The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it Resolved: There is No Scenario for Reopening the Economy That Prioritizes Economic Growth Over Public Health

Episode Date: April 3, 2020

Can we reopen the economy and keep people safe during COVID-19? On this episode of the Munk Debates Podcast, economists Stephen Roach and Stephen Moore debate the motion Be it resolved, there is no scenario for reopening the economy that prioritizes economic growth over public health. Sources: MSNBC Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I think it's time for this toxic binary zero-sum madness to stop. We're not an imperial power. We're a revolutionary power. We are no longer in a world where you can plot out moves statesman to statesman like a chessboard. You don't know anything about my background where I came from. It doesn't matter to you because fundamentally I'm a mean white man. We can't do this to the next generation because America will cease to exist. Welcome to the Monk Debates podcast. Every episode we provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issues of the day, free of spin, focused on the facts, and animated by smart conversation to arm you, the listener,

with enough information to make up your own mind. Today's debate, be it resolved, there is no scenario for reopening the economy that prioritizes economic growth, over public health. Nothing would be worse than declaring victory before the victory is won. That would be the greatest loss of all. Therefore, the next two weeks, it's very important that everyone strongly follow the guidelines. The better you do, the faster this whole nightmare will end. Therefore, we will be extending our guidelines to April 30th to slow the spread.

Hello, I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffiths. While President Trump recently characterized his previous statements about America returning to normal by Easter as, quote, aspirational. Instead, as you just heard, he's now announced that the United States will continue social distancing and strict social controls until April 30th. As the global struggle to contain COVID-19 continues, timelines for lockdowns and social distancing measures keep inching forward, while governments grapple with how to social distancing measures keep inching forward, while governments grapple with how to secure public health and the health of an economy in shutdown at the same time. Measures such as widespread social lockdowns can mean pushing thousands of businesses into bankruptcy and billions of dollars of lost economic activity. But it's also one of the best tools we have at this moment to save lives and no one wants more deaths. So how do we soften the

economic blow while combating the spread of COVID-19? Some U.S. economists argue that prolonged national shutdowns are simply too extreme, too great a policy risk, in that they do long-term damage to the economy. Others warn that ending strict social controls too early needlessly puts lives at risk and cause an even worse economic and financial disaster. On this installment of the Monk Debates podcast, we challenge the essence of these arguments by debating the motion, be it resolved, there is no scenario for reopening the economy that prioritizes economic growth over public health. Arguing for the motion is Stephen Roach. He's a senior fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and the former chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia. Arguing against

the motion is Stephen Moore. He's a senior economic contributor at Freedom Works, and he was also an economic advisor to U.S. President Donald Trump. Stephen Roach, Stephen Moore, welcome to the Monk Debate podcast. Thank you. Thank you. I want to have us jump right in here with opening statements. Stephen Roach, you're going to be arguing in favor of the motion. I'm going to put two minutes on our timer, on our clock here, and pass the proverbial microphone over to you. Let's have your opening statement. Thank you. As an economist, I've long been pro-growth, wrote my doctoral dissertation eons ago on the theory of economic growth. But I'm not in favor of pushing for economic growth in the midst of an unprecedented health crisis. I think health must come first. I think a premature relaxation of the containment strategy that is now in place would be reckless, unscientific, and relapse prone. And let me just elaborate on each of those three points. Reckless in the sense that this would be a short-term fix driven by understandable frustration and the fear of a protracted economic carnage. Uncientific, I think from the standpoint of public health and economic

moving too quickly without having clear metrics on state-specific infection rates and not being aware of the supply chain linkages that connect states is a real risk. And finally, relapse prone, I think if we start up too quickly, we could have a new round of infections that could deepen the behavioral capitulation of American consumers, and that could trigger the dreaded double dip. Thank you, Stephen Roach. Okay, succinct on time. I like it.

Over to you, Stephen Moore. We're going to put the same two minutes on our opening statements clock and pass the microphone over to you. You're arguing against our motion today, be it resolved. There is no scenario for reopening the economy that prioritizes economic growth over public health. Have at it.

