Glen Weyl: belief

Transcript context

…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? I certainly support some forms of that. I think testing essential workers, especially in long-term care facilities where there is a possibility not just for a lot of spread but for a very dangerous spread, makes a lot of sense. I think having a very top-down regime of someone analyzing a bunch of data and, on the basis of some probably pretty tenuous statistical correlation, claiming that such and such a person needs to be tested, and then coercively going in and testing them on a government basis — it does not seem to me like a very robust regime. So I think that there’s some robust elements of this that I would love to see implemented, probably largely through private demand. “I want my person taking care of me to be tested.” And then there’s other things that seem to me problematic and potentially authoritarian. Here’s a question from a reader, and I quote, “What are the best ideas for applying radical markets to the COVID-19 crisis?”…

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