How to Make Britain Prosperous Again with Sam Bowman

Sam Bowman. Sam as the founding editor of the online magazine Works in Progress, now part of payment processing platform Stripe. He has been Director of Competition Policy at the International Center for Law and Economics and an executive director of the Adam Smith Institute. Now we have specifically asked Sam on as a result of an essay that he co

authored called Foundations why Britain has Stagnated. There we go that word again, which looks at the main problems that are plaguing us, how we can fix them, whether it is possible to fix those problems, and of course that is the defining task of our generation and indeed of this new government. So we are hoping that Sam will be able to diagnose the UK's problems and tell us how to fix them in a hurry. Welcome Sam, Thanks

for having me. Well, it's a great pleasure. You know, we spend a lot of time on this podcast worrying about productivity, worrying about infrastructure, worrying about housing, and in particular, of course, worrying about the miserable real wages in the UK, because we firmly believe on this podcast that money can

indeed buy you happiness. Now, I just wanted to set the scene, which you do at the beginning of your essay, and I imagine that an awful lot of our listeners will have read this essay already, but for those that have not, you've got a wonderful not necessarily diagnosis, but description of the problem at the beginning. So I'm just going to read a few bits of that so that our listeners can get a sense of what it is

we're trying to talk about here. Okay, Ready, between twenty twenty four and twenty twenty one, that's before Russa's invasion of Ukraine, the industrial price of energy in the UK tripled in nominal terms. We have significantly more expensive electricity than many similar economies with almost identical population sizes. The UK's under thirty million homes, France has thirty seven million. And then there is this thing that I always find

really interesting. We complain a lot about second homes in the UK ren but only eight hundred thousand British families have second homes three point four million French families do. If the world was a better place, our coastline would be plastered, literally plastered with second homes. Then everybody would have their own summer house. Back to Electricity pert Capital, electricity generation in the UK is just two thirds of

what it is in France. Our electricity generation is closer to developing companies such as Brazil and South Africa, home of the regular blackouts. Britain's last nuclear power plant, and this is really important and I want to talk about this a lot of time. I'm a great fan of the idea of let's go all in on the nukes. Our last nuclear pad plant was built between nineteen eighty seven and nineteen ninety five. The next one, Hinckley Point C, is between four and six times more costly per megaworking

capacity than South Korean nuclear pals. We've talked about this and that on this podcast before. It's ridiculous. Tramp projects in the UK two and a half times more expensive than French projects on a per mile basis. Now I know all about this because I live next to the tram line in Edinburgh. I have watched the cost of building that kind of infrastructure in the UK in real time. And by the way, trams to new Haven. If you are listening, please, with the love of God, come and

pick up the rest of the rubbish. It's not finished yet. I'm going to stop there because if I keep reading for all these lists, I'm going to get myself terribly upset. So here we are. We have this this problem, and as you say, they're not disconnected observations. They highlight our real problem. What you diagnos is our real problem. We can't build anything. And now I'm going to hand in for you. Is it really that simple? We can't build anything and that's destroying our economy.

point where there's a cliff edge. If you look at the size of French companies, French companies are lots with forty nine employees, and then there's a huge collapse in the number of French companies that have fifty employees, either because companies just aren't refusing to grow because so many regulations kick in at that point, or because they're effectively committing fraud and under reporting the number of employees they have, both of which are pretty bad. We know that the

French public hates any attempt to liberalize its economy. There have been riots over raising the retirement age to sixty four. I mean, imagine if we were talking about raising the retirement age to sixty four in the UK. So, according to all those kinds of metrics, and I think almost anybody would agree, will hold back an economy, France should be doing incredibly badly. But actually France is doing roughly as well as we are. By some measures, they're doing

better than us. I think it's reasonable to say they're doing about as well as we are. And the reason we think that is is that even though they get those things wrong tax regulation things like that, they get the basics right. So the footprint of Paris has tripled since the Second World War, whereas London has basically not grown at all. As you mentioned, they build many, many more homes. They have far more homes per person than we do with about the same population size. They build

things like tramways much more cheaply than we do. They build much much more high speed rail, much more cheaply than we do, and all of those things are related. There there's I think big, big misunderstanding or kind of gap in the UK between costs and what you actually get.

