Glen Weyl: prediction

Transcript context

…How do your views on testing differ from those of Paul Romer, if at all? Overall, I think there’s a lot of similarity between us and Paul. Paul believes in mass-scale testing, and we do as well. Paul thinks that tracing is so problematic that he would rather see universal, very frequent testing, rather than tracing being used to reduce the number of tests necessary. His plans, correctly calculated, would require something like 10 to 20 times the number of tests that ours would and, therefore, has costs much closer to something like $500 billion rather than $100 billion. It would also be much more intrusive because there’d be a much greater reliance on these negative test certificates that you were talking about earlier, Tyler. Therefore, from both a civil liberties and a cost perspective, I strongly prefer a regime that also involves tracing. The other thing I would say is, because it’s so ambitious, Paul’s plan, in terms of the number of tests required, will take much longer to ramp up to that point, so we’ll end up with one to two more months of freeze in place. Overall, I think that there’s a strong case to be made for test, trace, and supported isolation instead of just testing. But on the other hand, I think it’s great that he’s advocating an ambitious target just as we are. What do you think of the plans that say we should try to predict who is a super spreader and then test them incredibly often? Maybe we won’t get that far in universal testing, but we’ll get most of the gains. Testing nurses, testing people who shake hands a lot, testing the extroverts, whoever people are at these nodes. Maybe they work in nursing homes — wherever we find, say, from analyzing big data. How effective would that be?…

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