Related to that I think there are essentially two democratic mechanisms.
The first is a power-sharing agreement among elites, essentially organized against personalistic rule. I think the archetypal example of this is the Roman Senate. The Chinese Politburo is another example, both underminded by a lack of rule of law that allows elites to persecute each other and give rise to a dictatorship. But early American democracy is arguably another, only open to white property owners and the logistical challenges of running a multistate campaign in the colonial era confined candidates further to a small group of urban elites. In the American case, it did not prevent a civil war but it otherwise has served us well. It even lead to the liberalization and enfranchisement which has brought us further away from autocracy.
The second democratic mechanism though is allowing common people to express themselves through nonviolent means. We can think of this in terms of a liberalization of a managed democracy, but we can also think of some single-party states that allow for a democratic mechanism. Iran for example allows democratic elections, but only from a list of candidates approved by the dominant ruling party. Those elections can take on great symbolic power, and become centers for public organizing, even as the actual elected officials have little power to substantially defect from the Supreme Leader. The glasnost in the Soviet Union allowed for regional autonomy that was far more consequential, in some cases breaking into separate democratic countries and in other cases leading to a relapse of autocracy. On the one hand these public campaigns provide an organizing center against the regime, on the other hand they provide a "release valve" for public unrest - allowing for some democratic representation in exchange for undermining the case for political violence.
I can see the conservative case against the second democratic mechanism, but not first. I can see the communist case against the first democratic mechanism, but not the second. Ironic that we should see conservatism defined as a cult of personality around Trump and communism defined as protecting the party from the people.
Easy to say this was a miscalculation in hindsight! But at the time, obviously nobody could be sure how this would play out. Or is Matt saying people back then missed something and could have made a better decision?
I don't agree with the "maybe it's all fine" comment, or the "maybe a totally MAGA-fied America will be okay too." Because by definition I don't think it can. What good is economic growth if we don't have freedom? I realize that people vote based on the economy, which is why I think our only hope is if the economy craters under Trump. We need to suffer so that we never make this mistake again. If he proves that we don't need democracy to have a functioning economy, that's not a win or a survival by any stretch. It's a devastating loss.
“What good is economic growth if we don't have freedom?”
Definitely a very American POV. The Chinese people I know (and many Taiwanese from an older generation) would not ask this question since they remember being hungry….
A couple of factual quibbles with this and its discussion of China:
First, you mention China as having an export lead growth dynamic. Maybe that's their ascent began, but currently, and for a while now, an overwhelming percentage of the things they build are sold within China, not exported.
Now, it's true that China is very very large. So even the small percentage of production they export is far more than any other one country (or even groups of countries) can hope to put on the international market. But factually, China is not sustaining things simply by building to export.
Second, you say dismissively that well-informed China watches have been predicting an economic crisis since 2009. But, like, China has had economic crises! They are still slowly recovering from a massive housing investment crisis.
And they are likely in the midst of another crisis of subsidy lead over-competition with a ton of government backed money propping up a too-large number of increasingly floundering manufacturing companies (at a surface level, very similar to the housing crisis they have/had...for obviously reasons).
Neither of those things derail the point you are making in the article, so file them under nit-picks. But still seemed worth mentioning.
I looked up free covid tests this morning for my sick partner and clicked on the google search popup describing free tests at https://www.covid.gov/tests. That site now redirects to a picture of Donald between the giant words LAB and LEAK.
Please don't frighten the horses by using a chart of Chinese GDP per capita at PPP! GDP includes questionable investment (40% of the economy) and PPP rates just doubles everything again. Maybe try disposable income per person at current x-rates. Then you would see Mexico at about $11,500 and China at $5,700. Rather than both at $22,000.
“If you look around the world today, the richest countries are mostly democracies. What’s more, the exceptions tend to be quite small and (except for Singapore) heavily reliant on natural resource exports. Large, complex modern economies tend to be democratic.”
I would like to make the point that Singapore is—in fact—a flawed democracy, and its authoritarianism is probably overstated. It’s not an exception to the rule at all.
I think a more interesting question is whether or not—in a post oil world—Qatar and the UAE can remain prosperous by being Singapore, but actually undemocratic. That would, I suppose, prove that institutions are what matters for prosperity but electoral democracy is not necessarily one of those institutions.
