The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Tyler Cowen, Yascha Mounk and Coleman Hughes

Episode Date: April 26, 2020

Tyler Cowen, Yascha Mounk and Coleman Hughes

You're listening to The Comedy Cellar, live from the table, on the Riotcast Comedy Sarah Live from the Table. This is a special panel of geniuses edition. We have with us Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason University and host of the very, very excellent podcast, Conversations with Tyler. Yasha Mouk, who's an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University and the author of The People vs. Democracy and the host of the Good Fight podcast. And I would say, along with Tyler, one of the nation's most prescient opinion makers on the seriousness of COVID-19. And Coleman Hughes and Perry L's bio says, you know.

So, but I would say that Coleman Hughes is a senior at Columbia University and is also a very important national scholar who's been published in Quillette, the Wall Street Journal, National Review. He also spoke before Congress in the debate over whether or not there should be reparations. Correct, Coleman? Correct. He's also a great musician and a very, very dear friend of mine. Okay, so let's go. Dan and I are also here. Oh, and Dan Natterman and Periel Ashenbrand, as always. So I was collecting a bunch of questions. And of course, my questions can go on forever.

But I know Coleman certainly has a lot of questions as well. And I'd like to, if we can, take a lesson from Tyler's podcast and move from question to question. Maybe not quite at the breakneck speed that Tyler does because he's usually one-on-one, which makes that make more sense. But let's not get too bogged down so we can cover a lot of ground. Coleman, you want to start? Well, I only really have one question.

You set it up like I had a bunch. I actually don't. I'm curious what your questions are. But Tyler, you have, you posted this paper on marginal revolution, I think today, which was arguing that it was an argument about what the optimal level of social distancing should be. And yeah, you know, the paper I'm talking about, of course, yes. Can you summarize that? Because I actually didn't understand the argument. The paper builds a model of how social distancing works. And then it calibrates that model against data we have from smartphones, and also data from Sweden. So one conclusion that comes out of this model is that even if there's no announcement,

no laws, a lot of the distancing will happen anyway because people have had the crap scared out of them, right? So that's kind of good news. It means that if we reopen, we won't reopen too quickly. But the bad news is that it's hard to reopen, economically speaking. And this model uses a mathematical construct analogous to what is called the envelope theorem, which we really can't get into here. And that basically suggests that you get a discrete gain in economic terms by opening up a little more quickly. And the effect of that on infectiousness gets watered down in the long run because the percentage of people who are going to get infected stays roughly constant.

So at the margin, you want to liberalize more is the core conclusion. That's it. So more people should hear comedy. That's what it is. Tom, you had this notion that you were talking about, about how can we just all pretend that money is not an issue for three months or four months, go into like a suspended animation state as best we can. And then, you know, you were questioning whether economic collapse is necessarily

the consequence of a shutdown. What I had said was, and I'm embarrassed to say it in front of Tyler, what I said was that this made me realize how, I mean, money is a man-made thing, but it seems like it's the last thing we can get rid of. No matter what we do, money has to exist. And if, and if there was just some way to,

to just everybody disregard money somehow, and then we could come out of this on the other side, but it just, it just really brought home to me how in a way that I just, I don't understand that I was never, I never really could wrap my head around how fundamental and essential the concept is of money. So I don't know if that makes anyone want to say anything, but it's just like for the layman,

it boggles the mind. I have an economic question that sort of picks up on that in a way, which is, as a non-economist, one of the main questions I've had running through my mind for the last month or two is that on one model of how the world economy works, the coronavirus shouldn't have a very big long-term impact because it hasn't actually changed anything about the underlying ability to produce goods.

It hasn't changed anything about the amount of human ingenuity we have in the world, about how well-trained people are. So when I sort of pursue that train of thought, it makes me think well five or ten years from now the economy should shoot back to being about where it would have gotten to anyway. Now on the other hand hand, of course, there's very real danger that we get into a huge debt crisis that suddenly, you know, yes, there's always people

who want to go to restaurants again once we have a vaccine and there's trained chefs, but that's just not the money in order to make sure that there's functional businesses that look like restaurants that actually are able to match those chefs

with the ingredients, with the kitchen, with the staff that is necessary and with the customers that are going to come to eat there. And so I guess my question to Tyler is, you know, which side of this do you tend to fall on? Do you think sort of 10 years from now the economy will be significantly lower because of all the investment we're not doing,

because of all the debt overhang we're going to have? Or do you think 10 years from now the economy will basically be what it would have been anyway, because we'll shoot back up to sort of a production frontier? I think the big problem is the two or three years of uncertainty ahead of us. And if there's no good vaccine, it could be more than that. So if what the coronavirus was, was a letter that comes in the mail and lists all the names of the people who will die or suffer.

And you knew right away, people in the economy would get on with things. But if you have several years, you don't know which sectors are bouncing back, when they're bouncing back. Should you try to hold on to your restaurant business? Or should you go drive a truck for Amazon? That will cause a global Great Depression. Now, how well can we bounce back from that? If we do everything rationally, I think you're right, in 10 years, we could be back to where we would have been. But if you look at the last Great Depression we had, we made some big, big mistakes in the 30s. And I don't just mean Nazi Germany, a lot of the world went screwy. So I don't think anyone knows

which of those is going to happen. Tyler, you follow this closely, maybe Yasha does too. Where are you on hydrochloroquine, remdesivir and the other proposed therapies for this? Well, I don't give medical advice, but I would say there are no clear studies showing they actually work. They might work, but there really is not the evidence there right now. So I wouldn't count on that. But again, consult medical advice if you're thinking about actual treatment. What about Lysol? Oh, that's a good question too.

So you're less optimistic about these things panning out than you might have once been or no? I think over the course of the next two years or even less there's a very good chance that some kind of antiviral treatment will work and that is what I hear secondhand from people who know much more than I do. But if you're asking any single one of those drugs I think clearly you should bet on the no. But there are many under investigation. And the chance of something coming through and say a 10-day hospital stay becomes a three-day stay and the death rate is cut in half, the chance of that's probably pretty good. Pretty good.

Pretty good, but not like 90% pretty good. But you might take an even money bet on that, say. By the way, how dumb is it to wonder in the private of my own mind about treating the lungs directly with bleach or some other chemical in order to kill the virus? Again, I'm not a medical expert, but from what I've read, the virus can attack many parts of your body, not just the lungs. The liver, the nervous system, the gastrointestinal system, your heart. So it's not just about the lungs. If it were that easy, we'd be in better shape.

