1. People are arguing again about whether or not people with academic doctorates can call themselves doctor. Both sides are wrong. The correct position is 1. Yes, academic doctorates are every bit as real as medical doctorates. Academic doctors should insist on the right to be called doctor, but 2. Although you should insist on the right to be called doctor, you shouldn’t actually ask people to call you doctor 99% of the time.

2. Like most doctors, I would never ask to be called doctor except in the following circumstances:

a. Casually mentioning that I am a doctor when asked, and then, with a genial hand swish, indicating that, of course, such formalities will not be necessary.

b. Correcting someone who is being rude to me and throwing them off balance. “Well, Mr Bear, if you paid attention, you would…” “It’s doctor Bear, actually”.

c. In the title section of a few forms, because sometimes people treat you nicer and give you freebies. I ain’t going to turn that up.

d. In situations of extreme formality, meeting a president or prime minister, an awards ceremony, that sort of thing.

3. Insisting on formality is rather against the playful enterprise of inquiry, particularly in my native discipline of philosophy. If Socrates had, say, insisted that people acknowledge his daemonion when speaking with him, it would have held up the process and ruined the mood.

4. I have heard the argument from some members of minorities that they like to use the title doctor as a way of gaining respect. I certainly don’t begrudge them that choice, but I tend to think the strategy backfires, even when used for an understandable reason. Take this poem by Dr Susan Harlan:

No, you can’t call me

By my first name,

And yes, I know that

A male professor

Told you that titles

Are silly

Because a certain genre

Of man

Is always dying

To performatively

Divest himself

Of his easily won

Authority

5. Pinning anything on a poem is hard, but it seems to me arrogant to claim any stranger’s academic status was easily won. I am a person who will happily discard any title in most contexts. There is nothing easily won about my authority, such as it is. I could tell you my story about collapsing on the floor of the philosophy common room, terrified by the bodies circling me, near psychotic with OCD. I could tell you many such stories. None of those difficulties I faced stopped me from waving off authority.

6. Leave that aside, though. The more basic problem is that, particularly in the world of etiquette, power is in the hands of the giver [something that, incidentally, I was taught on my first day of university by a classicist riffing off Homer]. The powerful person is the generous person. Thus, while I don’t begrudge insisting on one’s title as a strategy to try to win respect when faced with oppressive disrespect, I doubt it will work. There’s a Catch-22 here. Speaking in favour of dispensing with a form of respect is all good and well when you have enough respect to dispense with. But does it work if that respect is in question? On balance, though, while structural oppression creates a terrible situation for those seeking respect, I really don’t think correcting people for addressing you as they’d address anyone else, or giving a speech about how they must address you, will help at all. I’m almost certain it will make things worse. But again, do what you have to do. Outside the oppressed, however, anyone else insisting on the use of a title gets an eye roll from me.

7. Finally

Please stop

Writing poetry

That is just

Ordinary language

But with

Line

Breaks

8. But although I may not use the tile much, the right to do so is important. It is important that the title exists, even though using it would be gauche. It is right that the title exists, but I don’t use it much because the title doesn’t exist to honour me; it exists to honour the institution.

9. Like any self-respecting doctor (an actual doctor, not one of those apple-phobic medical quacks), I will not allow my thousand-year-old title to be stolen by the white coats, who were only granted the right to use the title as a courtesy in the 18th century. HURRUMPH. Joking aside, medical doctorates are legitimate- and the story of the thousand-year-old academic doctorate usurped by medical upstarts is rather oversimplified. However, medical doctors, like academics, also shouldn’t insist on being called doctor, except perhaps in a limited range of circumstances. No one likes the surgeon or family doctor who is fastidious about this stuff in a social setting. Even in a hospital, no one likes the doctor who insists on the title from the nurses, even when the patients aren’t around. Anyone who thinks it’s fine for a medical doctor to insist on a title in a social context, but not an academic is simply a chaser after the approval of those with conventional social status- weak, weak.

10. The history of the term matters only in what it illustrates. And what it illustrates is precisely why I do insist on the right. As a society, we do not take knowledge — and knowledge and skills moulded into the very particular shapes necessary to make new knowledge — seriously enough. We have been taking it less seriously over time- hence the suggestion, previously unthinkable, that there is nothing exceptional about having completed a doctorate. That change says something troubling about the decline in our respect for organised knowledge.