Thank you so much. I think that you have to look at the economics and the health aspects of, this crisis that we're facing in the United States and other countries like Canada, the economic damage that we're talking about by keeping our economy shut down and locked down are going to be potentially catastrophic, especially as time goes on. I think that the president was wise to start talking about Easter Sunday as a date to its selective places, open up the economy where it makes sense. It's one thing to keep New York City shut down where you have terrible

contagion going on, but it's quite another to keep shut, you know, places that have few infections. I think that we are looking at a potential Great Depression scenario. If we keep our economy shut down for too long, we're talking about potentially tens of millions of Americans unemployed. The human suffering and the toll not just our economy, but on our society at large, would be potentially an order of magnitude even larger than the health risks associated with this virus. My point is we need to calibrate the economy versus public health and make very smart decisions going forward about how we can start to reopen our economy in the safest possible way with the best medical technology, with the best medical know-how. We have businesses that are running today. We have grocery

store chains. We have trucking companies. We have companies like FedEx. They are doing a fantastic job of keeping their workforce safe and healthy, but still delivering vital services to our economy. And I believe we could do that in a sound way with other businesses as well, and not just save our country from this terrible virus, but save our great economic engine, which is the envy of the world. Thank you, Stephen Moore. Let me just for the benefit of the listeners just quickly sum up your both very precise and on-point opening statements. Stephen Roach, you're arguing in favor of the motion. You're indicating that to open the economy too early and not to heed the advice of our public health experts is reckless, unscientific, and maybe most important of all,

from an economic perspective, you see a risk here for economic relapse in the face of a resurgent virus. Stephen Moore, you've got a different point of view on this. You think there's a possibility here to calibrate. And you think that the president, Donald Trump, is right to start talking about how the economy can get going again in order to push back not only against the profound economic damage that could occur, tens of millions of Americans unemployed, but to understand that this economic crisis has its own health consequences in terms of depression, addiction, other public health emergencies that could emerge from it. So great opening statements.

Let's move into rebuttals now. So Stephen Roach, I'm going to similarly put two minutes on the clock, let you respond to what you've heard from Stephen Moore. I think the key word that he emphasized that I would completely endorse. I know we're supposed to be in opposition is this concept of careful calibration. But to calibrate and to understand the way in which we have to address this balance between the infection curve, and the economic curve, it has to be data-driven. And the U.S. is significantly ramping up testing, but we don't have the data enough to make this calibration

in the way Stephen suggests. Hopefully over time, and maybe this will happen by the end of April, but I'm dubious of that, we'll have a rich enough data set to be able to make these calibration decisions more judiciously. But until then, I think lockdown is, absolutely vital and the distancing that goes with it is very important. And I guess the final point I would say in rebuttal is, I think what worries me the most about state by state all clear

signs is that this is a borderless threat and it goes quickly from one jurisdiction to another, one city to another, one state to another. And just because things look, you know, say okay in, for example, I don't know, Idaho, but bad in California doesn't mean that Idaho gets the all-clear sign. It could easily hit, you know, states that right now seem to be infection-free. Thank you, Stephen Roach. So Stephen Moore, same opportunity for you, a chance to kind of rebut what you've heard from your colleague, Stephen Roach. I think it is true, in my opinion, that you can have a policy that's very different in urban crowded areas where you're really at risk of this and areas that are Idaho or Iowa or Nebraska where you just don't have areas of consolidation

of people and the risk is very different in those places. Notwithstanding, a professor makes a good point that we people travel around and that does increase the risk. I would also make the point that in terms of being smart about this, and I think he and are both incredibly frustrated about two things. One, we're not getting good data. It's frustrating, for example, in a lot of states in Virginia where I live, where the governor has, in my opinion, insanely said he wants a lockdown until the middle of June, which we wouldn't have an economy left in Virginia if that happened. But we don't have county by county data. They're telling us what's happening nationally, I mean, statewide, but they're not telling us what counties are affected and which are.