Singapore is a weird "authoritarian" state that imposes "tolerance" on its diverse population because it believes that its own population is not capable of liberal self-governance and will descend into ethno-religious pogroms if free speech is allowed to let rip.
This is true, but it is—in fact—an illiberal democracy and I don’t really see any evidence that a majority of the population wouldn’t choose a PAP government.
I am not an expert on Singapore and it would seem given the level of economic development they have, that the illiberalism to ensure ethnic harmony is not needed but after seeing what happened in the USA, the most advanced country in the world, with much less ethnic diversity than Singapore, my trust in humanity is quite low.
I agree, and I think PAP is irrationally afraid of not being reelected. Setting aside the moral imperative, they can “afford” to be liberal and still win—because their economic record speaks for itself.
The saying isn’t, “Don’t kill the messenger,” it’s, “Don’t SHOOT the messenger.” It means that, if you’re upset by a message, you need to execute its bearer up close with a melee weapon, not from afar with a missile weapon.
Matt has written that the unitary executive theory was formed as a reasonable response to the pre-1994 world where Republicans seemed incapable of achieving a trifecta. I am genuinely surprised that Roberts (one among many) hasn't revisited his priors and ended up more of stare decisis hawk to shelter the judicial branch's reputation.
"Very few people understood that the then-new internet could be effectively firewalled and censored, becoming a mechanism for surveillance and social control rather than liberation." Matt is correct about this. For those old enough to remember there was a weird amount of utopian thinking in the 90s around the internet. However, a professor at the University of Toronton, Ron Diebert, knew at the time this was bullshit. U of T has had a long line of forward thinking profs (e.g., Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan). https://youtu.be/EefmUadYERw?si=FP8a_0FeMfMbkYWB
Andrew Potter and Joseph Heath co-wrote a book in the early 2000s that poured cold water on the idea of “the internet as a source of freedom,” and they were writing before social media!
"But it’s hard for me to think about personalistic rule without thinking about Donald Trump."
Imagine the Simpsons-Bus-Driver-Tapping-the-Sign meme here, but instead of The Simpsons bus driver, it's me and I'm tapping the Wikipedia entry for "sultanism": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultanism
This is a very perceptive article. One among many from this great writer. The point about institutions is the starting point for the nonprofit that a group of us are creating. The discussion about the history circa 2000 however is not quite accurate based on my personal observations at the time.
FWIW I'm not updating that strongly on the results of the Blattman paper with respect to the democracy part not mattering that much compared to the patrimonialism/personalism (although it is some update for me.)
Most obviously, it seems plausible that regime type transitions within the time period the authors consider aren't exogenous given gdp lags and country-year fixed effects. For instance when China transitioned under Mao, I think there were plausible counterfactual worlds where growth rates still increased but with a different regime type, because Mao has distinctively bad polices. Leader death is then straightforwardly a confounding variable that can both cause higher growth (because of the end of distinctively bad policies) and regime type transition (which often happens at the death of a leader) which isn't captured by GDP lags or fixed effects.
Conceptually, this is because in dynamic panels you're comparing countries which transitioned regime type later to those which transitioned earlier, and using you're estimate of the compounding effects of the treatment (transition to personal rule say) to try to scrub out the accumulated effects of the treatment on the countries which transitioned earlier. It's really easy to get this wrong either because you have differences treatment effects between countries which vary systematically (e.g the effects are larger near oil shocks) or because you're specification of the compounding of the treatment effects were wrong.
I'm pretty confident that you do get heterogeneous treatment effects (and so are the authors given they use hetroskadisticy robust standard errors,) and this can badly mess up your estimates even if the authors exogeneity assumptions hold.
These critiques also affect the AJR lit it's challenging though. I'm inclined to be more skeptical of the Blattman et al result though. When you just look at the their estimates for the effects of regimes on growth rates graphically (figure 1 in the paper, page 5 of the pdf) the distribution of estimated effect sizes for autocratic regimes look much more similar to each other than institutionalised does to democratic. The estimate of the personalist growth rate is estimated significantly less precisely than the democratic growth rate, and visually it looks like there's a skew in the institutionalised distribution, which you shouldn't get when the central limit theorem applies (which it should.)