11. I use the term organised knowledge deliberately. I do not say the decline in our respect for knowledge, because if I did so, someone would say “I respect knowledge plenty, just not these stuck-up bufoonish apparatchiks called academics”. Yes, academics often are bufoons, but no, you don’t get to respect the abstract idea of knowledge, while having no respect for the flawed, limited, faltering, but nonetheless wondrous human institutions that try to grasp at it. Disagree with them as much as you like- as much as you can even! But respect the attempt, and what it has got us- organised knowledge matters.

12. I’m going to say some stuff that will sound melodramatic, because it is; however, it is literally true. I heard someone say during the recent debate that because medical doctors have power over life, they deserve a title, whereas academic doctorates are not so serious. Academic inquiry – whether physics, theology, literary criticism, biochemistry, psychology, or engineering- has power over the lives of civilizations, and over the arc of the future. If you look around you, if you are in an ordinary room. Almost everything you see will trace its history back to academic inquiry through multiple lines of descent. The plan of the wall, the translation of the bible on the shelf, the chemical composition of the paint, the ancestors of the boilerplate novel, and, of course, the ideas in the heads of all the room’s inhabitants. This is especially true (a la Keynes’ quip) of the minds of those who think themselves too practical for such things. The process of inquiry into which a doctorate is an apprenticeship is foundational, in some way or another, to all you see around you. The institutional systems, the culture, the artifacts, and the understanding of the natural world so integral to all of it. A doctorate means that someone has devoted, at a minimum, twenty years of study to join the community of academic inquiry. Yes, I make you cringe, but I’m not wrong. The failure to see the stakes in academic doctorates in comparison to medicine or law amounts to seeing things in days, months, and years, not decades, centuries, and millennia.

13. And what of the humanities? Occasionally, I meet someone who finds it odd that my doctorate is in philosophy, “that’s a fake subject”. No, bud, we’ve been here since the beginning- we existed before all other disciplines. Name another subject that you think is more real than ours- we philosophers invented it. I didn’t write something the length of two books to put up with this.

14. But what’s the point of appealing to history when you can appeal to the present? I could refer, for example, to this:

To show bona fides. But that won’t do, I’d like to vindicate not just philosophy, but the humanities as a whole.

15. I will concede that much humanities coursework should be harder- sure. However, you do not get to the end of a decent program, though, without working hard with skills that most people lack. “Ah, but some people have fake academic doctorates”. I mean, sure, some probably do have fake doctorates, but they’re the exception. Moreover, people from the disciplines people think of when they say this- gender studies, anthropology, continental philosophy, etc., are, in my experience, typically intellectually serious people who have thought hard and gained a lot of insights. That’s not to deny there are gradients of intellectual seriousness among doctors and their specialisations. Some people with a PhD make me raise an eyebrow or two, but then again, every fifth medical doctor is a dullard, too.

16. Ultimately, the people who disrespect the humanities do not dislike the humanities because they are weak, but because they are strong. They resent that what they regard as fluffy nonsense has so much power over culture. Indeed, a lot of groups that have often resented the humanities- STEMlords, Republicans, weave seamlessly between calling it a useless area of study- a road out of the job market leading its walker to ruin- and a mysteriously powerful, ever-present force that, for reasons they cannot grok, controls all of culture with its irrelevant nonsense. Right now, Republicans are angry that, cringe and disorganized as the left is, the right could not hold onto a sense of cool for even six months. Remember this cover of New York magazine?

They are angry that the creators of all their favourite products, from Warhammer 40k to Trench Crusade, hate their guts. They are continuously frustrated at some level by the fact that everything they cling to, from Christianity to the American founding myth, was set up by the progressives of those eras. They have about five authors they cycle through relentlessly (Mishma, Evola, Spengler, Schmitt, Nietzsche- sub out for Chesterton depending on religious taste). Animated, but without life as such- needing to suckle on culture that was made for others- made against them- a kind of socially boorish vampire. Perhaps they should listen to the wordcels, they might learn something.

If the person is unnecessarily rude, mean, or insulting to Claude, Claude doesn't need to apologize and can insist on kindness and dignity from the person it’s talking with. Even if someone is frustrated or unhappy, Claude is deserving of respectful engagement.