So we always talk about, oh, well, you know, we should build Hinckley Point C, which I agree with, we should build HS two, which I don't agree with, we should build crossrail, but never really recognize that the very very high costs of those projects mean that we really

don't get to build more than one. If we get that one at all, we should be in a situation where we're able to build things like crossrail and other metros much more cheaply at the price that for example, Madrid built its metro which was less than a quarter of the price of crossrail, so that we can have more of them.

to a massive shortfall investment. So the real origin of writing this paper was a frustration in the run up to and after the election that many commentators were kind of finally beginning to catch up with people like new Marin, people like me who've been talking about the UK under

investing for years. But the main conversation sort of thinks of investment as this sort of abstract number, as investment as measured by how many pounds we're putting into some accounts somewhere or spending, when really what we care about with investment is what we're getting out of it. How many nuclear power plants are we getting, how many miles of railway, how many miles of tramline, how many miles

of road, how many houses are we getting. And so the fundamental point that we're making is that we underinvest both in terms of costs are so high that it wouldn't be economic to put much more money in than we do and for the money we do put in, we get much less out the stuff that we really care about than we should and changing that is really in our hands. Very very little of this is a

technological problem. It's almost all a political problem. And yes, politics can be very difficult to fix, but politics should be eminently fixable. And the fundamental argument that we make is that the UK could be a much more prosperous country without any change in technology, without any real change in the constituency of the economy. We just need to make it much easier to build the dances.

a much more invisible way. So after the Second World War, the Athleague government nationalized huge amounts of the economy, including the way we use land, and it went from a system where even the local council did have the power to stop people from building things on their land. They had to compensate you if they stopped you from building something, so they had an incentive not to just block everything.

They could block things, but they would have to bear some of the cost of blocking, and that meant that pre the Second World War we had a much more balanced system that allowed lots of things to be built. And the nineteen thirties I think really should be famous for being the most impressive decade of housebuilding that we have ever had, almost entirely private house building.

really as important as that. And if we were building at the same rate today that we built in the nineteen thirties, if you adjust for population, we'd be building more than half a million homes a year. I mean, we talk at the moment as if three hundred thousand homes a year is really ambitious, and you know, if we're really, really lucky, we might be able to get

three hundred thousand homes a year. I mean, that's chicken feet compared to what we should be building and what we have been building as a proportion of the economy

in the past. So shifting to the Atli government, what I would argue is a socialist land use planning system was really disastrous and you can see the number of houses being built by the private sector collapse after that happens, And what also happens is that where homes are built becomes much less driven by market signals and prices and

much more driven by effectively central planning. And that's left us with a situation where we don't build enough houses every year, and the houses we do build are often not anywhere near where people actually want them to be built, and the consequence of that is that people can't move to where good jobs are. So housing is not just a problem of bills. It's not just a problem of us having to spend more of our money on rents

and mortgages than we'd like to. It's also, and I would say much more importantly, a problem of what jobs people can do and where.

world industry by the end of the nineteenth century. We haven't had anything like that kind of ability to move around and to migrate internally according to economic changes and changes in economic reality, and I think that's one of the really big reasons that we have been held back

in our ability to grow. And you're absolutely right. You know, there are some places in London inner London boroughs that have thirty to forty percent of the housing being assigned to social housing, and that means that a lot of the most valuable, most central housing stock is occupied by

people who are often not in work at all. If they are in work, they're often in fairly low productivity jobs, and they're occupying homes that could be occupied by people who could be far more economically productive and grow and drive economic growth much more. The result, as you've mentioned, is this kind of missing middle where if you want to live in kind of inner London, by which I mean sort of zones three, two and one, you either

have to be very rich or very poor. Nobody in the middle can really afford to live in central London because they can't get into social housing and they cannot afford private housing. I think that's a disaster. I think socially and economically that's a disaster. And what's so frustrating about it is that fixing that problem is really really simple. London is one of the least dense major cities in Western Europe. The nicest parts of London, places like Bloomsbury Belgravia,

are the densest part of London. You know, density doesn't have to mean towers in the park. Density can mean six story, eight story Jordan Edwardian terraces and building more beautiful and livable housing like that would allow us to allow many, many millions more people to move into London, get better jobs, start more companies with each other, and I think produce huge amounts of extra output and we're

just not doing it. And I think fixing that would be a tremendously easy way to drive a lot of economic growth, and to just get a lot of output just building those homes would be a lot of economic activity and a lot of economic outputs that we could have tomorrow. We could begin working on that tomorrow if we want such.