Yeah, because I'm going to admit that, although I don't think he should have said it out loud, I was like, well, if they can put a light down the tube into your lungs, why can't they find some way to put the chemical? Anyway, okay. So, Tyler, I read somewhere. It'll come to me where I read, I should have written it down. I think it was like the Cato Institute paper or something. Anyway, a guy named Robert Lucas, a Nobel Prize winning economist,

so you must certainly know who he is. And he said, once you start thinking about growth, it's hard to think about anything else. You familiar with that comment? Sure. I quote that in one of my books, those exact words. Okay. So, and I've been thinking about this. I have a few questions. So there's an Atlantic article like a few days ago that said, quote, the good news is that preventing trans about masks. The good news is that preventing transmission to others through egress is relatively easy. That research shows that even a cotton mask dramatically reduces the number of virus particles emitted from our mouths by as much as 99%. So I wondered immediately, if we had started wearing masks in February, just masks, given the way the growth compounds, how different would our situation be by now? I don't think I would endorse that 99% number, but fewer people would be dead and we would be in a much better position. We'd have more time to plan looking forward. What seems to work with

masks is when both people wear them. That's when you get the benefits. So I was out today. It's more of a norm. Just to jump in on that, I think that's a really interesting case where there's a deep danger of public health experts sort of playing or scientists playing public policy. I think what essentially happened is that, you know, people knew that masks weren't 100 percent effective. And there was a kind of moral hazard argument going on in the back of the minds of people at the CDC and other public health authorities. And what they're basically saying is if we tell people that they can wear masks and they'll be fine, then they won't be taking this pandemic seriously. Then perhaps people will rush out to buy a bunch of these masks, and we're not going to be able to get them to doctors and nurses that need them most urgently.

So let's discourage people from wearing those masks. And they weren't thinking about human ingenuity. We weren't thinking about the fact that even if you're not going to be having an N95 mask, you can rig up a very simple mask at home quite easily. And that might make a real difference. We weren't thinking about the fact that if everybody had been buying masks two months earlier, and it was obvious that there would be a lot more masks in demand than various companies would have gotten in the game of trying to expand production of masks early on. So I think it's one of those weird things where instead of sort of sticking to

the scientific truth, a bunch of these authorities, sort of understandable reasons, were trying to think, well, if we talk up masks, it's going to have all these bad consequences. But they weren't actually public policy experts. They weren't actually very good at predicting what kind of impact it would have on the world. And I think that's a real failing in this situation, one that we should ask real questions about. Well, I have two questions about that. The first thing, just to hone in on it, because I really am fascinated by this. If, let's say, we found that if everybody wore cotton masks, it would decrease the chances of spreading the disease by 15%. Maybe that's reasonable. Over the course of the eight weeks that it spread like wildfire, if you work backwards, how much does that change the picture. Well, Tyler... Am I asking a logical question? Sure, is it a question?

The answer is probably unknowable. Well, he can probably give us an approximation or something, or maybe not. Well, I think you need to break down the fatalities into a number of different groups. So a significant percentage of the people who have died are in nursing homes, right? And I'm not sure that masks there would have done nearly as much good. We need to somehow reform how those nursing homes are run. In New York State, if they try to send a coronavirus patient into a nursing home, the nursing home can't send them away. They have to take them. That is insane, right? It's like literally feeding someone to the tigers. Now, if you mean what you might call normal, ordinary transmission in supermarkets and restaurants, I suspect if everyone were wearing masks, the effect there would be significantly greater than just 15% reduction.

You might, in the long run, through exponential growth, end up with the same problem. But again, the point is you would have much longer to prepare, to have testing in place, expand hospital capacity, teach people how to do lockdown the right way. So a lot of these interventions are about buying time. But when you buy time, you can't squander it. You'd better put it to good use. That's why you can't say mathematically how much good it would do in the long run,

because we're not sure what people would have done with the extra time. Does that make sense? Go ahead. Sorry. Does that make sense as an answer? Yeah. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. The flip side is what Yasha made me think of. For instance, de Blasio was telling people, I think I'm right, not to wear masks, that masks won't help you. If they were actually doing that to save, to take pressure off the protective equipment of the doctors, and they, in other words, they weren't telling us the truth. Is that ethical? Because I had masks. Maybe I didn't wear my mask that I'd already bought because the mayor told me it won't help me, and maybe I'll get sick and die from that. Is it okay for them to tell us stuff less than the truth? No, of course not. I think it's clearly immoral for a political leader to do that.

And I think in this particular case, it was also sort of penny wise pound foolish. It seemed to perhaps solve a problem in a very short run, but actually by increasing a whole different set of problems in the long run. So if it does turn out that masks are relatively effective at containing the pandemic, or at least of reducing the spread of the disease, and if a lot of public health authorities had good reason to know that, and at this point, it seems like the answer

to both those questions is yes, then I think there should be real political consequences for people who decided to go that path. Or maybe even lost it. My wife is from the Soviet Union and her hypothesis is, since they didn't have enough masks for us,

they had to tell us masks weren't any good. A bit like the Soviet commissar. It's like, oh, there's no meat today. Meat's not that good for you anyway. I wonder if you think, I was going to raise the point about the masks too, which was, you know, the messaging we got was that masks didn't work for the first two months, which never quite made sense because you also had people saying that there aren't enough masks and the nurses need them. But if they work for the nurses, wouldn't they sort of work for us at least, even if not to the same extent? But do you think there are any situations in a pandemic where it does make sense to lie to the public because the public is irrational? Oh, that's a big question. I mean, I think if things are truly hopeless or look truly helpless, that maybe a leader, you know, should be firm and more that, to some extent, was a self-fulfilling prophecy. So I do think leaders should do that in emergencies. Is that twisting the truth? Maybe somewhat. But I don't have a problem with leaders doing that. That's a bit different from an outright lie and keeping truths from people that will save their lives. I don't think I would ever favor that.

I think there's a way of, you know, you don't want to build systems around hard cases. So I think in moral philosophy, we have a tendency to think about the really hard case and then try to derive a principle from it, right? And of course course I can come up with some kind of context in which a political leader should lie. Let's say that the political leader is asked in a press conference whether they have a lead on the whereabouts of a very dangerous terrorist. And for some reason they can't. If they clearly evade answering the question, then that would send a signal to the terrorist group

that they do, in fact, know where these people are. And it's going to make it much less likely that they're able to apprehend this dangerous terrorist. Under those circumstances, do I think a leader should lie? Sure. And you can come up with similar circumstances around a pandemic, I'm sure. I think the point, though, is both that in a democracy,

we should trust people to have good judgments on important things in the end. I think most of the time that is proving to be true. And some of that data that Tyler was talking about, about how people are actually behaving in Sweden, indicates that, I think. And I think we should also be careful not to overestimate our ability to gather the likely consequences of a lie. My problem with the people who said masks don't work is not so much that they were willing to lie. If they were rightly convinced that they would save thousands of American lives, I wouldn't be particularly annoyed by it. My problem was that they were really naive about what the impact was going to be of telling people a half-assed lie that anybody with a little bit of logic has reason to doubt and that has all kinds of downstream consequences

that are very difficult to assess. So, you know, the question is not, could there be some circumstance in which lying is fine? The point is that in a democracy, most of the time, the political leaders are going to win, who, or not win elections, but do the right thing, who trust the populations, who can speak with them as adults, and who don't overestimate their own ability to spin some kind of noble lie that's going to have positive consequences. I don't know that the mask lie was necessarily a lie, at least as far as the information that they had, because there's this notion that if you don't wear the mask properly, if you touch it, if you reuse it, it can actually be worse for you. So that improper use of a mask can make the likelihood of getting COVID higher. And so I think they were basing their recommendation on that idea.

