes that mathematical stuff is "hard" and "softer" topics are better suited to women are deeply embedded in the broader culture - hopefully fading over time, but not quickly enough.  Overall, I believe the mathematical rigor of our program is a strong suit - Wesleyan is very unusual in utilizing calculus from the outset (Econ 110).  One of the most valuable things that students take away from studying economics is the habits of mind - i.e., a particular type of critical thinking - that come from the discipline imposed by thinking in terms of models, expressed and manipulated in mathematical language.  Moreover, economics as it is practiced is a very mathematical discipline - while some may not like this (and I was a very math-averse economics undergraduate myself at one point) - I think our introductory class more honestly represents what studying economics involves than the more typical style of university "principles" courses which try to minimize using math.

Relatedly, the report discusses concerns about relevance -

Caroline finds disconnectedness between Econ and the real world, saying “it does seem like just learning how to crunch numbers right now, but I think learning...what sort of policy differences you could make if you learned about Econ, and I think that would encourage more people to take Econ.”

I'm not sure this is gender-specific; as an instructor, I need to guide my students through the theory - this is, for most, the hardest part, and where they most need the help of a professor (one of the reasons I majored in economics was that I perceived I needed this as a student).  We're time-constrained in class, but I've tried to use reading assignments to enhance students' sense of how the theory applies.  Over the course of the curriculum, the students learn about how we test theory against data and develop an understanding of how we choose which models (and therefore what simplifications) are appropriate under alternative circumstances.  But this all rests on groundwork we build in the introductory class and I think it is worth thinking about whether there might be changes we could make in its structure that could address some of these concerns.

The report also mentions grades, citing Claudia Goldin's research that women are more likely then men to be put off further study by low grades in introductory classes (summarized in this Washington Post column by Catherine Rampell, which I discussed in an recent post).  Economics does have one of the lowest grade point averages at Wesleyan - our grades are inflated, but less so than those in most other departments.  I think this is a serious issue - this effort at Wellesley to impose common grading standards demonstrated how much grading differentials across departments distort students' choices.  To the extent that women's choices are more affected then men's, grade inflation is a gender equity issue.  However, I think the culprit is not the economics department, but others where the grade inflation has gotten out of control (which I think is an unsurprising symptom of the reliance on student evaluations in promotion and tenure).

Another issue raised by the report is whether men are more likely to be attracted to economics because they believe it suits their vocational goals.  The misperception that an economics major is a proxy for studying business or finance runs deep.  I should write more about this sometime; for now, I'll simply say that this reflects a fundamentally incorrect view of what economics is about.  To the extent that this is disproportionately bringing more male students into economics, they're coming for the wrong reasons and the implication would be that "economics needs fewer men."

There's quite a bit more in the report that is worth thinking about.  Some of the issues are fundamentally about student culture - Wesleyan students seem to mostly be pretty good at maintaining their culture and supporting each other, so I am optimistic that the students can make progress, as well as the faculty.

Minimum Wages and Economics

Tim Harford writes on the minimum wage:

The UK minimum wage took effect 16 years ago this week, on April 1 1999. As with the Equal Pay Act, economically literate commentators feared trouble, and for much the same reason: the minimum wage would destroy jobs and harm those it was intended to help. We would face the tragic situation of employers who would only wish to hire at a low wage, workers who would rather have poorly paid work than no work at all, and the government outlawing the whole affair.

And yet, the minimum wage does not seem to have destroyed many jobs — or at least, not in a way that can be discerned by slicing up the aggregate data. (One exception: there is some evidence that in care homes, where large numbers of people are paid the minimum wage, employment has been dented.)

The general trend seems a puzzling suspension of the law of supply and demand. One explanation of the puzzle is that higher wages may attract more committed workers, with higher morale, better attendance and lower turnover. On this view, the minimum wage pushed employers into doing something they might have been wise to do anyway. To the extent that it imposed net costs on employers, they were small enough to make little difference to their appetite for hiring.

An alternative response is that the data are noisy and don’t tell us much, so we should stick to basic economic reasoning. But do we give the data a fair hearing?

At its best, economics is a fruitful dialogue between theory and empirical (data) work.  All economic models are, by nature, simplifications.  One of the judgments we have to make is whether some of the simplifcations we've made are inappropriate.  Testing our models against the data helps us do that.

The first tool an economist will reach for in trying to analyze a market is supply and demand; in that context, a minimum wage is a price floor, which creates an excess supply of labor (i.e., unemployment):

(the equilibrium wage and quantity of labor are labelled with superscript e's, and the m's mark the minimum wage and corresponding amount of labor).