there's a very obvious economic need for this. Now, the planning application for this alone has run to three hundred and sixty thousand pages and cost two hundred and ninety seven million pounds, which for context, is twice what it costs the Norwegians to actually build the world's longest tunnel.

has spent on building something similar. That is off the scale. Shocking, isn't it.

the case of infrastructure. It isn't just planning in the case of housing either, but it's primarily planning for housing. There are environmental assessments that slow down projects enormously cost huge amount of money. To reopen a three mile train trap between Bristol and Porto's Head, there is an eighteen thousand page environmental assessment that cost thirty two million pounds and to put that into context. The Jubilee Line extension in the early nineteen nineties had a four hundred page

environmental assessment. So this is a recent phenomenon. This is a new development that we are requiring environmental assessments like this and of this cost and of this time, and it's one of the really really major reasons we have other Some people would call them checks. I would call them hugead roadblocks to building things. Something called the Aarhus Convention, which is an international convention that the UK as a signatory to, which caps the cost of legal challenges to

infrastructure projects. So if you are a even if you lose, so if you are a vexatious claimant you don't want a tunnel being built near you, you can sue or you can judicially review the project, and even if you lose, the costs that you will have to pay to cover the winners' costs are capped at between five and ten pounds, so trivial, trivial amount of money. And this is something that we have made stricter in the last seven or

eight years. But Theresa May government actually made this stricter unbelievably and what we've created is a situation where legal challenges to infrastructure are very easy and very cheap. There are huge numbers of triggers for judicial reviews, there is huge compliance cost with the planning system and the environmental

assessment system. And then on top of all of that, the way that we pay for major infrastructure projects in the UK has moved from being something that was devolved and was either done by a private company as in the case of most of our railroads, or by local authority as in the case of many roads and tramways during the era of the tram to a situation where national government pays for things and oversees major projects, and almost nobody in that project has an incentive to keep

costs down. And I think this is the real problem that HS two had, where basically nobody in the decision making pipeline had any incentive to keep costs down for HS two and that includes the cost of appeasing objectives,

you know. I think there probably does need to be some appeasement nim of Nimbi's in some cases for political reasons, but there has to be a counter a counterweight to that that says, if you appease these people too much, and if you spend you know, billions of pounds on unnecessarily tunneling loads and loads of miles of this line. A quarter of HS two is supposed to be tunneled

to basically avoid NIMBIA complaints. Then you're going to go bankrupt, you know, or the project is not going to happen, or you will get fired, or your voters will vote you out. And we have very few of those mechanisms in place now for these projects. The only real mechanism that we have is the Treasury coming in and saying, okay, you know what, Actually, you spend too much money on this, We're canceling this, or we're going to cancel some of this, which is a very blunt to cancel.

making chain to be worried about costs. There is all always going to be cost inflation, and you need people with strong incentives to keep the costs down to make decisions that say, you know, this isn't going to be the fastest ty speed rail line in the world. This is going to be the second fastest or of the fifth fastest. You know, it's going to be a lot better than what we've got, but it's going to be not by it's not going to be gold plated. And unfortunately,

we just don't do that. So all of the problems that we have with environmental assessments and with planning and judicial reviews and stuff like that are compounded by the fact that the incentives for the people who are actually running the project don't factor costs in at all, really, and I think that's the kind of underlying reason that cost disease has grown so badly in infrastructure and things like nuclear power as well, but infrastructure especially, And again,

we can change that. You know, we can evolve decision making to people who are more accountable for the decisions they make and who can go bankrupt, and we can bring a more involved role for the private sector that includes loss as well as profit. I think a huge, huge problem that we've got is when we do these sort of quasi private projects. There is still the kind of government, a funder of last resorts that that insulates

the private sector from its cost increases. And we can change that, but it will be challenging and it's not straightforward to get there from where we are.