At a higher level of abstraction, we should have a markov chain which tells us the transition probabilities between different regime types. Without estimating the markov chain, conceptually what you're doing when you estimate the causal effect of regime type is estimating the expected growth rate while in that regime, not a countries expected growth rate conditional on being a in a given regime. If being in an institutionalised autocracy is causally related to an increased probability of transitioning to a personalist regime relative to democratic regimes, then just comparing the growth rates would lead one to overestimate the expected value of transitioning from a personalist to an institionalised regime relative to transitioning to a democratic regime.
Finally, in what is now a very long comment, generically this is a paper with a positive finding that cuts against received wisdom, and I think one is more likely to see these kinds of papers compared to null results and results which don't cut against received wisdom, even absent publication bias because these sorts of results are more interesting and so more likely to be on blogs and twitter.
"Maybe it’s all fine... maybe a totally MAGA-fied America will be okay too. But I’m awfully uncomfortable banking on it."
AYFKM?
"Maybe it's all fine"?!? It's already very obviously NOT FINE across a variety of metrics!
Yes, yes, I know. Matt Y is talking specifically about *the economy*. Maybe the economy will be fine, so that makes everything else okay?
I keep thinking to the day I did my naturalization ceremony and became a US citizen, how happy and proud I was, how happy my husband was for me, how we went to a local Cracker Barrel for a celebratory stack of pancakes and I told the waitress that this was my first meal as an American citizen and she smiled and congratulated me...
I believed, on that day, that America STOOD FOR SOMETHING! You know, all those old-fashioned ideas about being a country of laws and not men, about being a shining city on a hill, about welcoming immigrants from all nations and weaving them into a beautiful tapestry, about the belief that all men are created equal and have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...
Never did I think that we would debase ourselves to the point of "Meh, we'll just shrug and accept any tyrant who comes along, as long as he panders to our prejudices and keeps the economy humming."
This is a degradation, and IDGAF if saying so makes me elitist.
I think you (and I and unfortunately many others) had a much higher opinion of the American people than was warranted. I was pretty distraught during the GWOT era, particularly after the 2004 elections when it was clear that most Americans did in fact have no problem with torturing Iraqis and bombing their cities back into the stone age, but 8 years of Obama lulled me into the (wrong) belief that we'd progressed beyond such things.
What I think Matt gets wrong is that while China's authoritarian state may or may not be economically a net positive for them, they have a lot of other advantages which we do not. When the Trumpists destroy the twin pillars underlying most of our productive economy - a stable financial system and a research engine powered by immigrants and higher education - we won't have much to fall back on. With a rapidly aging and shrinking labor force, high labor costs, and institutional paralysis, we are not going to transform into a manufacturing powerhouse, or indeed any other powerhouse...
Liberals have to seriously contemplate how to change our mindset into one that resembles that of the people who live in civilizational states like China, India, Turkey etc.
It is of course true as Matt noted that more education and the prosperity it enables leads to greater demands for self-determination in general but in my university interactions I have met PhD educated Chinese and Indian scientists who are bought into civilizational narratives and do not see the Chinese system or the increasingly authoritarian Indian democracy as intrinsically problematic.
Those of us who have great discomfort seeing corruption and authoritarianism may simply be outnumbered and within 20-30 years the only choices left might well be from a menu of slightly different authoritarian style regimes. Even Europe may not be immune for too long and is likely to splinter back into small ethno-states under the pressure of migration from Africa. So liberals will have no where to go.
I don’t want to be a fair-weather liberal who is for liberal values only as long as they are popular, but who goes “welp the Chinese and Indians are totes cool with authoritarian rule, so I guess I should be too.”
Saying that you need to contemplate how to exist in a world where your values are in a distinct minority is not the same as saying you need to be cool with it.
Some people given no choice in the matter will rationalize it (like some Chinese and Indian scientists) and try to be happy, others may choose to agitate and become dissidents. But what will you do when there is no place left where you can be a dissident?
Related to that I think there are essentially two democratic mechanisms.
The first is a power-sharing agreement among elites, essentially organized against personalistic rule. I think the archetypal example of this is the Roman Senate. The Chinese Politburo is another example, both underminded by a lack of rule of law that allows elites to persecute each other and give rise to a dictatorship. But early American democracy is arguably another, only open to white property owners and the logistical challenges of running a multistate campaign in the colonial era confined candidates further to a small group of urban elites. In the American case, it did not prevent a civil war but it otherwise has served us well. It even lead to the liberalization and enfranchisement which has brought us further away from autocracy.