We like supply and demand because it is simple and works well in many context; but the labor market is one case where its simplicity can lead us astray.  As Paul Krugman recently put it:

[B]ecause workers are people, wages are not, in fact, like the price of butter, and how much workers are paid depends as much on social forces and political power as it does on simple supply and demand.

Indeed, some empirical research has demonstrated that minimum wages do not have the effects implied by the supply and demand framework.  This NYT Magazine piece by Annie Lowrey summarized David Card and Alan Krueger's classic paper on the subject and some of the subsequent dispute.

Economic News on TV

A nice bit of parody, "Every TV News Report on the Economy in One"

STEM versus Liberal Education?

In a Washington Post column headlined "Why America's Obsession with STEM Education is Dangerous," Fareed Zakaria writes:

This dismissal of broad-based learning, however, comes from a fundamental misreading of the facts — and puts America on a dangerously narrow path for the future. The United States has led the world in economic dynamism, innovation and entrepreneurship thanks to exactly the kind of teaching we are now told to defenestrate. A broad general education helps foster critical thinking and creativity. Exposure to a variety of fields produces synergy and cross fertilization. Yes, science and technology are crucial components of this education, but so are English and philosophy. When unveiling a new edition of the iPad, Steve Jobs explained that “it’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough — that it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing.” 

There is much to agree with in the case he makes for liberal education, but the way he (and the Post's headline writers) frame it is problematic.  We don't face a tension between science, engineering and mathematics and liberal education; science and mathematics are part of liberal education, and engineering should be too.

Zakaria is right that liberal education is concerned with "critical thinking and creativity."  To be effectual, these require a set of intellectual tools to understand the world around us.  Liberal education as it is practiced does fairly well through the humanities and social sciences of expanding students' capacities to think about the human and social world.  But the social world is shaped by the physical and biological, the mechanical and computational.  And here I worry we aren't doing such a good job - we seem too ready to declare that we're not "math people" (and, it mostly follows from this, not science or engineering people).  Doing so early in a child's academic life means that they will later find many areas closed off to them.  At the college level, we accommodate this with science for non-scientist courses - every college has its "physics for poets" and "rocks for jocks."   Some of them are likely fantastic classes, but there is a worrying asymmetry - we don't seem to feel a need to offer "poetry for physicists" or "social theory for biologists".  To some extent, this reflects what we're given - too many of our incoming students have already "tracked" away from serious studies in math and science (or turned off to them).  But it raises a question of the seriousness of our commitment to science and math as a real part of liberal education.

The importance of science and math in liberal education is not just in knowing "stuff," or "how stuff works" - though I think knowing stuff, and how it works, is often underrated - but in learning other modes of thought which can extend our mental capacities and give us another perspective.

While Zakaria picked up on our current STEM-mania (much of which is misguided, even on its own terms), and his column's headline puts science and liberal arts in a false opposition, his real target - a narrow vocationalism - is a valid one.  Economic insecurity and the wage premium for college graduates have helped entrench the belief that a college degree is some sort of golden ticket. This is a far too circumscribed view: a good education should enhance one's working life (regardless of how remunerative) - but it should also enrich our lives as citizens and people.  That is, it should help us, as Keynes put it, to "live wisely, agreeably and well."  We would be better able to do this if we took science and math education a little more seriously.

Update (3/31): At Forbes.com, Union College's Chad Orzel has a nice response - "science is essentially human" - to Zakaria's piece.

Krugman: Not Down With T.P.P.

Naughty Curmudgeony by nature, Paul Krugman - whose Nobel prize is mainly due to his important work in international trade theory - disses the Trans-Pacific Partnership:

I’m thumbs down. I don’t think the proposal is likely to be the terrible, worker-destroying pact some progressives assert, but it doesn’t look like a good thing either for the world or for the United States, and you have to wonder why the Obama administration, in particular, would consider devoting any political capital to getting this through.

As Krugman points out, the importance of trade agreements is often overstated:

[A]lmost everyone exaggerates the importance of trade policy. In part, I believe, this reflects globaloney: talking about international trade sounds glamorous and forward-thinking, so everyone wants to make that the centerpiece of their remarks. (The same thing happens to an even greater extent when international money issues like the dollar’s role as a reserve currency crop up.)

While, as a professor of international economics, I have a vested interest in promoting "globaloney," I think he's right about this.  Although international trade certainly has a substantial impact on the US economy, the effects of these trade agreements are pretty marginal.