So we need better data on that. But the other thing that is really missing from this, that is so frustrating, and maybe I've missed it, but I've talked to dozens and dozens of people in the government to get this data is the age profile. I mean, we do know that for the most part, not exclusively, but for the most part, this is an evil virus that is really affecting older people. And we know this, by the way, from other countries. It's amazing. And we have good data in Korea and Taiwan and Italy, but we don't have data in the United States that the government is releasing. That shows the average age of the people who are dying from this, the average age is about 75 to 80 years old. So what makes

sense to me would be to quarantine, certainly, people who are susceptible from this. people who have problems in terms of chronic diseases, people who are over the age of 70, and keep them safe and secure, but let other people on a gradual basis and a rolling basis start to get back to work so we have a functioning economy. Thank you, Stephen Moore. Okay, let's jump into our conversation because that's really what we're doing here. We're using a debate format to try to tackle this important tension that is the center of the national debate right now, the tension between the need for economic growth and a time

of kind of profound economic contraction, if not collapse, but also, you know, the shared responsibility of public health. And maybe to come to you first, Stephen Roach, I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about your concerns about relapse and specifically the economic dimension of that. I know you've got a lot of experience from Asia, from your time as the head of Morgan Stanley's Asian operations. I'm just wondering if you're looking across at Asia and seeing some lessons that you think should be applied here that bolster your case.

for why we really need to prioritize public health at this moment? Well, there are two Asian templates that I am in the process of studying very carefully and actually teaching about that in my online courses at Yale right now. The Chinese experience and the South Korean experience, China, as you know, was very draconian in terms of lockdowns, quarantines, and restrictions on travel and basically walled off a province of 60 million people from the rest of the country and contained the spread. Their practices in terms of authoritarian implementation are not something that really is consistent with our value system in so many respects, but it's interesting to see how we have moved in

some of those directions. The South Korean experience is certainly far more preferable to us, but it's one that really emphasizes the point that Stephen Moore just made, and that is sharp expansion of testing. And we're moving up on the testing, and there's no question about it, but we're still on a per capita basis only at about two-thirds the level of South Korea. We've come from nowhere in a few weeks, so that's good news. They also do universal masks, and most importantly, they are superb at data processing through mobile phone enabled apps that provide both direct communication from the government

to the Korean population, incredibly detailed contact tracing without revealing the actual name of the person they're tracing. So if you're sitting in an apartment in somewhere in Seoul, you know not to go down the hall or not to go around corner XYZ. And so they allow very targeted lockdowns as opposed to national lockdowns. And I think we have the ability and the incentive to deploy our technology to get the kind of data we need to really operate in an effective way to balance this tradeoff between the infection and the economic carnage. You're listening to the Monk Debates podcast. Be it resolved. There's no scenario for reopening the economy that prioritizes economic growth over public.

health. Speaking for the motion is Stephen Roach, senior fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. Arguing against the motion is Stephen Moore, senior economic contributor at Freedom Works. Stephen Moore, what's your reply to those people that say, look, you, Stephen Moore, want to reopen the economy, but you've got to look at the Asian example. And the reason they're now being able to, in fact, have some economic opportunity to return. is that they went for a very strict full lockdown approach. They didn't calibrate. They put maximum effort into this. And as a result, they have now some economic wiggle room. What's your refutation of that thesis that comes out of Asia? I have to confess, I'm not an expert on, you know,

what Asia has done. And I get emails, you know, every day overnight that are coming in with kind of conflicting stories about what's happening in these countries. So I don't know who to believe. I like what the professor just said that the key to this clearly is testing. No question about it. And we're paying a very, very, very high price for the screw up at the CDC and the FDA for not having a system in place that would allow widespread testing. Because if we had that, maybe we wouldn't have to have our economy lockdown right now and we wouldn't be suffering these multi-trillion dollars of losses. Incidentally, just as a side note, there's no question about it. the people are being crushed, just crushed by this economic shutdown in the United States

are the lowest income people. And so, you know, from a distributional standpoint, the people really getting hurt are the people at the bottom of the income scale. I like the idea of testing because once we have that, obviously we can start to reopen because we know who is asymptomatic. We know people we need to keep quarantine. And that would obviously be the best solution. But quite frankly, we don't know when we're going to have the widespread testing available in the United States yet.