The second democratic mechanism though is allowing common people to express themselves through nonviolent means. We can think of this in terms of a liberalization of a managed democracy, but we can also think of some single-party states that allow for a democratic mechanism. Iran for example allows democratic elections, but only from a list of candidates approved by the dominant ruling party. Those elections can take on great symbolic power, and become centers for public organizing, even as the actual elected officials have little power to substantially defect from the Supreme Leader. The glasnost in the Soviet Union allowed for regional autonomy that was far more consequential, in some cases breaking into separate democratic countries and in other cases leading to a relapse of autocracy. On the one hand these public campaigns provide an organizing center against the regime, on the other hand they provide a "release valve" for public unrest - allowing for some democratic representation in exchange for undermining the case for political violence.
I can see the conservative case against the second democratic mechanism, but not first. I can see the communist case against the first democratic mechanism, but not the second. Ironic that we should see conservatism defined as a cult of personality around Trump and communism defined as protecting the party from the people.
Easy to say this was a miscalculation in hindsight! But at the time, obviously nobody could be sure how this would play out. Or is Matt saying people back then missed something and could have made a better decision?
I don't agree with the "maybe it's all fine" comment, or the "maybe a totally MAGA-fied America will be okay too." Because by definition I don't think it can. What good is economic growth if we don't have freedom? I realize that people vote based on the economy, which is why I think our only hope is if the economy craters under Trump. We need to suffer so that we never make this mistake again. If he proves that we don't need democracy to have a functioning economy, that's not a win or a survival by any stretch. It's a devastating loss.
“What good is economic growth if we don't have freedom?”
Definitely a very American POV. The Chinese people I know (and many Taiwanese from an older generation) would not ask this question since they remember being hungry….
“What good is economic growth if we don’t have freedom?”
Thank you, you are my new friend, you deserve ALL the likes 👏👏👏👏👏
A couple of factual quibbles with this and its discussion of China:
First, you mention China as having an export lead growth dynamic. Maybe that's their ascent began, but currently, and for a while now, an overwhelming percentage of the things they build are sold within China, not exported.
Now, it's true that China is very very large. So even the small percentage of production they export is far more than any other one country (or even groups of countries) can hope to put on the international market. But factually, China is not sustaining things simply by building to export.
Second, you say dismissively that well-informed China watches have been predicting an economic crisis since 2009. But, like, China has had economic crises! They are still slowly recovering from a massive housing investment crisis.
And they are likely in the midst of another crisis of subsidy lead over-competition with a ton of government backed money propping up a too-large number of increasingly floundering manufacturing companies (at a surface level, very similar to the housing crisis they have/had...for obviously reasons).
Neither of those things derail the point you are making in the article, so file them under nit-picks. But still seemed worth mentioning.
Chinese proverb: "The mountains are high, and the emperor is far away"
Maybe Xi has less control than we think - or than he thinks.
I looked up free covid tests this morning for my sick partner and clicked on the google search popup describing free tests at https://www.covid.gov/tests. That site now redirects to a picture of Donald between the giant words LAB and LEAK.
),:
JFC, I didn’t know that was now our official position.
Wow, you are genuinely not kidding!
Please don't frighten the horses by using a chart of Chinese GDP per capita at PPP! GDP includes questionable investment (40% of the economy) and PPP rates just doubles everything again. Maybe try disposable income per person at current x-rates. Then you would see Mexico at about $11,500 and China at $5,700. Rather than both at $22,000.
“If you look around the world today, the richest countries are mostly democracies. What’s more, the exceptions tend to be quite small and (except for Singapore) heavily reliant on natural resource exports. Large, complex modern economies tend to be democratic.”
I would like to make the point that Singapore is—in fact—a flawed democracy, and its authoritarianism is probably overstated. It’s not an exception to the rule at all.
I think a more interesting question is whether or not—in a post oil world—Qatar and the UAE can remain prosperous by being Singapore, but actually undemocratic. That would, I suppose, prove that institutions are what matters for prosperity but electoral democracy is not necessarily one of those institutions.