I don't think that's, that's not how I read it. What I read it as, it's not an effective protection mechanism. It only, you know, protects you somewhat. And so therefore telling people to wear masks is going to make them feel like they're safe or like they're invulnerable. And that's a problem. So I think it's more a moral hazard argument they're making. On the question of masks, there's all sorts of GoFundMe things that are popping up where people

claim to have special access to getting masks and they're asking people to donate money. And I am wondering if these well-intentioned people injecting themselves into this market are helping or hurting. Are they just bidding up the price, encouraging manufacturers to hoard masks, or are they doing something good? Anybody have any comments? You should mention, by the way, that this is an argument you've been having with Perriel now for the past several episodes. I actually don't know. I don't know if Tyler, Yasha, Coleman have any opinion on this? A lot of those are frauds. So they're ripoffs because people feel desperate. So I would be very careful supporting any of those. I think legitimate mask supply at higher

prices is a great thing. I don't have any grudge against the higher prices. It's what we need to do to get the greater supply. But just be very, very careful, whether it's masks or ultraviolet light or someone selling you a new medication. Don't underestimate how much fraud is out there, including from businesses from China. What scenario can you imagine where a major hospital like NYU wouldn't have access to a major manufacturer of masks, but some small business owner, fashion designer in Florida would be able to get these masks? It doesn't make sense to me, but maybe. Personal contacts in China, it's possible. But so many people in China that actually used to sell drugs, fentanyl, they're making bad masks

that don't work well, or they're making other defective products and selling them to people who think they have some kind of tricky connection. So some of it's legit, but again, a lot of it's a ripoff. And what if you had those masks and they were vetted by doctors in the US? Go ahead. No, go ahead. I don't want to suck them into our argument. What are we here for? Go ahead. What if they had masks and they were vetted by doctors? Go ahead. You open this can of worms, my friend. Okay, go ahead. So a few people I know, myself included, have been doing this with vendors that we either know or don't know. And starting with small orders and getting them directly into the hands of doctors and ICU nurses. And then once those have been determined to be legit, have been doing larger orders. And what I'm hearing from all of these ER doctors, ICU doctors,

is that we've been doing it much more quickly. It's not that we have some special power, but that they're getting through the bureaucracy of it all. And I've been sending Noam endless text messages. Okay, you're right. Sorry, what? I'm what? No, you're not right. What I'm saying is that it seemed to me, and I could be wrong, that if I had access to a mask supplier in China

right now, rather than start a GoFundMe and raise money, I would call up whoever's in charge of procurement at a major hospital and say, listen, call this guy in China. He can get you masks. I know him. If you have any problem, I'll vouch for it. And that would seem to be the efficient way to do it rather than wait for people to donate money and all that. You know, they have the money ready and they can pull the trigger on orders. That's all. Anyway, next one.

It's illegal for the hospital to do that. They don't have legal clearance. Whereas if a thinly capitalized individual entrepreneur flying under the radar, so to speak, does the same thing, they can get away with it. Tyler, if you're going to take Ariel's side, I'm really going to be upset. It sounds like that's what's going on. To be clear, it's not even thinly veiled capitalism. It's total transparency. Nobody I know is taking a cent out of any of this. Okay. Maybe I was wrong. What was the other thing? I'm signing off now.

Let's go back to the beginning. What went wrong with the testing? And to what extent is Trump responsible for it? Who knows about that? There were two long articles recently in the Washington Post and New York Times about what went wrong with testing. There were defects long articles recently in the Washington Post and New York Times about what went wrong with testing. There were defects in the testing process at the CDC facility in Atlanta,

and the tests didn't work, and they were contaminated. And then there were other lingering FDA restrictions on other methods of testing. And to get the whole mess cleared up has taken us till about now. So we're way behind on testing. And in the meantime, other countries bought up some of the key materials and were somewhat screwed. That's my in a nutshell version of what happened. And I do have a follow up on that, Tyler, that I'd love to hear your thoughts on, which is around the performance of the CDC and the FDA and other agencies like that.

I mean, I think broadly speaking, there's sort of three sets of views you could have on it. One, that they've actually performed reasonably well, despite a couple of big fuck-ups. The second, that they didn't perform well because they are well set up to do sort of business as usual. A pandemic is not business as usual. So you need a political leadership in order to coordinate those actions. And that obviously wasn't there because of the Trump administration. And then the third is that it's really sort of, you know, these institutions are much less good than we thought. The efficacy of the CDC and the FDA is much worse than we thought. And we should actually have reason to distrust those

institutions going forward. So how damning do you think the performance of the FDA and the CDC has been? And what does that mean for how much we would need to reform them if, say, we had a more competent administration in the White House? I think it's very damning of the CDC and the FDA, and they need radical reform as quickly as possible. I do think the Trump administration performance has been awful. But keep in mind, the Democratic candidates were holding mass rallies, you know, up till the day Trump made his big speech. So we've had failures at many, many levels here. It's not just about Trump, though, again, the blame there, I think, is completely justified.

So go into further, give us more detail about what Trump, what a better president would have done differently and how that would have impacted testing and anything else that you hold him accountable for. Well, I think three countries that have done a better job are Singapore, Germany, and New Zealand. Getting back to your question about lying, leadership in all of those countries told the truth. They told it in a sober fashion, an objective fashion. They showed respect for science. They impressed people with the gravity of the situation and actually avoided panic and did a lot of preparation in advance. So there's no reason why we could not have come closer

to the performance of those countries. Like there is a recipe. We see the other examples now. It's not some mystery why they did a better job. And we didn't. And you've got to blame the people in power for that. And of course, Trump is at the top of that pyramid. So, because I had argued with Yasha,

and I'm still not clear on how a president, I agree with you about all the other things and his manner and all those things. As a matter of fact, at the time, something like the fact that nobody had checked the ventilators, even once we knew we might need them, nobody checked to make sure they were working after being in storage for so long. That seems to be very much what a good president kind of thinks he'd be thinking. But if there's a highly technical defect in the tests, I likened it to blaming Reagan for the Challenger explosion. How would a president know that the testing was defective? Well, yeah, I think that's the wrong thing to focus on, right? I mean, one thing that I find striking right now is that we don't, so far as I can understand, have a real national effort to ramp up our testing capacity and put a test and trace system into place. I mean, in all of those kinds of, Tyler mentioned, where we have a relatively rational response, it is organized and coordinated at the federal level. Now, you can involve states and municipalities

and private companies in all kinds of different ways, but you've got to be somebody who is leading this response saying, all right, here's the four things we need to accomplish. This we can delegate to this person, this we can delegate to this entity, but somebody at the center is actually responsible for making sure all of it happens. it is i'm unspeakable i mean a great crime of humanity and just one of the great failures of government but the united states federal government is not doing that at this point now when it comes to things no my understanding is that essentially i mean you know the information from the white house changes from day to day but my understandingistana essentially say, no, we can, you know, the states can figure that out. We're not really doing it in a central way.