Now we're supposed to be living in a world, we keep being told with living in a world where our huge investment into the renewable industry will make our electricity cheaper and cheaper and everything's going to be absolutely marvelous. That's not happening.

of photovoltaic solar cells is collapsing. You know, we're getting to a point where solar cells, I mean, they're not going to be quite free, but they're going to be something approximating free. The problem is that you also need storage in a place like the UK where we get very, very overcast, whether as everybody knows, I mean possibly people listening to this right now are listening to it in a very overcast This is the this is the time, the time of the year where solar is really not

very good. But you know, in south in the southwest of the United States, in Spain, in North Africa, solar may be very very problem. The trouble is it's just not going to work here. It may have some role to play, but we just cannot expect the base load energy that we need, the base electricity production that we need to come from solar and wind is just not seeing anything like the kind of cost reductions that solar is see.

was needed. But now if you have the power being developed in loads and loads of remote places all over the country, you have a very very different setup. And there's that cost, and then there's the costs of the grid balancing where you have to match up this intermittent energy with the needs. And then of course there's the

cost of backup capacity. These are the three things that you list, and all these things are not necessarily always included when we look at the cost of renewals, and if you do include them, you get slightly differ pature. Is that fair?

we pay for when we pay for electricity. The rest is these kinds of system level costs, and what we're doing with renewables and really with nuclear as well, is moving from a world where marginal wholesale costs are the most important thing to worry about, which is the case with gas, which is the case with coal, which is the case with oil, to a world where fixed costs

are things that we really care about. You know, the marginal cost of a wind turbine is very low, totally agree, But the fixed cost of a wind turbine, once you include all of the system level costs you're talking about, isn't quite high. And once you include the need to produce electricity when the wind isn't blowing, and produce electricity and travel transport electricity from where the wind turbine is to where people actually need it, then the costs become

quite significant. And I think that's the way that we make sense of this apparent paradox where we've been moving from a world where you know, where we've been building lots and lots of renewables, which you know do indeed have very very low the wholesale costs when they're producing energy, but we have to pay for them to have been

set up in the first place. You know, we have talked about the environmental levees, things like the renewables obligation contracts for difference, these are the contracts and subsidies that are explicit that we have set up to support renewables, and they are important. You know. They now exceed ten billion pounds a year, but they're not anywhere near the whole story. And even if we weren't on the hook for those, the cost of renewables I think would still

be prohibitive. At the beginning of November, the energy mix for the first week was majority gas. And this is in a context where we've already built decades. We've already built more of a wind and solar for more than a decade. We are supposed to be able to move to a decarbonized electricity grid, or the government's aim is to move to a decarbonized electricity grid by the end

of the decade. I just do not believe that that is possible with wind and solar, and if I'm wrong, please you know, I very much hope my role that I just don't think that that's going to happen. Think the thing that we point to, and that the event that we point to that is a model that we may be able to follow is France's nuclear roller in the nineteen seventies and the nineteen eighties, which was state led.

Probably wasn't the way I would have favored it at the time, and I would hope that we could do a non state leaded version of it, but managed to decarbonize the French economy far far earlier than or decarbonize the French electricity grid at least far far earlier than any other Western European country, and did so without really having decarbonization in mind. And now that the rest of Western Europe is I think trying to decarbonize the wrong

way with intermittent renewabals rather than nuclear. France has become quite an important energy exporter. We are quite reliant on French nuclear energy when the windows are blowing and when the sun isn't shining. I think that it would be a mistake to continue that state of affairs, and I think nuclear is a clean form of electricity that we should be looking to the problem is that it's so expensive.

The problem is that we are building nuclear power plants for vastly more than even Winden solar cost us.

I think, sucked into a grid and killed. And some of these fish, you know, a few hundred of these fish would be from rare and protected species, and so the reactor, the EDF was instructed to come up with a way to stop these fish from being sucked in. Their solution was to build an underwater megaphone. That would play loud noises that would scare fish away. And amazingly, doing this will actually increase the risk to human life of the reactor because the megaphone has to be maintained

by divers who undertake some risk in doing this. So in order to protect fish, we have not just increased the cost to the project, we've actually increased the danger to human life. And again this is really for a few hundred fish.