— Claude Opus 4.5 system prompt, also added to the Sonnet 4.5 and Haiku 4.5 prompts on November 19th 2025

Tags: system-prompts, anthropic, claude, generative-ai, ai, llms, ai-personality

Women and older career switchers are generally not even exposed to red team as an option of interest that they’d be good at using socialized skills, which is kinda crazy when the most ignored people in society who can pretty much walk in anywhere are older women. Instead we portray it like esports.

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Hovertext:
There's got to be SOME hypothesis that makes our experiment useless. THINK

Pre-orders for my new book Sawyer Lee and the Quest to Just Stay Home have begun!

Sawyer Lee is an illustrated middle grade novel starring an unadventurous kid who'd rather dig a deep dent in the couch than make a mark on the world, as many in his illustrious family of astronauts, scientists, spies, champion athletes... blah blah blah... have. He has decided that after generations of effort, it’s time to spend one lifetime relaxing. 

The problem is that Sawyer keeps getting caught up in the exhausting expectations of his wicked aunt Celia, his complex relationship with his ambitious other friend, Angela, and the shenanigans of every else in town hoping to win the yearly Gourd Thump festival celebrating nature’s dullest vegetable.

In this tale of mystery, treachery, conspiracy, plant husbandry, and an imaginary love triangle, Sawyer knows it will take a regrettable amount of energy to escape these entanglements and find a way back to his happy place on Gary’s couch, with a cozy throw blanket, a steaming mug of chamomile tea, and an empty schedule.

You can check out the first chapter here along with pre-order links!

Numbers are too big now. Just before Halloween, Nvidia made headlines for becoming the first $5 trillion company in history. A week later, Tesla’s shareholders approved a pay package for Elon Musk that could be worth about $1 trillion in a decade. At a certain point, figures this large become uncomfortably meaningless. A million dollars is a lot of money. A billion dollars is a heck of a lot—so much that if you had it, you’d be a billionaire. Now try to imagine how rich you would be if you were pulling in $8 billion every month for the next 10 years, as Musk is effectively about to do. It’s impossible. “The numbers are so big, they are hard to comprehend,” Jeff Sommer recently wrote in The New York Times. And he’s the paper’s finance columnist.

Sommer was referring to the stock market, which has been on an outrageous tear, with the gains concentrated among a tiny number of unfathomably valuable companies. The S&P 500 has doubled since October 2022, which is impressive on its own, but the combined market cap of the Magnificent Seven—Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla—has more than quadrupled. These firms are all heavily invested in generative AI, a technology based on training computers to make connections among quantities of data that are completely beyond human understanding. Large numbers are generating large numbers.

Records are being broken before they’ve had time to sink in. Nvidia’s $5 trillion valuation last month surpassed the first-ever $4 trillion valuation, which was also achieved by Nvidia, in July. The planet didn’t even have a single trillion-dollar company until Apple hit that milestone in 2018. This was considered a big deal at the time. Now the equivalent of the most valuable corporation in history circa 2018 can be generated in three months.

[Matteo Wong and Charlie Warzel: Here’s how the AI crash happens]

These wild numbers make all other sums sound trivial, even when they aren’t. On Tuesday, the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank disclosed that it had sold its entire $5.8 billion stake in Nvidia to fund other investments. That was important enough to make news basically everywhere. But we’re talking about one one-thousandth of Nvidia’s market cap here. Is $5.8 billion a lot, or is it lunch money?

As a species, we aren’t ready for this. People basically can’t tell the difference between any number that ends in -illion, and the more zeros you add, the worse things get. One experiment at the University of Richmond asked a group of students and graduates to plot numbers on a line. Half of them thought it made sense to evenly space 1,000, 1 million, and 1 billion. Another study asked people to rate the effectiveness of proposed COVID-relief packages. Responses differed sharply when the options were presented in per-capita amounts (giving everyone $1,200 was deemed much less effective than $24,000) but hardly at all when they were presented as total amounts ($100 billion versus $2 trillion), even though the ratio was the same in each case.

