Tyler Cowen: commitment

Transcript context

…There are things to learn from this about the proper role of government, the relative level of responsibility of, say, a Republican or a Democrat, but the zeal and ease with which people paint this situation as the result of problem X or Y that conforms with their preexisting worldview, and I include myself in this guilty party, that’s very depressing to me. Does that get to you at all? Yes. I try to follow better people on Twitter, but even following better people, one sees quite a bit of this. But that said, I think we will have to make significant adjustments in a post-coronavirus world. I think the upside is to believe that at least biomedicine will be far swifter and better funded and less regulated, in the good sense of that word, and our response capabilities, when all this is over, for the next event will be far, far greater. We may overreact in some 9/11 kind of ways like we’ve done arguably with airport procedures, but if there’s one part of the economy that will get a huge, beneficial boost, I think it is our biomedical capabilities and our public health infrastructure. You might think we’re going to make big policy mistakes in many other areas. I do expect that. But in that one area, I think we will end up in a much better place. If you see that as a major sector going forward, in any case, completely aside from the issue of pandemics, that’s one of the major positives likely to come from this, that the next time something like this happens, you won’t have the FDA banning states from doing or approving their own tests. It’ll just happen. That’s true. Let talk for a second about a possible upside of the story, a cheerier story. Is it irresponsible to have this conversation, Tyler? Are we risking that people will misunderstand this? I think not. I’m going to take a chance here and talk about what I think is a cheerier story. Is it possible that we’ve overestimated the death rate based on Italy and Seattle, Washington because they’re older populations that got infected? Is it possible that one of the things being tested right now for treatment will turn out to be fairly effective, that a vaccine will be here in not 18 months, but more like something shorter, but that the treatment will carry us over until that happens and that some of these more depressing or a cataclysmic economic changes will be much smaller than you’re worrying about?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.