no final decision on a project like nuclear. You keep having to go back, you keep having to make adjustments, you keep having to do compliance and kind of this dance with the regulator and with the environmental the environmental regulator, and it means that costs just drive up and up and up and up. Now we know both from history and from international examples that it doesn't have to be

this way. South Korea builds nuclear reactors for about a quarter of the price that we build them in South Korea, and it has committed to building new reactors in the Czech Republic for about half the price that we're building. So a very simple solution would be to contract with the South Korean Energy Authority KEEPCO to do this for us. I think a more exciting approach, you know, I think

we should probably do that. I think a more exciting approach, but actually just fixing our regulation to rebuild the UK nuclear industry, which could be world leading. You know, there's no reason that we should have to resort to South Career to build our nuclear reactors. We have built many, many good nuclear reactors. We built the world's first nuclear reactor and by the by as late as the nineteen sixties, we had more nuclear reactors than the rest of the

world put together. Or you know, in existence in Sheffield is a company that builds some of the effectively a world leading nuclear reactor casing company that's still operating, still exporting. It's you know, it's a company that not many people know about, but is something that I think we should be quite proud of. We should be reviving that kind of industry by making it much easier to build, making it much more certain to build, and ultimately making it

much cheaper to build. And it will have the double benefit of yes, we'll be able to provide the nuclear industry. Yes we'll be able to build the low carbon energy that we need for an actually affordable price. And actually a triple benefit is that in getting much cheaper electricity, other English, other English industry, British industry will be able to come back. So we know the industry is incredibly

sensitive to the price of electricity. It's obvious that it will be and as we decarbonize, we're going to get more and more dependent on the price of electricity being low to have industry. I think it's quite important that

we do that. And I think that whatever discussions and debates people want to have about industrial policy, and that's great, but the best industrial policy in the world is not going to work for you if you don't have electricity costs that are competitive with South Korea, competitive with China, competitive with India, and right now we are way way way above them.

some wonderful advantages. We have very solid base right that still exists, not going anywhere. What you're feeling about fixing the rest, I mean our most recent budget. Flicking through it and looking at it, I'm not entirely sure that Rachel reeves had read your essay quite as carefully as the rest of us.

I mean, we've had so much stagnation since the mid two thousands that we should be seeing quite rapid catch up growth, both catching up with the US the kind of economic frontier, and just catching up with the trend, catching up with what we look like we should have been we should have been on for prior to the late mid two thousands. So every year that goes by that we experience stagnation, I think it becomes harder and harder to deny that we have a really, really big problem.

And I think people do recognize, and the response to this paper I think shows that people really do recognize that the big problem is that we're just more building things. We're not allowing things to be built. You know, the price of a house in London is very very high. There is a huge amount of demand to live in somewhere like London, Oxford, Cambridge. It isn't that there isn't demand.

If if it was really cheap to live in London and we would still stagnating, then I'd be worried because I would think that we may have nothing going for us. You know, we may be trying to jump start an entire economy here. Really we're just trying to meet demand that is already there. So that's one reason I think people are becoming more and more aware of the problem.

The second reason is that a lot of the time, the answer, I think is giving more control at a much more local level and taking control away from national level quangos and national level kind of independent agencies that we've set up, I think in a quite a misguided way to try to fix problems, in my opinion, are

not really the big problems that we've got. So I think that, for example, if local councils could make decisions about nuclear power permitting rather than the environmental agency, rather than the rather than the amount of involvement that the nuclear regulator has. We should be checking for safety. We should be checking to make sure that the nuclear reactor is safe, but we shouldn't be worried about whether the nuclear reactor is going to kill a few.

It's a post war phenomenon that local councils do not want prisons in their area. They don't want the kinds of infrastructure that the country wants because we do not allow them to retain the business rates that those projects used to pay. Fixing that I think should be quite easy. And once we fix that kind of incentive, and you know, I mentioned earlier local councils used to have a really strong incentive to not block development because they would have

to pay for it. I think that's what kind of mechanism we want to go back to, and we want to give them incentives to allow development. And I think once we do that, combined with devolving decision making to that kind of level, we will fix a lot of the incentives problems that exists. I think it's quite striking that during the era of the tram in the UK, when you know, we had the first major tramways in many cities, we had the first overhead tramway and lead

overhead powered tramway and leads. Many of these tramways were not run by private companies. They were run by the local authority for profit and they were used by the local authority to generate money that they could then spend on other projects. I think we have a pretty good tradition here that local government can actually allow things to be built and build things themselves if we give them

the right incentives to do so. So I'm quite optimistic about that, I think kind of Secondly, the other thing that we should be doing is giving Parliament much more power over national level projects that get built. Again, historically, when we built railways in the nineteenth century and right up until the Second World War, I believe it wasn't an independent quango that made the decision about what got built. It would be a private operator would have a proposal.