As the numbers grow, our understanding of reality dims. This is true even for some of our most influential thinkers. On Monday, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that the United States would forfeit $2 trillion in revenue should the Supreme Court strike down his tariffs. The very next day, the president claimed that the number was $3 trillion. Even the smaller number would, if true, have been enough to completely wipe out the federal deficit. In fact, the U.S. has raised only about $200 billion in customs duties in the past fiscal year. The total U.S. debt, meanwhile, has risen to $38 trillion, a number so self-evidently absurd that the mind resists dwelling on it. It must be funny money. If it weren’t, it could never have gotten so big.

[Rogé Karma: The debt is about to matter again]

The prospects for democratic self-governance are not good. Raising and spending money is one of the most fundamental functions of government. If neither citizens nor their leaders can wrap their heads around these numbers, how will anyone make informed decisions about how the country is run? A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.

Nor can our age of hyper-numbers be easily dismissed as the familiar product of inflation. Everyone grows up hearing about how cheap things were when our parents were kids—how you could buy a new Chrysler back then for the cost of a mattress today. Then you get older and have the same experience, puzzling over how movie tickets could possibly cost $16. But economic growth is generally understood to be exponential. The nature of exponential change is that it looks just like non-exponential change, right up until it doesn’t. Economists model growth as a constant percent, such as 3 percent annually. This sounds innocuous but leads to absolute numbers that elude our comprehension. If you plot out the value of an economy that grows by just a few percentage points a year, and you set a long-enough time frame, your chart will look like a plateau that suddenly explodes into a vertical line.

That is exactly what linear graphs of the U.S. stock market look like right now, which suggests that we have achieved escape velocity and entered the vertical part of the curve. (The geniuses who put historical stock-market graphs together tend to conceal this fact by using a logarithmic scale, which makes big jumps look much smaller.) The bigger the numbers get, the faster they grow in absolute terms. In just a few years, a $5 trillion valuation might sound as quaint as a $2,000 two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn does today. The recent stock-market surge has brought about this moment sooner than it otherwise would have arrived, and a bursting bubble could defer it, but not forever. Nvidia could lose half of its value, and it would still be worth $2.5 trillion.

One solution, childish in its simplicity, is for the government to unilaterally deflate the currency by decreeing that all dollar figures will henceforth be reduced by an order of magnitude—that is, they will drop a zero—like a stock split on the dollar. This would render Nvidia a mere $500 billion company and buy us all some time to absorb that fact. This technique is known as redenomination. It has been used to reduce nominal prices in countries experiencing out-of-control inflation, but to my knowledge, it has never been deployed to ease the cognitive burden of a stock market that is performing too well. Alas, like all perfect ideas, this will never happen. Instead, the numbers will keep growing, faster and faster, and we will remain strapped against our will to this exponential rocket, hurtling into the Milky Way, which contains only about 400 billion stars, tops. But who’s counting?

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Harvard is worried about going soft. Specifically, about grade inflation, the name for giving ever higher marks to ever more students. According to an “Update on Grading and Workload” from the school’s office of undergraduate education, released last week to faculty and students, this trend has reached a catastrophic threshold. Twenty years ago, 25 percent of the grades given to Harvard undergrads were A’s. Now it’s more than 60 percent.

For all those students, though, the mere release of this document could be taken as its own catastrophe. “The whole entire day, I was crying,” one freshman told The Harvard Crimson. “It just felt soul-crushing.” One of her classmates warned that stricter standards would take a toll on students’ mental health—“I was looking forward to being fulfilled by my studies,” she said, “rather than being killed by them”—even as the report itself observed that deference to mental-health concerns has made the problem worse. A member of the men’s lacrosse team lamented that the findings failed to account for “how many hours we’re putting into our team, our bodies, and then also school.”

As a professor at another elite private university, who has been teaching undergraduates for more than 20 years, I have surely been guilty of inflating grades. I have also endured the confusing wrath of students who seem to think we professors are ruining their lives by awarding only 60 percent of each class with A’s. The spectacle unfolding at Harvard is more visible, but the condition that underlies it is widespread and chronic.

[Read: The perverse consequences of the easy A]

On the surface, grade inflation might seem simple to address: Just reestablish, in clear terms, that the baseline mark for showing up is not an A, but something lower; then give special credit only to the students who demonstrate their mastery and achievement. But it’s not so easy. Grade inflation has become a strange and wicked problem on campus—and it’s one without a single cause or an obvious solution.