And what I'm saying is we can't wait six, eight weeks for that because we're not going to have an economy to come back to. Everybody wants us to get up and running. But I don't think people realize that this economy is not an ignition switch. You can't turn it off for eight, ten weeks and then just turn it right back on again. I mean, there's going to be real damage, even a potential Great Depression scenario that we saw in the 1930s with three or three. or four years of people's livelihoods, their businesses being ruined, people's life savings being wiped out. I mean, this is a really dark scenario, but it certainly could happen if the shutdown continues. Stephen Moore, thank you for that. It's an important contribution to this debate.

And let's have Stephen Roach come back on this idea that there's, I think what Stephen Moore's saying is there's a hard time limit here. Like, it could be three weeks, it could be four weeks. Maybe you can stretch it to five, but you simply have to start opening up the economy, regardless if you have full testing capacity in place, full contact tracing, you know, these things that they have had in places like South Korea and elsewhere. You just, there is a hard stop here where you have to move. Do you accept that? Well, it's a really tough and critically important question.

The point that Stephen Moore raises about they're not being an ignition switch to our 18 trillion dollar economy that we can just restart and go. back to where we were. That's a really important one. He raises the question, the fear that drives this debate, and that is, how long do we have before we lose the economy that we had and were unable to find that ignition switch? I don't know the answer to that, but what I think is a reasonable thing to begin thinking about, and that is that the post-COVID U.S. economy is not going to be the same as the one that it was a couple of months ago, that when we restart, we'll really have to think of ourselves as a different economic engine. I think we'll be able

to find that we're able to restart our manufacturing facilities much easier than we can reconstruct our services sector, which is being decimated right now by some of the carnage that Stephen Moore is just alluding to. I think many of the services that consumers have become accustomed to from eating out to entertainment to travel are not going to come back the way they were, period. And I think the behavioral norms of consumers who take part in these services activities are also going to change. So I think this is a transformational point for the U.S. economy and the post-COVID economy, again, we have to think up in a very different way than we did just a few months ago.

Thank you, Stephen Roach. So, Stephen Moore, let's have you react to that. In a sense, you know, what Stephen Roach is saying here is we have to accept that there is no putting Humpty Dumpty back together again and that we can therefore not necessarily be captured by what you feel is this very short-term hard date. We're just, we have to accept that things are going to be different and that this is potentially a long and painful recovery? Well, I certainly don't want a long and painful recovery. I want what's called a V-shaped recovery where we boom out of this and not, you know, the kind of L-shaped recovery.

For example, we had under Obama, where we had just a very flimsy flat recovery. We're going to lose potentially 15 or 20 percent of GDP. We need to get that back quickly, just for the well-being of the American people, and especially people at the bottom of the economic ladder, who are the people who suffer the most when an economy contracts anywhere near that amount. And look, the good news is we had an incredibly booming economy four weeks ago. It seems like 100 years ago. All systems were, you know, though we were firing in all cylinders, I want to make sure that obviously we reduced the deaths and infection rates by as much as possible, but that we get back to the kind of prosperity that we were having in the last few years, a kind of prosperity that was lifting all boats. I'm an economist.

So I do look at all of this through economic prism. Of course, there are going to be changes to the economy post-coronavirus. But the other question, and I'd love Stephen Roaches, thoughts about this, there is a kind of rethinking of globalization in ways that could be very counterproductive. I'm a fan of globalization. It's reduced global poverty rates by over a trillion dollars over the last 30 years. But especially as we see a lot of Americans saying, well, maybe we don't need to have such a trading system.

And certainly, by the way, our relationship with China is going to go through a radical rethinking when this is done. So, Stephen Roach, would you like to talk a little bit about this idea of a V-shaped versus an L-shaped recovery? And do you feel that Stephen Moore is right, that there is the possibility of a V-shaped recovery? So we kind of have to exercise that option to see if the V-shape is possible, because if you if you don't restart the economy by that hard date of three to four to five weeks, that opportunity's gone and you're into this much more painful L-shaped recovery.