Another thing he points out is that, since tariffs are already low, the substance of trade agreements isn't really about trade, per se, but about other (arguably) trade-related issues, such as intellectual property protection.  As a net exporter of intellectual property-intensive goods, the US has a mercantilist interest in strong IP protection, but Krugman has an appropriate economist's skepticism of such arguments:

Well, we should never forget that in a direct sense, protecting intellectual property means creating a monopoly – letting the holders of a patent or copyright charge a price for something (the use of knowledge) that has a zero social marginal cost. In that direct sense this introduces a distortion that makes the world a bit poorer.

Tyler Cowen points out a big non-trade related argument for the TPP that Krugman does not mention:

either this deal happens on American terms, or an alternative deal arises on Chinese terms without our participation.  For rather significant foreign policy reasons we prefer the former, and the pragmatic side of President Obama understands this pretty well. - See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/03/why-paul-krugman-is-wrong-to-oppose-the-trans-pacific-partnership.html#sthash.b5KbTNCP.dpuf

Either this deal happens on American terms or an alternative deal arises on Chinese terms without our participation.  For rather significant foreign policy reasons, we prefer the former and the pragmatic side of President Obama understands this pretty well.

Brad DeLong also responds with a set of counterarguments, including:

Paul Krugman says that the potential net gains from freer trade in services and (secondarily) agriculture as estimated by Petri, Plummer and Zhai of 0.5% of GDP “seem high to him”. Suppose that they are half that. In a Pacific region whose GDP is now approaching $30 trillion/year, that is $75 billion/year. Capitalize that at 4%/year and we get a net addition to world wealth of $3 trillion. That is indeed a very small number relative to the wealth of the world both now and discounted into the future. But that is a rather large number compared to other things the U.S. government might do this year. So why not grab for it?

Of course, we have yet to actually get a deal...

Update (3/12): At the Washington Post, Autor, Dorn and Hanson argue for the TPP.

either this deal happens on American terms, or an alternative deal arises on Chinese terms without our participation.  For rather significant foreign policy reasons we prefer the former, and the pragmatic side of President Obama understands this pretty well. - See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/03/why-paul-krugman-is-wrong-to-oppose-the-trans-pacific-partnership.html#sthash.b5KbTNCP.dpuf

either this deal happens on American terms, or an alternative deal arises on Chinese terms without our participation.  For rather significant foreign policy reasons we prefer the former, and the pragmatic side of President Obama understands this pretty well. - See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/03/why-paul-krugman-is-wrong-to-oppose-the-trans-pacific-partnership.html#sthash.b5KbTNCP.dpuf

Mark Blyth to the Social Democrats

Jacobin magazine has Mark Blyth's thought-provoking speech to the German Social Democrats, in which he encourages them to act like social democrats:

When you ask for the content of what structural reform means, it seems to be a checklist of lower taxes, deregulate everything in sight, privatize anything not nailed down, and hope for the best. But are these policies not disturbingly American, if not Thatcherite? Indeed, isn’t this everything that the SPD is supposed to be against, and much of which the German public would never put up with?

Interesting...

"Structural reform" means lots of different things - some good and some bad - and whether "austerity" is appropriate depends on the circumstance, so I'm wary of blanket statements about either of those concepts, but I think he is broadly correct in the context of what is going on in Europe right now. The existence of the Euro, in conjunction with ECB policy, prevents necessary monetary and exchange rate adjustments that from taking place, and misguided moralism about debt may make a political settlement impossible.  It is this last point which is his target.

Trade-Related (?)

Economic theory provides a number of useful tools for thinking about tariffs, and these tend to frame economists' instincts when it comes to discussions about "free trade agreements."  However, in many cases, tariffs are already quite low (perhaps this is a rare success for economists' powers of persuasion...) and the main ingredients of trade agreements concern other things which are trickier to analyze.

One aspect of contemporary trade agreements that is coming under scrutiny in the discussions over the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) are provisions to protect foreign investors by allowing them to take disputes with governments to arbitration.  This Vox piece by Danielle Kurtzleben is a nice summary of the debate concerning these investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) rules.

Another issue getting considerable attention in the TPP discussions is the fact that trade agreements typically do not deal with currencies.  As the Times reported, many in Congress are pushing for incorporating a provision to deal with "currency manipulation" into the TPP.

This is a tricky issue which cuts across economics' division between international trade - which uses microeconomic theory to analyze long-run equilibria - and open-economy macroeconomics, which is concerned with monetary and balance of payments issues (which are "short-run" but can have meaningfully persistent effects).  At an institutional level, trade policy is usually the purview of trade ministers (e.g., the US Trade Representative), while currency policy falls to central banks and finance ministers (i.e., the Treasury in the US).  Globally, trade has the WTO, while currencies have the IMF (which, unlike the WTO, does not have any enforcement mechanisms).