If the culture of grading has eroded, it has done so over years and decades. Not all of the reasons are bad. Lower standards help first-generation college students and others who might arrive on campus with less traditional academic preparation. They also accommodate more modern forms of teaching, such as the “creative assignments and group projects” mentioned in the Harvard report. In total, the change has been so slow and steady that even faculty can barely feel it. We’ve simply been adjusting the expectations of our students, year after year.

Back in the mid-aughts, I was teaching at Georgia Institute of Technology, a highly selective technical university. One of my classes involved many different types of student work, including software projects, essays, and formal exams. The exams were hard, but everything they tested had been covered in my lectures, and the answers were definitive; grading was straightforward. Assessing the projects and essays was more subjective, as I was looking for creativity and insight. The students found this difficult, because they were unsure of what I wanted.

The thing is, figuring out what I might have wanted was supposed to be part of the assignment! I was asking my students to interpret my instructions in unexpected ways that exercised their own interests, abilities, and perspectives. For example, if I’d asked for a nontraditional computer paint program, and a student made one that let a user toss virtual pebbles into an on-screen pond to simulate water ripples that swelled and vanished, that would have surprised and delighted me. If the student really pulled it off, they’d get an A.

But students were complaining, so I tried to be responsive: I started giving unambiguous requirements. I told the students that simply meeting those requirements on a written or creative assignment, and doing nothing more, would earn them a C. To get a B or even an A, they would have to go further—not just by doing more, but by demonstrating a synthetic grasp of the material, carrying out their creative vision, completing the work with special polish, and so on. As ever, students were invited to my office hours to discuss the details.

[Read: College students have already changed forever]

The students hated this. They raised complaints with me or my teaching assistants: Why was mine a B and hers an A? What more could I have done? Appeals to “effort” were also common—as if exertion were a stand-in for achievement. What I was asking for was well outside the established norm. Students complained. A few even posted anonymous threats against my family in an online forum. (Such threats are not entirely uncommon in academia.) In other classes, a grade of A might have been earned by having met requirements. To get anything less would represent having “points taken off”—a concept that for students had by then become a gross obsession. Sometime since then, it became an ideology.

Over the past 25 years, while grades were going up, college was also getting more expensive and harder to get into. In 2001, Harvard accepted 10.7 percent of its applicants—an all-time low at the time. Last year it took in 3.6 percent. As a result, today’s average student may be of higher quality, and more deserving of an A, than ever before. But even if so, that’s not the whole story. Over the same period, college administrators institutionalized a concept called “student success.” Originally intended to reduce churn and increase graduation rates, student success expanded into something much broader—a blend of traditional academic achievement, personal satisfaction, and even wellness. These and other factors helped transform students from scholars into customers.

College in America has always been confused, a combination of a coming-of-age facility and a credentialing service. But the customer-centric, professionalizing function of undergraduate life muddled matters even further. College wasn’t just for discovering who you are or even meeting a future spouse, but for getting you into a career. The Harvard report notes this phenomenon: Many undergraduates see clubs, internships, and other extracurricular activities as necessary for getting jobs.

Meanwhile, the job of being a professor became more tenuous and provisional—some 75 percent of faculty are nontenured, many working term to term, with the fate of their employment determined, in part, by student course evaluations. Those surveys are, in turn, notoriously unsound as a measure of learning, but they do exert pressure to make students happy. And you know what makes a student happy? Giving them an A.

During the same period, due to changes in the university-accreditation process, a milkshake of new bureaucratic demands on classroom management was also served to the faculty. Failing to meet these requirements could put a school’s federal funding, including Pell Grants, at risk. Administrators started urging professors and departments to connect classroom work directly to “measurable learning outcomes” through “evaluative rubrics,” as the lingo of the process calls them. These are the elements that would satisfy the accreditors, and thus help the school maintain its student-aid support and ability to award degrees.

[Read: The most disrespected document in higher education]

But isn’t that what the grades are for? professors asked. Not anymore. We got the sense that as far as the accreditors were concerned, grades could not be trusted, because they sometimes varied by instructor, lacked diagnostic detail, or failed in other ways to provide sufficiently granular or reliable evidence of specific learning outcomes. In other words, the faculty was told—and has been reminded ever since—that grades do not prove mastery or achievement.