Well, look, I want a V too. I think we all want a V. And I was interested to hear Fed chairman Jerome Powell last week on the Today Show make the point that the Fed is providing stimulus to bridge distress over the near term, but to provide the fuel to turbocharge the upturn that would hopefully give us a V. So I put this question to my seminar at Yale this week, and these are 20 incredibly bright, concerned seniors, and I gave them three scenarios to look at. The V or the L, I wouldn't call the U.S. in an L as Stephen Moore did. I'd say it's more Japanese-like than the U.S. But then I gave them an in-between scenario called the U, where we go down hard and we are sort of stuck at the bottom for a while before we start to trudge our way up. And, you know, by a factor of about 4 to 1, these bright students who are taking a course from me, call the Lessons of Japan voted for the U. You know, that's sort of where I am. I think it's going to take us a while to digest the damage it's been done. I do believe in the resilience of the economy will come out the other side, but it's going to be. be a slow grind, and that gets us to the point that Stephen keeps raising, and that is, can we afford

the slow grind after the carnage that we've gone through? And I don't think any of us know the answer to that, but I'll go back to the point I made earlier, is that we come out the other side with a very different configuration to our economy. If we try to resurrect what we had before, I think we're going to be in for some setbacks and disappointment once we get through the worst of the infection. So can I just make one point about this issue about why I think it's important that we get the economy up as soon as possible and not wait six, eight, ten weeks? And again, I'd love the professor's response to this. But I am very worried right now, and I wonder if you are, about the financial system of our country. What we saw in terms of the reduction in production is now just spreading, unfortunately, like a virus through the financial system. Or just for example, I was speaking this morning when, you someone who owns apartment buildings around the country and has thousands and thousands of tenants, nobody's paying their rent. And that means the person who owns the apartment building doesn't have income going in. That means they can't pay the bank that they owe the money. In other words,

this kind of thing whipsawes throughout the economy. And I just worry that then you start getting problems in the banking system that need to be propped up. And I worry about this almost house of cards just collapsing if we don't have production in the economy. people paying their bills. And in my view is, you know, we're spending all this money. We're sending trillions of dollars out to people. But if the economy isn't producing anything in the end, it's not going to matter how much money we're sending people. I just worry about this contagion throughout the financial system. Great question to raise. Yeah. It's the opposite of what we went through in 2008 and nine, where the problems started in the financial

sector and spread to the real economy. And this goes the other way from the real economy to the financial sector, they're ultimately just as lethal because they continue to feed on each other. The good news is that we have done a pretty good job in buttressing, at least the core banks in our financial system. So in many respects, the financial system is in better shape. And the Fed, as you know, Stephen Moore, has moved aggressively, massively, and far more quickly than it did in 2008 and 2009. But the hemorrhaging is very real, and you describe it very accurately, and there certainly is a risk that it could once again become very worrisome. This $2 trillion-plus stimulus is, you know, it's massive. It's unprecedented, but ultimately it's a

band-aid to deal with a much bigger wound if this does continue to go on. So that, you know, really underscores the point you're making that we need a restart, and the cautionary note I have is what kind of a restart is going to stick and really enable the system to move into a period of healing and repair. What about globalization? Yeah, it's a great question. I view this, what's going on right now as basically a quality shock to globalization. I think countries around the world have been focusing on the speed of economic growth. All we care about is growing faster. It's true in the U.S., it's true in China.

It's true in every other country. The idea is that growth is the answer to poverty, and it has been. But in focusing on the speed of growth, we have not paid attention to the quality of economic growth and the health care problem that we're experiencing right now, together with the environmental degradation and climate change. These are examples of a world that has just not been attentive to the quality of growth. And this is a wake-up call for all of us, you know, rich countries and poor countries. And, you know, you raise concerns about those at the low end of the income distribution in the U.S. I share those concerns hugely.

But I think also about sub-Saharan Africa. I think about India. I think about nations that still have enormous swaths of their population living in shantytowns who can't distance at all to deal with disease. They don't have running water. And they have to wash their hands. they live and they mingle together. And I think this is an enormous threat to the progress that we have been making in terms

of dealing with global poverty as well. Stephen Moore, you are someone who has deep contacts within this administration, within the White House of President Donald Trump. What are you hearing in terms of your sources there? Is there an awareness? It seems to be on the president's part, an awareness of a clock ticking and a need to restart the economy sooner rather than later? Well, that's a good question.