Now, the other thing when it comes to the tests that you're talking about is, you know, you've got to have somebody who's behind this saying, what are the tests that are happening? You know, how are we ramping this up? How are we validating this? Could there still be a screw up where they think the test works and it doesn't? Sure. But at that point, the political leadership would step in and say, well, why don't we use the WHO test now that the other one has messed up? Why don't we force the FDA to actually allow private labs to develop their own tests? Because clearly we are not able to produce these ones at scale. So you can still have screw-ups in that kind of situation.

I agree with you. If the scientists at the FDA, at the CDC, sorry, messed up and just created a test that doesn't work, you know, President Barack Obama or whoever his special COVID-19 czar might have been would not necessarily have known that either. They would have had mechanisms in place to react in a much more rational way to that failure once it became evident. And here we didn't actually react to the failure for a long time.

Well, when did they lift the restrictions and allow the private sector to essentially get into this testing stuff? That was pretty close to after they found out they were defective, right? That's a matter of degree. There are different kinds of tests. Some of them just got clearance, say, a week ago, and now a lot of the materials are hard to get. But I would make a broader point. Like I've been saying since 2004, our federal government should spend much more money and time in pandemic preparation. And it's hardly been me as a lone voice. Bill Gates has said this, many, many other people. And our government, since Bush too, just has not done that. So the stock of masks ran down under Obama,

and the Obama administration did not replenish it. That's partly their fault, but neither did the Trump administration. So just many small things we let dribble away. And then when the actual event happened, we weren't ready for it. So if we... had been a reasonable expectation for a common president. How would our situation be different today? I blame the bureaucracy more than Trump,

though I think Trump did a bad job on it. Fewer Americans would have died. We don't know how many fewer. And we would just have much better data about what we should do next. So right now, we're not even sure how many people have been infected. We're not sure what the death rate is. There's so much about this we don't know, and to make further decisions, if we knew that, if we had had more testing behind us, we would today be making better decisions. I feel known that Coleman is being underutilized. Yeah, Coleman,

yeah. Is there any particular aspect of this that Coleman has a particular expertise or curiosity about? And we can go in that direction. I have a question for Coleman after he speaks. I have a curiosity about how much of the failure of the CDC and the FDA is attributable to the inherent constraints of bureaucracy and the inherent incentives of bureaucracy, and how much is attributable to factors particular to the CDC and the FDA? Does that make sense? That's a question for me. My answer would be the countries that were hit hard by SARS earlier had well-prepared bureaucracies, but most of Western Europe also did not. So whether you had the prior emergency seems to be the most predictive variable. Right. A prior emergency functions analogously like a vaccine.

Like 9-11, right? Now we're somewhat ready for further terrorist attacks. Yeah, I had said to somebody, you have to be bitten once before you can be twice shy, and Asia has been bitten a little bit. So they, I mean, we won't, we'll jump on it next time. I have this, and then I'll move on from this. I've had this kind of simplistic notion, just from my own point of view,

that no matter what went wrong all along, it was clear to me sometime in the middle of March when Yasha was writing these great articles in the Atlantic, cancel everything now, it was almost like a hashtag you had. That at that moment. It did in fact become a nationally trending hashtag on Twitter. I think the only time that has happened to me, or I hope that it shall happen to me. When did you write that? March what? I'm not sure. Second week of March, I think.

And at that point, no matter what had come before, we could have compensated for it all by just shutting everything down then. And that's why in my heart, I blame someone I like and admire kind of the governor of New York, because I suppose New Jersey area as well could have been avoided if Cuomo had, if they had shut down New York a week or two earlier. And if we had had 50 to 80% fewer deaths in this neighborhood, I think we'd be ahead of Germany maybe in terms of our overall situation vis-a-vis this virus, meaning that we could have been the best in the Western world if not for that one moment in time when our local government didn't do it. So I disagree with you actually, Noam.

So I have to say that in the days after I read that article, I really felt, I felt had impact, the feelings, you write something, even if a bunch of people read it, you don't really know sort of what the influence of it is. I mean, this, I can't publicly say what, but, but, you know, I heard reliably that some very, very large organizations canceled events in part because their bosses read that particular article. And I've heard the same from a lot of small things. And at that point, my sense really was if we shut down a lot of things, not quite in the way we've done the shutdown, but certainly canceled exporting events, certainly have

white collar workers working from home as far as possible and so on. Right now, it'll buy us the time to slow the spread of the disease, to make sure that hopefully we develop a more effective treatment and that we put a test and trace regime into place. So in those days, I thought, honestly, that that article may have saved some lives. In retrospect, I'm less sure of that.

And the reason for that is that, so far as I can see, we're not doing nearly enough to actually use the time that the shutdown is buying us in order to put the test and trace regime into place. It so happens that some of the early hopes for effective treatments, like remdesivir and Trump's favorite drugs don't seem to be panning out. And so it's not clear to me that it's made such a difference because we're not going to be in lockdown forever. We failed to do our homework to use that godsend time in order to actually improve our ability to manage the pandemic. And so right now I'm less pessimistic than I was a month ago that, you know, whether we shut down

on Tuesday or Friday or we shut down one week earlier or later, it's going to end up making a difference to the aggregate numbers in the end. Well, I wasn't referring

to the aggregate numbers in the end. I don't know if anything will make a difference. Tyler kind of made that point a little while ago about the difference would be if there's a vaccine

or a treatment that we get. But but what effective system of tests, trace and quarantine? I mean, I think that's perhaps we should talk a little bit more about that. I mean, that's the one hope I have left. But basically in the 12 or 18 or however long many months it takes until we have hopefully an effective vaccine, we're going to have to be able to test extremely well, very quickly trace the contacts of people who may have been exposed, and then actually effectively make sure, whatever that means, I have big question marks about that,

that they quarantine themselves in such a way that they don't then, in fact, the next person. I think that is good evidence from South Korea and Singapore, that that can at least limit the spread of a virus to some significant extent. The question is, what does that have to look like? And will we get there? Also, we're learning more about who's vulnerable and how it's spread. Whether it's spread mostly indoors,

whether it can be spread if you're outside jogging, this information. What do you think about all that, Tyler? There's increasing evidence that the outdoors are safer than we had thought and that the indoors are riskier than we had thought. I don't want to encourage anyone to be reckless in the outdoors, but those are the studies I'm seeing coming in. And what about contact tracing? Does that work in America? I don't know. I mean, the countries that have done the best with tracking and tracing, the people who test positive,