Singapore is a weird "authoritarian" state that imposes "tolerance" on its diverse population because it believes that its own population is not capable of liberal self-governance and will descend into ethno-religious pogroms if free speech is allowed to let rip.
This is true, but it is—in fact—an illiberal democracy and I don’t really see any evidence that a majority of the population wouldn’t choose a PAP government.
I am not an expert on Singapore and it would seem given the level of economic development they have, that the illiberalism to ensure ethnic harmony is not needed but after seeing what happened in the USA, the most advanced country in the world, with much less ethnic diversity than Singapore, my trust in humanity is quite low.
I agree, and I think PAP is irrationally afraid of not being reelected. Setting aside the moral imperative, they can “afford” to be liberal and still win—because their economic record speaks for itself.
The saying isn’t, “Don’t kill the messenger,” it’s, “Don’t SHOOT the messenger.” It means that, if you’re upset by a message, you need to execute its bearer up close with a melee weapon, not from afar with a missile weapon.
Matt has written that the unitary executive theory was formed as a reasonable response to the pre-1994 world where Republicans seemed incapable of achieving a trifecta. I am genuinely surprised that Roberts (one among many) hasn't revisited his priors and ended up more of stare decisis hawk to shelter the judicial branch's reputation.
He genuinely and earnestly believes that (Republican) presidents are elected kings.
"Very few people understood that the then-new internet could be effectively firewalled and censored, becoming a mechanism for surveillance and social control rather than liberation." Matt is correct about this. For those old enough to remember there was a weird amount of utopian thinking in the 90s around the internet. However, a professor at the University of Toronton, Ron Diebert, knew at the time this was bullshit. U of T has had a long line of forward thinking profs (e.g., Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan). https://youtu.be/EefmUadYERw?si=FP8a_0FeMfMbkYWB
Andrew Potter and Joseph Heath co-wrote a book in the early 2000s that poured cold water on the idea of “the internet as a source of freedom,” and they were writing before social media!
Social media as a mechanism of imposing very effective social pressure is something I certainly never foresaw.
"But it’s hard for me to think about personalistic rule without thinking about Donald Trump."
Imagine the Simpsons-Bus-Driver-Tapping-the-Sign meme here, but instead of The Simpsons bus driver, it's me and I'm tapping the Wikipedia entry for "sultanism": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultanism
This is a very perceptive article. One among many from this great writer. The point about institutions is the starting point for the nonprofit that a group of us are creating. The discussion about the history circa 2000 however is not quite accurate based on my personal observations at the time.
FWIW I'm not updating that strongly on the results of the Blattman paper with respect to the democracy part not mattering that much compared to the patrimonialism/personalism (although it is some update for me.)
Most obviously, it seems plausible that regime type transitions within the time period the authors consider aren't exogenous given gdp lags and country-year fixed effects. For instance when China transitioned under Mao, I think there were plausible counterfactual worlds where growth rates still increased but with a different regime type, because Mao has distinctively bad polices. Leader death is then straightforwardly a confounding variable that can both cause higher growth (because of the end of distinctively bad policies) and regime type transition (which often happens at the death of a leader) which isn't captured by GDP lags or fixed effects.
There's a big new literature that I take to show that dynamic two-way fixed effects designs can go really wrong really easily when you have heterogeneous treatment effects (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29691/w29691.pdf.)
Conceptually, this is because in dynamic panels you're comparing countries which transitioned regime type later to those which transitioned earlier, and using you're estimate of the compounding effects of the treatment (transition to personal rule say) to try to scrub out the accumulated effects of the treatment on the countries which transitioned earlier. It's really easy to get this wrong either because you have differences treatment effects between countries which vary systematically (e.g the effects are larger near oil shocks) or because you're specification of the compounding of the treatment effects were wrong.
I'm pretty confident that you do get heterogeneous treatment effects (and so are the authors given they use hetroskadisticy robust standard errors,) and this can badly mess up your estimates even if the authors exogeneity assumptions hold.
These critiques also affect the AJR lit it's challenging though. I'm inclined to be more skeptical of the Blattman et al result though. When you just look at the their estimates for the effects of regimes on growth rates graphically (figure 1 in the paper, page 5 of the pdf) the distribution of estimated effect sizes for autocratic regimes look much more similar to each other than institutionalised does to democratic. The estimate of the personalist growth rate is estimated significantly less precisely than the democratic growth rate, and visually it looks like there's a skew in the institutionalised distribution, which you shouldn't get when the central limit theorem applies (which it should.)