And I think there's an internal debate that's going on in the White House, just as we're having this debate on this broadcast, about how do we calibrate these risks of infection spreading versus the well-being of the American people in our society, which is based on the economic system. And it sways back and forth. I think right now, my impression is I haven't talked to the president. recently, but I think he's more moving in the direction of listening pretty much exclusively to the public health people and saying we have to take every step possible to make sure that we

minimize the contagion and the death rate from the disease. And, you know, as I've said, I think that's not necessarily the wisest choice that we have to really also take into account what are going to be the long-term implications of our society. You know, I mentioned that, this one statistic to one of the top economists at the White House. It's just something for people to consider as they think about this debate that we're having. You know, there's a kind of rule of thumb, and it's just a rule of thumb. It may be off by 20% or 25% one way or the other, but I think it's a pretty good rule of thumb. That for every one percentage point increase in the unemployment rate, that's generally associated with about 10,000 additional deaths per year from things like

suicide, drug overdoses, problems like that heart failure, because unemployment costs a lot of stress, obviously. And so let's just assume for a minute that that's right. And let's assume that our unemployment rate does end up going from three and a half percent, which it was a month ago, to I'm seeing some people saying our unemployment rate could go up to 25 percent. So all I'm saying is we've got to really be very smart about this because the decisions we make now in the next few weeks could have overwhelmingly large consequences for our society one year or two, three years from now. You're listening to the Monk Debates podcast. Be it resolved, there is no scenario for reopening the economy

that prioritizes economic growth over public health. If you're enjoying this podcast, review us on iTunes. We also welcome your ideas for debates and debaters to feature on this podcast. Email us at podcast at monkdebates.com. Thank you for helping us bring back the art of public debate, one conversation at a time. Now, back to the episode. Stephen Moore sounds like you're fundamentally opposed to what your governor is doing in Virginia with extending a lockdown hypothetically into June. You think that would really court calamity.

I think it's ridiculous. I think it's outrageous. You know, they're closing down everything. They're not letting people go into the parks. You know, you can't even play golf by yourself. I mean, this is almost another issue, kind of unrelated. to this. I'm a civil libertarian. I'm very afraid of big government and big brother making all of these decisions for us. I mean, you have an example in Los Angeles where the mayor basically said, if, you know, you don't follow our orders and keep your business shut down, we're going to turn off your water and electricity. I mean, these are kind of Stalinistic responses to this that is someone who believes in freedom and individual liberty, and this is a totally different issue from the

economic fallout. I'm very, very nervous about that, about the extraordinary powers. that we're handing over to the government right now. Before we go to closing statements, I just want to hear Stephen Roach's advice to the administration, to the U.S. administration. What would your economic advice be at this moment, both to manage the situation right now, but also to think through your idea

of this post-COVID economy that we're going to have to probably bring some new tools and some new thinking to try to manage our way through it successfully? To deal near-term with the problem, testing, testing, testing, testing. I think, you know, we've got the best minds in terms of technology in the world, but we're not utilizing our technology to really trace and track and manage this calibration that we talked about earlier that will enable us to get a better handle on that. And then I will also advise

the administration that this is the time to, you know, put any of these animosities with other powerful nations aside. And I think we can gain a lot from collaborating more effectively with countries like China. And I think I would start with an act of good faith in rolling back all these tariffs we put on them, putting that argument aside and asking the Chinese to do the same of the tariffs they put on us and utilizing China's production platform to get a massive airlift of medical supplies into the U.S. hospital system that is in such desperate straits right now. We had our first airplane delivery into JFK recently, but that's just a drop in the bucket. And I think that collaboration with China is in our best interest at this critical point as well. Thank you, Stephen Roach. So

let's go to closing statements. Stephen Moore, you're going to go first. We'll put a couple minutes on the clock. It's your chance to kind of sum up the key points that you want to make and what has been of really a substantive conversation, but also if there are a few things that Stephen Roach has said that you just want to underline and push back on, now's your opportunity. I'll just push lack a little bit on that last point about China, because for better or worse, I think it's going to move in the opposite direction. I think there is a lot of antipathy among the American people, I think justifiably so by the bad behavior of China throughout this virus, the fact they were so duplicitous in terms of hiding the information. And, you know, that could end up causing, you know, millions of

lives lost because they didn't alert us to the severity of this crisis. And I think there is going to be, for better or worse, and I'm a free trade guy, but I think there is going to be a big reconsideration of our relationship with China in bringing a lot of that manufacturing back home. I have three good friends who have contracted coronavirus. One of them is 26 years old on a ventilator. We don't even know if he's going to make it through this. So I'm certainly very attentive to the health risks that we're facing here. And I think we need to balance these health risks. By the way, every decision we make in Washington, whether it's a new EPA regulation about clean air, whether it's auto safety regulations, or whether you can ride a motorcycle, all of these decisions are based on a kind of cost-benefit analysis.