they forcibly separate them from their families and from their lives. I don't see America being willing to do that, for better or worse. And we now have so many cases. You do best with track and trace if you start early when the number of cases is small and you keep the thing localized and somewhat isolated. So I still strongly favor doing as much testing as we can and trying to trace people. But I'm not sure we will in the U.S. see the successes we're seeing elsewhere. I think we have to try it, but I'm growing more skeptical about that every day. What are we, what are we, what we're seeing in Sweden, what is that telling us

about, if anything, about whether we can loosen the lockdown, maybe do social distancing in a more relaxed way like they are doing? Sweden is pursuing a policy that is a huge gamble. There's much less of a forcible lockdown. People are still mingling more. If you look at data on mobility of individuals taken from their cell phones, people in Sweden are mingling with each other more than are, say, people in California. I think we still don't know what are the results of that experiment. Sweden so far has a death rate right in the middle of other European nations. But when you have an exponentially rising disease or the potential for that, I think it's very dangerous to issue judgments until the whole thing is over. So there's a chance Sweden works out fine or okay. There's a chance they end up

with a much higher death rate than peer countries. I would say we don't know yet, but we should be watching it very carefully. And just one addition to that, it depends a little bit on your definition of a peer country, which is a basic problem in social science. If you compare the Swedish death rate to Scandinavian neighbors, it is actually multiples higher per capita already. Wow. I mean, that seems like a very important distinction, no? But why would we necessarily want to compare it just to other Scandinavian nations and not to the whole of Europe? What is unique about Scandinavian nations, if any, that they should be in their own separate category for comparison?

Well, so that's why I think it's not a straightforward question who you do want to compare to. I mean, they do have populations that are probably more similar in terms of urban and rural structure, more similar kind of living arrangements, more similar public health system. Perhaps to some extent, more similar genetics for whether or not that matters, I think is very much an open question. But that's just something, you know, whenever you're trying to figure out cause and effect, you need to find the right composing group. And there's often arguments to be made both ways. If you take all of the different European countries into account, it gives you greater information. You have more cases to compare to.

But if you just look at, you know, Denmark and Norway, those places are obviously more similar to Sweden than Italy or Poland or Greece. And so there's an argument to restricting it for that. I haven't studied this particular case strongly enough to have a very strong view on which of the two we should be doing. I just wanted to offer this sort of additional piece of information. And again, you need to look at the long run. It could be what Sweden has done has gotten the worst over with, and Denmark and Norway will catch up.

I would insist that we don't know yet. There's also the separate nursing home problem. Some of Sweden's mistakes came in how they handled their nursing homes. And that has nothing to do with the more liberal lockdown policies there. You said something similar earlier, and I was a little skeptical of that, which is to say that surely one question is how do you make sure that once

a nursing home is exposed to the virus, it doesn't sort of kill everybody within it. But another question is how likely are nursing homes to have contact with the virus in the first place? And presumably, the more the virus spreads for the general population, the more likely it is that somebody who's coming in and out of that nursing home, either as an employee or in order to deliver food or whatever else, might actually have a coronavirus. So it seems to me that those two cases aren't as separate as you seem to portray them as, Tyler. That's possible. The Swedes say, well, they have larger nursing homes than the other Nordic nations. And therefore, that it's in nursing homes than the other Nordic nations. And therefore, that it's in nursing homes at all has meant more nursing home deaths in Sweden. And again, it may be a matter of timing.

If Denmark and Norway don't have a way of fixing their nursing home problems, they may end up catching up to Sweden. What do you mean by the long run? How much time is that? Is that like six months, 12 months? Many experts think there'll be a second wave in the late fall, early winter that could possibly be worse. Again, I don't think we know, but people are reckoning with that as the baseline scenario. And the long run would be that second wave, the Spanish flu, even had a third wave, albeit a milder one. And if there's no vaccine, possibly no complete immunity, then all bets are off. So Tyler, you had something in Marginal Revolution not that long ago, which talked about how herd immunity might be reached at a lower percentage if it takes into account that a small percentage of the population has the most social

contacts. You recall that? Sure, of course. I think about this every day. So how does that, now New York had a study, New York City recently had a study that showed 20% supposedly have the antibodies, although that could be a distorted number. What do you think a 20% already infected New York City, how does that change how dangerous it will be to walk around in New York City for the people who are normally walking around? What you commonly hear is that for herd immunity, you might need 40 to 60% of people to have been exposed to the virus. But if there's a subset of people, they spend all their time in clubs, they shake hands with others, they hug them, they kiss them on the cheek and so on, and they're super

social, possibly, and again, this is speculative, but if those people have been exposed early, you might have more herd immunity than it appears from the aggregate number. I would stress, it seems no one knows the answer there, but that's an optimistic scenario if it is true. A follow-up on the antibody studies. So, you know, the New York study seems to say that about 13.9% of people in New York State have had the virus at this point. There's also a few studies that put it much, much lower,

including one from Santa Clara County that's been heavily criticized, one from Miami-Dade County, which I've seen less discussion of. Those numbers really matter, right? If you take the New York State number of people who are supposedly infected, and the number of people who have already died in New York State, and you basically derive an infection fatality rate and then project it to the United States, it means that about two million people would die by the time we lead herd immunity. If you're pessimistic about what percentage of people have to have exposure to it in order to reach herd immunity, perhaps a million if you're more optimistic about that as Tyler appears to be or at least consider. Now, when

you look at some of those studies in Miami-Dade County, Santa Clara County, it could be much lower. It could be two to 500,000, two to 400,000. Do you have any views of whether it will shake out and how relevant that is for decision-making at this point, Tyler? Yeah, my sense is the window of really fixing this problem passed some time ago, and the scenario where no matter what we do, 40 to 60% of our population may end up exposed. And we're just hoping the advances on the biomedical front are quick enough. That's my baseline scenario, that we veer back and forth from one bad policy to the next. We never quite execute well on any of them. And we're just hoping our scientists

come through big time. They may or may not. But right now, that's what I'm expecting. That it's too late to fix this through policy. So you're saying you wouldn't even have, if I would ask you what your recommendation is, you wouldn't necessarily have one or you wouldn't have a good one anyway, at this point, if going forward from today. Well, I don't think we can just do away with the lockdown, but I do think we need to think about how we might start relaxing it or our economy will collapse. And that will eat into our future public health capacity, say a year from now. But you can't just bring your economy back by waving a magic wand and saying the lockdown is over. People are afraid.

So we just don't have that many good options right now. Once again, I feel Coleman's being underutilized. I'll ask Coleman a question. So Coleman, you're a young guy. If they were to allow it, would you go to a comedy club next week? It would very much depend on what my friends are doing that's kind of a circular answer but it would matter to me if all my friends thought i was a dick for doing it but that would be that would be if i'm if insofar as i'm at all on the pulse of what people in my age bracket are are thinking that would be the only constraint, social disapproval.

It wouldn't really, there wouldn't be so much worry about me personally getting infected, particularly because I'm not living with anyone 50 or above. Those would be really the two constraints. You see all the giving your age and your health that you don't run a huge risk of severe illness, which is probably true. Right.