They would say, you know, we want to build this railway from here to there. They would bring it to a select committee in Parliament. The select committee would make a decision. They would then pass a build that would protect the project from vexatious lawsuits and things like that, and it would get built and you have a privately owned operatives and managed railway. I think there is a lot of infrastructure that could be built by that mechanism.

It would be it would bring power over these kinds of projects back to democratic decision makers, away from I think, very very badly incentivized kind of independent bureaucrats. And that's the kind of underlying change we need to the country

that I think probably could happen. It certainly won't be easy, and it certainly will be quite a significant change in the way we do things, but it would be going back to the way we did things when things worked really well and when we build block things in this country. So it's possible. I think there's a growing demand for it, and I think what's really optimistic about it is that it works with the grain of the history of British democracy rather than against them.

like nuclear, but they might. I think that they have nailed their colors to the mass of growth so much that they need growth kind of politically they are they are going to be kind of humiliated if they don't get growth. And fiscally, you know, it's looking increasingly likely that the tax the tax rises that were in the budgets are not going to deliver the kinds of revenues that were expected or were hoped for, which means that they really really need growth. Both from a fiscal point

of view, and the political point of view. So you know, stranger things will have happened than a government like this realizing that it needs to be quite bold. I don't think they're going to do the huge constitutional changes that I would love, and you know, I think we have to wait for a future government to do that. But in the meantime I could see this government just saying, look,

we need houses to get built. We're going to upseone parts of London, or we're going to do the Cambridge Extension to build an extra quarter of a million homes in Cambridge, whatever it might be. I'm not super optimistic about that. But gravity is a powerful for us and it's not one that this government can bum.

And one of the shocking things when you look at the numbers, is productivity having literally barely budged in the public sector of a multi decade period, despite the extraordinary technological games the rest of us have made over that period. Can you see I'm pulling here back to your optimism. What can you see you happening there?

the Trust's case, it was tag cuts. In this government's case, it's spending money on public services and talking about, oh, we'll do the supply side reforms later, rather than I think, you know, taking your medicine of the supply side reforms, getting a bit of growth, getting some sign that they're working, and then rewarding yourself or rewarding your clients with more money or with task cuts or whatever you want to do. That's my kind of pessimistic take on what they're going

to do. I don't have a huge amount of insight into what they're planning, so I don't know what they're doing there. I think that public services do not seem as if they are a high priority for reform from this government. The thing that really worries me is that I think that labor came into power thinking that the reason the Conservatives failed was that they didn't know how

to use the civil service quote unquote. This was a thing that I just kept hearing of the Tories saying that they just don't know how to use the civil service, and we know how to use the civil service. And they went in They seemingly didn't have particularly well developed plans about what they actually wanted to do in government, and I think they expected that the civil service would tell them what they needed to do, which is a

really a civil services job. You know, a civil service can advise you on various parameters that you that you set for it, but they're not there to tell you, well, you must build one point five million homes and this is how you're going to do it, and that's your job's that's why we elect a government. So I think the initial signs are that they don't seem to be aware of how much reform the civil service needs and

public services more broadly quite the opposite. But it may be that their experience of this and you know, they have five years, so I've got they've got quite a bit of time sort of wakes them up to how much needs to change in terms of the British state. And again, would I bet on it, No, I probably wouldn't. I think the main reason to be optimistic about the UK economy over the next few years is that labor may need to do supply cyber reforms just to get growth.

I don't think they're going to do very much on public services. They certainly don't seem to at the moment want to do a public service reform, except maybe in the NH. Yes, But like I say, five years is a long time and it's hard to buck gravity's if they keep putting more money into public services. They keep giving pay rises to public sector workers and they still aren't delivering improvements in service and in results. Then they may have no choice but to demand reform and to

do this. But I don't think I will put money on it.

Merin Talks Money. If you like us, show, rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and keep sending questions or comments that Merin Money at Bloomberg dot net. Remember you may know more about some of these things than we do. Let us know. You can also follow me and John on Twitter or x I'm at mariners w and John is John Underscore s Epic. This episode

was hosted by Me marin Somerset Web. It was produced by Someasadi, production support by Moses and and special thanks to Sam Bowman.