Simon Johnson and Jared Bernstein have written in favor of inserting a currency clause, while Edwin Truman argues the contrary.  Janet Yellen expressed concern about the potential for trade agreements to encroach on monetary policy, and Jeffrey Frankel noted that some of the loudest concerns about currency manipulation aimed at China (not currently a party to the TPP) are out of date.

Just the Varoufakis, Ma'am

An interesting BBC interview with Yanis Varoufakis, the finance minister of the new Greek government (interview begins at about 3:30):

If the eurozone breaks apart - and it seems we're back to worrying about that yet again - I don't think it will be because the Greeks are being unreasonable (or uncool). 

Varoufakis also spoke with Ambrose Evans-Pritchard:

Mr Varoufakis is braced for an arid meeting on Thursday with his German counterpart and long-time nemesis Wolfgang Schäuble, a man he once accused – borrowing from Tacitus - of reducing Europe to a desert and calling it peace.

“I will try to be as charming as I can in Berlin. I will tell Mr Schäuble that we may be a Left-wing riff-raff but he can count on our Syriza movement to clear away Greece’s cartels and oligarchies, and push through the deep reforms of the Greek state that governments before us refused to do,” he said.

“But I will also tell him that we are going to end the debt-deflation spiral and do what should have been done five years ago. That is not negotiable. We have a democratic mandate to challenge the whole philosophy of austerity,” he said.

In a recent blog post, Paul Krugman clarified how we should think if the conflict between Greece and the EU-ECB-IMF "troika" -

[A]t this point Greek debt, measured as a stock, is not a very meaningful number. After all, the great bulk of the debt is now officially held, the interest rate bears little relationship to market prices, and the interest payments come in part out of funds lent by the creditors. In a sense the debt is an accounting fiction; it’s whatever the governments trying to dictate terms to Greece decide to say it is.

OK, I know it’s not quite that simple — debt as a number has political and psychological importance. But I think it helps clear things up to put all of that aside for a bit and focus on the aspect of the situation that isn’t a matter of definitions: Greece’s primary surplus, the difference between what it takes in via taxes and what it spends on things other than interest. This surplus — which is a flow, not a stock — represents the amount Greece is actually paying, in the form of real resources, to its creditors, as opposed to borrowing funds to pay interest.

Greece has been running a primary surplus since 2013, and according to its agreements with the troika it’s supposed to run a surplus of 4.5 percent of GDP for many years to come. What would it mean to relax that target?

It would not mean demanding that creditors throw good money after bad; everyone has already implicitly acknowledged that the debt will never be fully paid at market rates, but Greece is making a transfer to its creditors by running a primary surplus, and we’re just arguing now about how big that transfer will be.

At Project Syndicate, Joe Stiglitz writes:

So it is not debt restructuring, but its absence, that is “immoral.” There is nothing particularly special about the dilemmas that Greece faces today; many countries have been in the same position. What makes Greece’s problems more difficult to address is the structure of the eurozone: monetary union implies that member states cannot devalue their way out of trouble, yet the modicum of European solidarity that must accompany this loss of policy flexibility simply is not there....

When companies go bankrupt, a debt-equity swap is a fair and efficient solution. The analogous approach for Greece is to convert its current bonds into GDP-linked bonds. If Greece does well, its creditors will receive more of their money; if it does not, they will get less. Both sides would then have a powerful incentive to pursue pro-growth policies.

This short paper by Marcel Fratzscher, Christoph Steffen and Malte Rieth of DIW Berlin lays out how GDP-linked debt might work.

The Greek government's proposals are along the same lines, according to Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's article:

The proposals offer a bond swap to ease the debt burden – 177pc of GDP - without demanding an explicit writedown of Greece’s foreign loans. This allows both sides to save face. The aim is to slash Greece’s primary budget surplus from the troika target of 4.5pc of GDP to around 1.5pc to pay for welfare pledges and boost investment. “This gives us a reasonable buffer. The old target is ludicrous,” Mr Varoufakis said.

Loans from the EU bailout machinery would be replaced by GDP-linked bonds, akin to Keynes’s "Bisque Bonds" in the 1930s. Money owed to the ECB would convert into “perpetual bonds”.

The Times' Eduardo Porter reminds us that economists foresaw that the euro might not work out so well:

The euro had been enshrined in a treaty but not yet come to life in the autumn of 1997, when Martin Feldstein, the influential president of the National Bureau of Economic Research, published an essay arguing that European leaders’ hopes that a monetary union would foster greater harmony and peace in a Continent repeatedly ravaged by wars were misplaced.