What numbers do you plug into that equation? The chance of dying if you get it times the chance of getting it. What does that come out to in terms of your risk of this? The chance of getting it, let's say, what, 50% in the next year or two? Chance of dying if I get it has to be like less than 0.6%. Maybe one-tenth of 1% if you're as healthy as you look. Yeah.

I have no comorbidities. What are the chances of getting it and if not dying, suffering gravely? That's something that's sort of been running through my mind. Nobody cares about that. I don't care about that.

Speak for yourself. Well, I mean, kids get horrible hangovers every weekend just from drinking too much. And they do what they go, but they keep going back to it, you know. We're not shutting the economy down because everybody's going to get really sick and recover, you know,

to me, anyway. I would go to work. But it's a factor. I mean, when I think about getting it, I don't think my chances of being killed are very high. But some of the stories I've read, some people sail right through it, like Avi Lieberman got it. He got the antibody test. He weaseled his way through it in two days with relatively mild symptoms. Other people, I'm reading utter horror stories. I don't know how common they are. I mean, can we talk about the fact that every single doctor and healthcare professional is begging people to stay home? Like, doesn't that factor in here? No, we're just talking. Hold on. Hold on. Because this comes to the question I think we do want to talk about, which is what's going to happen once they allow people to leave the house?

I'm kind of skeptical that anybody's going to want to come to the Comedy Cellar anymore. I wouldn't. I'm heartened to hear that Coleman might. Tyler has speculated publicly that he thinks comedy clubs may never come back as they were,

or might take a long time. And Yasha is more optimistic. So why don't we ask Yasha, tell me why you're more optimistic and then we'll let Tyler pour cold water on you. Yeah. Well, let me say something first of all, empirically and then normatively. So empirically, look, I think as soon as people feel that they are not personally at risk, and that as Coleman was saying, we're not going to be sort of judged horribly morally for what they're doing, social life is going to go right back. I used to read with amazement at the time when you had huge rates of suicide bombings in Baghdad about people who would go out to the market,

they would go out to cafes, even though they had this risk of this violent death that was very, very real. And the reason is that people are wired to want social connection, to want to have normal lives, to want to enjoy their lives. And if you're asking me, you know, a year after the vaccine exists, are there going to be fewer people going to clubs and restaurants and so on than there are today? I am adamant that the answer is no. We're going to go right back to it. And in fact, there may even be a surfeit of social activity as people are catching up and compensating for the time they've spent locked inside.

Now, on the moral question, you know, I took a very strong moral stance in the early weeks of March that it is truly immoral for people to go outside and risk infecting others. But that was at a time when it really looked like we were about to overwhelm our healthcare systems and in which it seemed that people staying at home may help us completely contain this pandemic and put in place treatments and test and trace measures that save scores and course of lives. I have to say right now I'm sort of torn

because I think the facts are starting to change to some extent. But if we were in a situation like in South Korea or like hopefully will be soon in Germany, where we're far from overwhelming the healthcare system, we have pretty good test and trace measures in place. And so obviously there's a risk of contracting the virus if you go out,

and obviously there's a risk of giving it to some other people if you go out. We are minimizing those risks in an effective way. Then I think the moral question would be very different from what it was in early March. And then it might be perfectly reasonable for people to go out to restaurants and to go out to comedy clubs if they're willing to take that personal risk. Because we've determined as a society that at that moment, you know, we can control the virus to some extent. And we've decided not to shut down life for many years to come. So I think,

you know, when I said cancel everything, and when I said, if you go into the beach on spring break in South Florida in the middle of March, you are deeply immoral person. That was because of this very specific situation we're in then. I'm not sure that applies today. Perhaps to some extent, I hope it will no longer apply in a month or two. And Tyler is very, very pessimistic about things getting better. Very, very, but I think less pessimistic than that, but I won't characterize it. Go ahead, Tyler. Well, I agree that once we have a good vaccine, everything will come back, but that could take several years. It's not even a guarantee. And in the meantime, people will do things where they perceive they're more in control.

So people need socializing. But the dinner party of five people or the walk on the beach, I don't think it will be NBA games and comedy clubs that will feel most safe to people. That might even be irrational. But humans, in the early stages of a problem, they underestimate risk, and then for a long time afterwards, they seem to overestimate risk, as we've done with the TSA and flying and terror attacks and so on. So I'm more worried than you are. But I agree, if a good vaccine is here, and that's certain, you know, then we're fine. How do you know if you've

overestimated risk if you've taken such strong measures? How do you know it's because of the strong measures that prevented the terrible outcomes? I was wondering, is it because we foiled so much terrorism that it feels like we overreacted, or do we actually overreact? Maybe we don't know, but the TSA kept a lot of procedures in place for a long time, whether or not they were justified. And we might do the same with protective measures against coronavirus. Bureaucracies are slow to react. There's status quo bias. Decisions are hard to reverse. People don't want to be blamed for the spread of whatever. I just think it will take quite a while.

And in the meantime, you have a lot of thinly capitalized restaurants, other entertainment venues, some of which will go away forever. The entrepreneurs will do other things. The staff will disperse. Immigration to this country will be much harder to pull off. That will hurt personnel, especially in New York City, a great deal. So I think just the immigration effects will hurt personnel, especially in New York City, a great deal. So I think just the immigration effects will hurt many, many entertainment centers who rely on immigrants to be workers. I have a tough question.

How will intergenerational homes, multigenerational homes negotiate this? I can kind of figure that the younger homes will just go and go back to normal and the older homes will try to back to normal and the older homes will try to stay home as much as they can. But here I'm 57, I'm on the borderline of higher risk and I have little kids and they have to go to school. And many homes have grandparents that live there. Can anybody think of any workable routines that these homes can adopt to protect the older people from the younger people? And wives are more risk averse than husbands on average, right? Yes.

That seems like an intractable problem. I don't know if anybody has any thoughts on it. I'm scared of it. Let's say four people would have gone to a comedy club. You need all four to agree to still go. And if one says, oh, I'm not comfortable, let's do a picnic instead. Those people will do a picnic. Right.

What Tyler seems to be saying is Noam needs to find another revenue stream. Yes, he did say that. Or be prepared for a smaller one. And I don't know what I'm going to do about my son. I'm going to send my kids to school. And anybody who's a parent knows there is no way you're not going to catch it from your kids. You can't, your kids are going to sneeze on you and they're going to hug you and they're going to, you know, social distancing is not going to happen with kids. I'm really worried about that. All right. Let me ask one more follow-up question around this, which is,

you know, the original approach of the British government was to say, you know, we'll just lock away the old people. And now in different ways, a bunch of governments are starting to say that. And I can see the pull of that position, right? If you're saying, hey, we do actually have good evidence that people below a certain age cutoff without comorbidities just have much, much, much lower risk of dying from the disease. It's becoming obvious that this may be with us for a year or many years. We can't shut down the economy for three years. So perhaps we protect them as vulnerable and everybody else can go through their lives. I've been pretty skeptical of this position

because I just think it'll be so hard to do. I'm just going to tell grandpas not to see their grandkids for a year or two. I just don't think that's going to happen. But I wonder whether other people think that there is a way of trying to make this protection of the vulnerable and reopening for everybody else work in a more substantial way

than I'm giving it credit for. Well, I think the idea is that if the herd immunity is reached within some reasonable timeframe, that the older folks will be protected that way. I believe that's the reason. Well, you would think that old people wouldn't be needed to, we would need to order them to protect themselves. You think they would do that on their own to the extent that they can. I'm with you. I don't think there's any way. That's kind of what I'm describing in the multi-generational home.

