Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Yes, my mother-in-law is Korean and went back to Korea over the summer. Her experience traveling there and the procedures — it probably was your ideal version of state capacity because it was very much empowering you to live your life. You were required to take a number of steps, including downloading, I think, three different tracing apps and getting a lot of notifications about exposures and everything else, but she was able to actually have a holiday while she was taking care of some family business. Here’s the thing. I did not get onto a plane and fly to Korea. Now, I would have had to have quarantined — I think there it was for two weeks. I don’t recall, but whatever the period was, I could have done that. I actually preferred to stay here, but socially, overall, they did quite a good job. Revisiting your conversation with Russ, I think it’s instructive for all of us to go back and examine what our attitudes were in middle March when things were starting to shut down, and how long we thought things would last, and so on. If you read between the lines of what you all were saying, I think the worst-case scenario that you outline was that we’ll still be in a situation like we are now maybe through August, maybe later. I think you open it up to being a little bit later. I know a lot of this is endogenous, but if we had known that we were in it for a year in March, how do you think things would change? Would it have made things worse or better?…

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