Where we looked at what are the benefits to society versus what are the cost in terms of lost lives or injuries. And, you know, to some extent, people say, oh, it's so callous to put a price on human life. But, you know, to some extent, you know, we have to do that here. We can't allow trillions and trillions of dollars of everything we built up in this country for the last 50 years to be liquidated to save, you know, a few thousand lives. And by the way, we don't know how many lives we're talking about. But I think what we should consider, consider the millions of people who put their entire lifetime in building up a business. I've talked to so many of these people on the phone and they're practically in tears that their business is destroyed, that they don't

have any revenues. They have to have a fire sale on their assets to pay their creditors. That business isn't coming back. The people are losing their jobs. They are suffering real hardship. So let's be smart about this. The one thing that Stephen Roach and I totally agree on is we need testing. We need the best medical information because at some point, whether it's going to be four weeks from now or six weeks or now or 10 weeks from now, we are going to reopen this economy. We better make sure we have the best health care measures in place. And I just want to see America return to the prosperity that benefits all of us. Thank you, Stephen Moore. So the final word is going to go to your colleague in this debate. Stephen Roach, we'll put a couple minutes on the

clock. This is your opportunity to sum up what indeed has been an enlightening conversation. The trade-off between the infection curve and the economic curve is at the heart of this debate and at the heart of the debate that so many are having. And I am certainly aware myself personally, as well as professionally of the carnage that this is causing to the U.S. economy. The contraction economic activity is severe right now. It's going to grow in the months ahead. But we're powerful economy, we've contributed a lot to the prosperity of our own citizens and a lot to the prosperity of the world by emphasizing the power of our economic might. And this is an unprecedented challenge to that power. Do we lose everything if we stop for two months? I don't think we do.

I think we can take the pain and we can come out the other side if we manage the economic adjustments carefully, judiciously, and in a metric-driven world. We cannot lose sight of the opportunity that will be ours for a carefully managed exit from this terrific disease. Do we exit at a 10% unemployment rate, a 25% unemployment rate? Do we exit after one month, two months, three months? We don't know the answer to that. And Stephen Moore and I both agree that the exit strategy has to be very much data-driven. Can we afford to move before the data? In my view, again, that would border on being a reckless, unscientific and relapse prone. We have to be very, very judicious. And I don't think, again, just to underscore a point I made earlier, that we can pretend that we're just going to go back

to the way it was. The economy that existed two months ago is not going to be something that we can recreate instantaneously once we get the all clear from the health care system. We have great potential as a U.S. economy and that potential has to be rethought, reconfigured, and redirected. The American people are resilient and our businessmen are creative, and we have to put that together in looking to the upside of the post-coronavirus environment. Thank you, Stephen Roach, for those concluding remarks. And just on behalf of our listeners, I want to thank both of you for approaching this with real thought, substance, and again, civility, a willingness to engage.

And I think in this moment of crisis, having these types of civil, substantive conversations can only help. And you've been a great credit to that exercise. So thank you both, Stephen and Stephen. Thank you. Thank you. Well, that wraps up today's debate. And again, thanks Stephen Moore and Stephen Roach for a terrific, thoughtful conversation.

The Monk Debates podcast is a place for civil and substantive debate on the big issues of the day. To listen to more debates on everything from the U.S. election to the accuracy of COVID-19 data to the future of human progress, visit our website, monkdebates.com. You can also find detailed show notes on today's debate. Thank you for joining us and for helping us bring back the art of public debate one conversation at a time. I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffiths. The Monk debates are produced by Antica Productions and supported by the Monk Foundation. Redyard Griffiths and Ricky Gurwitz are the producers. The president of Antica Productions is Stuart Cox.

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