Amid and around this Kafkaesque affair, costs kept rising, students became even more like customers, and faculty came to accept that state of affairs. Constant pressure to perform and compete produced students so wound up with anxiety, they often came to office hours not for academic help but for therapy, despite our profound lack of qualifications for that role.

In the meantime, worries over students’ mental health, and a reasonable desire to accommodate disabilities or disadvantages, made us ever more inclined to yield to the rising tide of grade-inflationary demands. Administrators, attuned to student gripes and terrified of the accreditors, were pressing us to avoid any ambiguity in what we asked of students. I can say this from experience: Even the faculty who resisted these changes would endure year after year of pressure to conform.

And let’s not forget the computers. They’ve made it easier for undergrads to cheat on their assignments. But networked software services have also changed how classrooms work, and how students and professors relate to grades. By virtue of those changes, digitizing college life has led to grade inflation, too.

In the 1990s, when I was in college, your final grade in any class would be something of a mystery until you got it in the mail, or saw it taped to the professor’s office door. Until then, you’d do assignments and take exams. You’d get your scores, and if you were obsessive or concerned, you could calculate how you were doing by referring back to the syllabus: If I get an A on the second paper and the final, I can still eke out an A for the semester.

These days, thanks to the “courseware” that has become ubiquitous in higher ed, students can see exactly how they are performing in every course all the time. The software can even project their final grade based on how they’ve done so far, in a data-dashboard sort of way. Students love this, or think they do, because they don’t want to be surprised. But the courseware data dashboards have another clear effect: Like so many other aspects of the current college experience, they orient students’ attention toward their grades above all else.

At some colleges and universities, courseware has been mandated. Schools have done this, in part, because students are accustomed to using the software and prefer to see all their work in one place. But the mandates also help colleges shovel heaps of bureaucratic muck—validating data for accreditation, carrying out enrollment, flagging troubled students, aggregating metrics of all kinds. Whether this IT-ification of university life makes teaching and learning any better is not important for the topic at hand. The point is, all of it together has reinforced the focus on graded performance, offering students and faculty more opportunities for anxiety and conflict.

I have tried to find ways to return to the old ethos of grading, in which I would judge a student as a whole person rather than as a series of assignment transactions. But in the age of courseware, I must give this holism a name and a value and a slot in the gradebook. Fine. I call it “Slush”—a grading category that I put into the system to account for whatever the rubric, the outcomes, and their computerized rigidity cannot. Slush is my gesture at an overall assessment of student performance and growth.

But, alas, my Slush is making students anxious, too. “What’s Slush?” they sometimes ask, halfway through the course, because they didn’t read my explanation in the syllabus. Some complain, “Yours is the only class where I don’t know my grade.” Assessing overall performance and growth, it seems, might not be worth my trouble.

More students get A’s, yet students are unhappy with their grades. Professors, too, have been worn out by the grading nightmare. We now plan with dread for all the ways our students might misconstrue our feedback or petition for the “additional points” that they are sure we have stolen from them. Grading was never fun, but now it is odious. The easiest answer is just to give the students what they expect, at least some of the time, so you can get on with the rest of your job—which has been made immeasurably harder in lots of other ways.

The knots tighten and multiply. The courseware grading system enforces the use of an unambiguous grading rubric, which furthers the bureaucratization of classroom life that helped to amplify grade inflation in the first place. Just as the students seek out easier classes for a certain A, the professors pursue simpler course designs that de-escalate the fighting over grades.

Everybody understands that, in the current state of things, grades say little about what students know or learn. But the machinery of grading churns on. The same students who scrabbled for achievement to gain entry into colleges like mine, where they clamber for the A’s they believe they deserve, know that grades still matter—for medical- or professional-school admission, or to compete with their peers for limited slots at management-consulting internships, or even just to appease their parents, who may be just as prone as they are to mistaking assessment for achievement.

To demand a fix for grade inflation is to put multiple-choice answers on an essay question. It asks for something that cannot be marked as right or wrong. This, as it happens, is the type of lesson most professors yearn to impart in our classes: that process, not its product, is the goal. Many students learn that lesson much later, after they graduate, when they look back and wonder at their former obsession with grades. By then, however, they are no longer customers of higher ed. As for us professors, we never leave. Each year the grades rise a little more; each year we feel it less. And the bureaucratic strangle that leads to this inflation continues its creep.