There's just no way. It's scary. It's my biggest fear now. It's like, what happens in September? I have to send my kids to school. I have to. I'm just going to have to take that chance. All right. We're kind of out of time. I wanted to share just a little thing. And Tyler probably has something to say about it. I've often told friends that we, I was kind of defending Trump one time, that we business people don't

really respect the law because the law for us too often is a bunch of well-intentioned rules, the unintended consequences of which we make our living trying to get around. And that's what every business owner ends up feeling like. Well, how come I can't do this? How come I can't do that? And these are all moral, smart things to do. Since this all began, I just want to share. I was advised not to close prior to the government order. Yasha remembers began, I just want to share. I was advised not to close prior to the government order. Yasha remembers this. I wanted to close early. I quoted a little bit

from my lawyer. Employers should consult with counsel to determine whether potential layoff decisions or even cutting workers' hours would trigger noncompliance penalties in New York. I was advised that I can't take the temperatures of my employees. I can't ask them to take their own temperatures and I can't even buy thermometers and leave them around for them to use voluntarily. I was told that I cannot lend money to employees should one of them need help. I was told that I can't start a GoFundMe for my employees. And if someone else does start one,

I'm not allowed to have any input in how it's distributed because I can get sued for discrimination. And there's more stuff. And I would say, how do we measure the effects of all these rules on our economy, on our ability to react to things quickly, to how much humane behavior is being prevented by this crazy stack of regulations. I know Tyler thinks about this from time to time. I don't know. You got anything to say about that? I would just say our regulatory state has been failing us. And those are further examples, many of which I had not been aware of previously. But we have too many laws. I mean, it's unbelievable. Okay, well, I'll just get some thermometers and let them take their own temperatures at the beginning of the shift. Now, maybe my lawyer is, and the truth is I disregarded a lot of that legal advice because I just felt that this was, no one was going to get in trouble for this.

And lawyers are very, very cautious because they don't want to ever get sued, I guess. But this is the advice that everybody was getting, you know, and it was just, it's just horrible. All right. Can I ask one more question? Does everybody have to go? Can I ask Coleman one question? Sure.

I've called coronavirus the greatest psychometric test of all time. Like productive people have become more productive. Other people react in the opposite direction. What have you observed from your friends and your peers? How have they taken this? So I would, I guess I would separate it into people who, people for whom quarantine, the lifestyle of quarantine was not so much of a huge departure from their day to day because they're introverts they're info vores they're obsessed with whatever their thing is whether it's writing music whatever and people for whom the opposite is true who are

socialites always meeting people for the second category it's it's made them less productive, definitely, and less happy. For the first category, it's mostly made them more productive and in many cases, a lot more productive. What about you, Coleman? What category are you in? Is that even a question? He's an infivore. Well, I know he's an intellectual. He's an infivore. Well, I know he's intellectually an infivore. He's a musician, and you can do that at home. But I know that he likes to go to the cellar and hang out with his buddies, so I guess he's social as well.

So I'm not sure what category he's in. No, I've definitely become more productive. Productive in terms of your writing? And music. And the music. Are you going out? Like, are you going outside for walks and stuff? Yeah, me and my sister try to go on one walk per day.

Are you in the city, Asha? No, I'm not actually. You want to specify where you are? I'm in front of a blue wall. I find, I mean, I don't know. I'm thinking through what Tyler was saying. I found that I've been going through phases. I was very, very productive in the first few weeks

because I felt very intellectually engaged by what's happening and trying to make sense of it and trying to write about it and think about it. And at the same time, I was trying to improve my Chinese and improve my coding skills. And so, you know, I had this sort of bevy of activity. And then there was about a couple of weeks where the social distance, I was in an apartment on my own, was really taking a toll on me. And I found myself to be quite unproductive for a couple of weeks.

And now I'm sort of in a phase of productivity again. So I wonder sort of my experience, and I've heard this anecdotal from other people, is not sort of a clear effect in one direction or another, but a real cyclical effect, where depending on how you're feeling at a particular moment, it gives you the time to be productive or it sort of makes you a little disengaged from the world i think my productivity

level is probably neither greater nor lesser i will say i am working as many of you know on a novel and i've never written a novel before and if i were a spiritual person, if I believed in cosmic destiny, I would say that God or the universe put me on this path knowing COVID was coming. Because what better thing to be doing for a comic that can't do comedy than the only thing left to do, which is write a novel. All production, movie and TV is down, all comedy is down. The only thing left for a creative person is a novel.

And I had been working on it anyway when COVID struck. So make of that what you will. But could it be that the universe has guided me in this direction? I don't think so, by the way, but if I were that kind of person. We're talking to smart people here, Dan. Nobody believes in that mumbo jumbo. But if I were that kind of person, I'd say, wow, the Lord put,

or somebody put this new goal of mine in my path at just the right moment. And he only killed a couple hundred thousand people, but it's worth it. Yeah, exactly what I'm going to say. All about you, Dan, who killed people just for you. moment. And he only killed a couple hundred thousand people, but it's worth it. Yeah, exactly what I was going to say. What about you, Dan, who killed people just for you? Well, people tend to think that way, you know. Alright, can I just get a quick question?

I'm reading this book by this guy called Nathan Robinson, and the book is called Why You Should Be a Socialist. I just started it. Do you like him all of a sudden because you agree with him about Tara Reid? Well, no. Ah, yes! I heard him on his podcast, and he seemed very bright.

You heard part of it, too. He did seem very bright, so I looked him up. And I had no idea who he was. Anyway, so I started reading the book, and the first chapter, he softens everybody up with his kind of very heart-wrenching observations. And I think I know the answers to this, but I think that these are the kind of things a lot of people wonder about. And he went to Yale Law School and he's asking, so I'm just going to put it out there if anybody can dispose of these quickly. I'll just give a few. He says,

children die of preventable diseases and yet there are forerunneries. There are tens of thousands of homeless people in New York and yet there are tens of thousands of empty luxury condos. Amazon warehouse workers work long, exhaustive hours for little benefits, yet Jeff Bezos has declared he has no idea what he could possibly do with so much money other than build spaceships. What is the quick, and Coleman, you might have an answer to this, what's the quick and easy answer to these when they contrast distribution with abundance? Coleman, you have...