At a higher level of abstraction, we should have a markov chain which tells us the transition probabilities between different regime types. Without estimating the markov chain, conceptually what you're doing when you estimate the causal effect of regime type is estimating the expected growth rate while in that regime, not a countries expected growth rate conditional on being a in a given regime. If being in an institutionalised autocracy is causally related to an increased probability of transitioning to a personalist regime relative to democratic regimes, then just comparing the growth rates would lead one to overestimate the expected value of transitioning from a personalist to an institionalised regime relative to transitioning to a democratic regime.
Finally, in what is now a very long comment, generically this is a paper with a positive finding that cuts against received wisdom, and I think one is more likely to see these kinds of papers compared to null results and results which don't cut against received wisdom, even absent publication bias because these sorts of results are more interesting and so more likely to be on blogs and twitter.
"Maybe it’s all fine... maybe a totally MAGA-fied America will be okay too. But I’m awfully uncomfortable banking on it."
AYFKM?
"Maybe it's all fine"?!? It's already very obviously NOT FINE across a variety of metrics!
Yes, yes, I know. Matt Y is talking specifically about *the economy*. Maybe the economy will be fine, so that makes everything else okay?
I keep thinking to the day I did my naturalization ceremony and became a US citizen, how happy and proud I was, how happy my husband was for me, how we went to a local Cracker Barrel for a celebratory stack of pancakes and I told the waitress that this was my first meal as an American citizen and she smiled and congratulated me...
I believed, on that day, that America STOOD FOR SOMETHING! You know, all those old-fashioned ideas about being a country of laws and not men, about being a shining city on a hill, about welcoming immigrants from all nations and weaving them into a beautiful tapestry, about the belief that all men are created equal and have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...
Never did I think that we would debase ourselves to the point of "Meh, we'll just shrug and accept any tyrant who comes along, as long as he panders to our prejudices and keeps the economy humming."
This is a degradation, and IDGAF if saying so makes me elitist.
I think you (and I and unfortunately many others) had a much higher opinion of the American people than was warranted. I was pretty distraught during the GWOT era, particularly after the 2004 elections when it was clear that most Americans did in fact have no problem with torturing Iraqis and bombing their cities back into the stone age, but 8 years of Obama lulled me into the (wrong) belief that we'd progressed beyond such things.
What I think Matt gets wrong is that while China's authoritarian state may or may not be economically a net positive for them, they have a lot of other advantages which we do not. When the Trumpists destroy the twin pillars underlying most of our productive economy - a stable financial system and a research engine powered by immigrants and higher education - we won't have much to fall back on. With a rapidly aging and shrinking labor force, high labor costs, and institutional paralysis, we are not going to transform into a manufacturing powerhouse, or indeed any other powerhouse...
Liberals have to seriously contemplate how to change our mindset into one that resembles that of the people who live in civilizational states like China, India, Turkey etc.
It is of course true as Matt noted that more education and the prosperity it enables leads to greater demands for self-determination in general but in my university interactions I have met PhD educated Chinese and Indian scientists who are bought into civilizational narratives and do not see the Chinese system or the increasingly authoritarian Indian democracy as intrinsically problematic.
Those of us who have great discomfort seeing corruption and authoritarianism may simply be outnumbered and within 20-30 years the only choices left might well be from a menu of slightly different authoritarian style regimes. Even Europe may not be immune for too long and is likely to splinter back into small ethno-states under the pressure of migration from Africa. So liberals will have no where to go.
No.
Just no.
I don’t want to be a fair-weather liberal who is for liberal values only as long as they are popular, but who goes “welp the Chinese and Indians are totes cool with authoritarian rule, so I guess I should be too.”
Morality is not decided by majority vote.
Saying that you need to contemplate how to exist in a world where your values are in a distinct minority is not the same as saying you need to be cool with it.
Some people given no choice in the matter will rationalize it (like some Chinese and Indian scientists) and try to be happy, others may choose to agitate and become dissidents. But what will you do when there is no place left where you can be a dissident?
Nice to see you've noticed.