Tyler Cowen: prediction

Transcript context

…Yeah, well those other parts I think are very relevant. The economic and social pieces, political pieces. Let’s focus for a few more minutes on the medical epidemiological side of this before we move on. What are your views? Do you have anything to say about this accusation, which is true, that we’ve been very slow to roll out testing? A lot of people are arguing, South Korea figured this out, solved it. They’re basically almost done with this problem. We’ve been slow to test and as a result it’s we’ve opened up a huge Pandora’s box that we can’t fix. It’s very true that we have been slow to test. Some of that is because of FDA restrictions. Some of that is the administration simply not responding quickly enough. Some of it is reasons that still seems somewhat mysterious as to why we didn’t have better tests handy. There’s a very good article in Wired a few days ago on this. We don’t know the full extent of what happened, but I would not be so quick to assume that South Korea or any of the East Asian nations have it under control. There’s some very recent data suggesting that the number of cases may be rising in those countries. A downside of controlling it quickly is that you have a very large pool of people who have in essence no immunity. So which countries exactly will do how well? I would say we don’t know yet. I do think Taiwan and Singapore most of all, and then South Korea probably have had the best responses, but they are by no means in the clear. The question is how many waves there will be, what kind of immunities are built up, for how long does this stretch? What I am seeing from informed opinions is just a high degree of uncertainty and I find that worrying. We’re in a position where we need really quite a number of particular things to go well for any country to be in the clear. It’s just hard to know. I think what people seem to have missed in this testing conversation is that there appears to be an enormous number of false positives. So I’m encouraging people not to focus as closely on the caseload as more perhaps on the death count, unfortunately. I assume there’s false negatives too, but this idea that people are walking around who are asymptomatic, I’m sure there are some. But I wouldn’t be confident it’s all the people who have tested positive. My thought, it’s hard to have a Libertarian moment or a classical liberal moment in these times. But it seemed to me that when the administration and Trump underestimated the seriousness of the problem and they downplayed it, which I thought was a terrible mistake. But when they did, people like you and me and others said, “Hey, this is a real problem.” And the private voluntary reaction to the crisis was quite strong. The NBA shut down very quickly. The NCAA shut down very quickly. Baseball shut down very quickly. Nobody had to order folks around. I think what’s been underestimated in this, in the demand for this sort of top down, fix it, solve it, make everybody hold. Don’t let anything bad ever happen. We’ve missed the role that we can play individually. It’s going to be very imperfect. Of course, people cheat on self quarantining. I know that. But the idea that we can test perfectly as if that could solve it is unrealistic in a country of 330 million people in our number of square miles. It just seems that the advantage of this bottom up voluntary response to the crisis is it allows for nuance. The top down says everything’s closed and that means that there’s going to be enormous economic and human results from that, that we’re just sort of ignoring. The advantage of the private response is it allows for people to be more flexible, to take into account when they can and should, when things are more dangerous to some than others. And I just think that that’s been lost in this maelstrom.…

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