I'm not sure what's the question. When somebody says to you, we have all these homeless people in all these empty homes. We have... Why would you spend any money on yourself when you could be curing people, you could be buying malaria vaccines for people? What do you answer to these kinds of things?

I would say that it's, basically, it depends on where you start, where you start the explanation. If the phenomenon to be explained is why there's wealth at all, then those questions don't seem as upsetting, or at least they make sense more because the systems that create wealth to begin with also tend to create lots of inequality. And the systems that don't create inequality tend to not also not create wealth to begin with

because the human species begins in poverty. So it's not the poverty that needs to be explained. Although obviously there are, there are, you know, there are, there are reasons for poverty, poverty in the trivial sense. But when you ask the deep question, the more, the better question is why everyone is wealthy to begin with. Is your question, why doesn't jeff bezos give away more money how can he justify morally let's take let's take the what was the first one um did i lose it already uh why uh oh my god i'm sorry ferraris and why why yeah why

well let's say why are the 10 what do you say when you say there's 10,000, there's tens of thousands of homeless people in New York, and yet there were tens of thousands of empty luxury condos? I would say that if you're suggesting that homeless people should be allowed to live in those condos, those condos wouldn't have been built in the first place. Because no one's going to build a condo knowing that they have to give it rent free to a homeless person. I think you can look at actually socialist countries, and what housing looked like in them in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, it took over 10 years of a

waiting list in order to get an apartment of your own. And in fact, there's some idiotic article saying that sex was bad in the Soviet Union, the best rebuttal to which was that a huge percentage of the population lived with their in-laws or with their parents, which probably wasn't particularly great for their sex life. So, you know, I think when you're talking at the level of economic systems, and I haven't read the book, but I take it that it's a case for socialism, then I think the point is that you actually get with people being more significantly under housed in actually socialist systems than in ones that are not. Now, what I would say as somebody who's on the center left is that, you know, you can attenuate some of those trade offs. And when you look at a country like Sweden, or for that matter,

like Germany or France, you have a lot fewer homeless people, you have a much more generous welfare state. And by the way, in some of those countries, you still have a very, very entrepreneurial economy because it allows people to take risks. So I'm firmly on the side of capitalism, but I'm also firmly on the side of having a welfare state system, which makes sure that we take care of our most vulnerable. And I think empirically, when you look around the world at which countries manage to have both luxury condos and few homeless people that have a good standard of living for the vast majority of the population, it is countries that have a robust capitalist system and a robust welfare state at the same time.

By the way, just related to that, so I read in a Brookings Institute study writes that the United States consumer is responsible for 70% of the global pharmaceutical profits. And maybe this is a way to end it because it kind of brings it all together. So am I right? I think I'm right that that is a big factor in innovation in the world is the United States consumer is responsible for the innovation of drugs. If we had had a single payer price controlled system starting 30 years ago in 1990, given what we were talking about at the top about the effects of growth, how much less medical technology would we have by now? It's great for these other countries to be able to do all this when they have one big engine in the United States to provide them the material to

distribute more equally. What happens when we take on those same systems and the innovation stops or will it not stop? Tyler, last word. I agree with your point, but on all those questions more generally, I would in each case try to get very context specific. So if they're talking about homelessness in New York, I would look at the American states that have done a better job than New York state has. One example would be Utah, which has had a mix of public sector and private sector activity and also greater freedom to build and better public sector programs than what New York State has had. And I would say New York State should learn from Utah. Utah did not have a better homeless solution by confiscating the condos of

its wealthy Mormons, say. So just to be very factual, very context specific, and look for what the best actual answers have been and try to move in that direction. Those questions, to me, they sound a lot like emotional manipulation rather than genuine curiosity. What about the issue of the United States, whether or not single payer would quash innovation in healthcare? It depends what form single payer would take here. If we try to do European single payer with much lower prices, I do think it would quash innovation. But we have a big single payer program as it is called Medicare. On top of that, Medicaid. Medicare is quite expensive by European standards. Whatever its problems may be, and they're massive, I don't think Medicare has quashed innovation. So it could be that because the American propensity to consume is so high,

we would end up with a form of single payer that doesn't crush innovation, but it's just way phenomenally too expensive and an overinvestment in healthcare. That depends. Could you make an analogy between healthcare single payer and the military? That's essentially a single payer system. If you overpay for weapon systems, that's the American way. But is it quashing innovation in terms of stealth fighters and smart bombs and this and that? Probably not. But the way the Germans run their military quashes innovation.

They're super cheap. A lot of their soldiers don't even have guns. Saves them a lot of money. We indirectly pick up part of their tab. They have low quality, low expense. And the world perceives- Let me wrap it up. I wrap it up because I don't want to impose anymore every time.

I wonder if we could convene this very same panel maybe twice a year or something like that. If you guys would be up to that. Because I think it's a wonderful group of people. And really, from the bottom of my heart, I can't tell you how lucky I feel, and I wish my father were alive to see it, to have access to speak to people like you and to call you guys friends, and for you guys to tolerate me and my emails and stuff and all of it. And I really mean that really, really from the bottom of my heart. Since you're speaking mainly to me and Perriel, I would say thank you. As far as these other guys, I know you're just being nice.

No, really. You're really a special group of people, and I really appreciate it. I would suggest... No, it's your great talent to assemble special groups of people, and that's a lot of what makes this wonderful for all of us. So the thanks really should be from us to you. Usually when this particular group of people get together, there's free food involved, and it's no one that's paying.

All right. I would like to, uh, extend my gratitude toward, toward, uh, toward, uh, Coleman,

Yasha and Tyler, uh, for coming here with no, uh, with no free food. I would just stress to the listeners that we all know and indeed like each other. And that's something quite special for any group of six.

Next time. I'm going to try to get this guy Robinson on and see if he'd join. He seems like a pretty interesting guy. Maybe try to get him the olive tree one day too. Anyway, everybody, please be safe. Thank you more than you know, and good night. Tyler, where can people find your podcast? Find Tyler at marginalrevolution.com,

one of the most fantastic websites in the history of websites. And Conversations with Tyler podcast. Conversations with Tyler. And Coleman's also in the podcasting game now and hitting the ground running, dare I say, with a very popular podcast called Coleman. Conversations with Coleman, ripping off from the best. Conversations with Coleman, which is Patreon-based but also free. I think you can get extra content on Patreon, but if you're a cheapskate, the best. Conversations with Coleman, which is Patreon-based but also free.

I think you can get extra content on Patreon, but if you're a cheapskate, you can listen to a lot of free content as well. Is that correct? That's correct. Yasha, I didn't know you had a podcast.

I can start listening to your podcast. I do. It's called The Good Fight. The Good Fight. Famous, yes. And of course, if you have comments,

questions, and suggestions about our podcast, Live from the Table, it's podcast at comedyseller.com. And you can follow us at Live From The Table.

Alright, let's let everybody go. Good night, everybody. Alright, bye-bye. Good night, everyone. Bye.