It “would be more likely to lead to increased conflicts,” wrote Mr. Feldstein, a former chief economic adviser to President Ronald Reagan.

War within Europe, “would be abhorrent but not impossible,” he added. “The conflicts over economic policies and interference with national sovereignty could reinforce longstanding animosities based on history, nationality and religion.”

The real difficulty is politics, not economics; as Porter writes:

Fixing this is not impossible. The most direct way would be for the creditors in Europe’s north to relax the tight conditions on debtor countries, provide them with debt relief and allow them to spend more to kick-start growth. Alternatively, they might just invest more themselves, which would lead to higher wages and prices at home, encouraging more output in their poorer neighbors.

This path presents some political complications, however. Voters in Germany and other rich northern countries have no appetite for transfering resources to the vulnerable neighbors around Europe’s edge. And, comfortably insulated by their own prosperity and conditioned by memories of hyperinflation after World War I, they still fear higher inflation. Even the direst warnings of impending doom seem unlikely to shift the public mood.

And that sets the political constraint on the other end of the field. “The right policies would defuse the political crisis in the peripheral countries at the expense of intensifying it in Germany,” Mr. De Grauwe said. “It would prevent communists taking over in the south but would fuel the extreme right in the north.”

As we've seen in the US, the right policies to deal with financial crises and depressions do not appeal to most people's moral intuition, and are thus very difficult politically.  If the euro - and the project of European unity - is to be saved, it will take some courage on the part of the leaders in Germany and other "northern" countries.

Update: the embedded video was taken down, but a shorter version is available at the link.

Economics, Grade Inflation, and Gender

The NSF updates us on the share of economics degrees earned by women:

while the share of female PhD is now up to about one-third, the fraction of undergraduate economics majors has slipped back under 30%.

In a Washington Post column last year, Catherine Rampell argued that the obsession with grades can partially account for the relatively low percentage of women majoring in economics as well as in science, engineering and math fields.  The women don't do worse then the men, but apparently they're more likely to avoid areas where grades are, generally, lower.  She writes:

Claudia Goldin, an economics professor at Harvard, has been examining why so few women major in her field. The majority of new college grads are female, yet women receive only 29 percent of bachelor’s degrees in economics each year.

Goldin looked at how grades awarded in an introductory economics class affected the chance that a student would ultimately major in the subject. She found that the likelihood a woman would major in economics dropped steadily as her grade fell: Women who received a B in Econ 101, for example, were about half as likely as women who received A’s to stick with the discipline. The same discouragement gradient didn’t exist for men. Of Econ 101 students, men who received A’s were about equally as likely as men who received B’s to concentrate in the dismal science. 

One of my ongoing, and largely futile, battles as a college professor is to convince my students that their grades don't matter - or at least, they don't matter nearly as much as the students often think they do.  Alas, obsession with grades is pretty deeply entrenched in young people who've been coached for years to compete to get into college.  This may have gotten worse over time with perceived increases in the competitiveness of admissions (the perception isn't fully accurate: declining acceptance rates are partly due to colleges soliciting more applications to make their numbers look better, as well as the growing ease of applying to large numbers of colleges), as well as increasing anxiety about financial outcomes after college.

Not only does the obsession with grades distract us from the real purpose of learning, the apparent difference between how men and women respond to them contributes a gender gap in fields like economics, which appear less prone to grade inflation (this study from Wellesley provides further evidence on how grade inflation distorts students' choices, though it doesn't consider gender differences).  One could make the case that grade inflation is thus an equity issue.

The better news from the NSF's report is the continued increase in the share of women earning PhDs (though the discipline still faces "leaky pipeline" issues).  I'm not too worried that the decrease in the share of women earning US undergraduate economics degrees will impact graduate education, since US graduate programs draw from a global pool (only about 30% of US PhDs go to Americans).  However, I don't think we should be hopeful that a greater share of female professors will bring more women into undergraduate economics: while a "role model" effect sounds plausible, the empirical evidence does not seem to support it.

A Note from Irving Fisher

via twitter:

MT Irving Fisher on the Great Depression. Could be talking about Greece.... pic.twitter.com/cUZbi8UWbq great quote via @Frances_Coppola

— Roger E. A. Farmer (@farmerrf) January 31, 2015

from "The Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions" (Econometrica, 1933). Note: the tweet was cropped a bit when I embedded it, but if you click on it you can see the entire quote.