Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He is the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and eight books in 5 languages, most recently The Market Loves You<\/a>. He is also the editor of The Best of Mises<\/a>. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jeffrey is available for speaking and interviews via his email<\/a>. Tw<\/a> | FB<\/a> | LinkedIn<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research.","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/cepa\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/21\/2020\/06\/Policy-at-McCombs-Summer-2020-Jeffrey-Tucker.mp3","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"66.34M","filesize_raw":"69565376","date_recorded":"25-06-2020","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":""},"tags":[30,86,93],"categories":[],"series":[2],"class_list":["post-541","podcast","type-podcast","status-publish","tag-economics","tag-fair-markets","tag-technology","series-policymccombs","entry"],"acf":{"related_episodes":"","hosts":[{"ID":693,"post_author":"38","post_date":"2020-10-29 17:58:44","post_date_gmt":"2020-10-29 17:58:44","post_content":"\n Carlos M. Carvalho is an associate professor of statistics at McCombs. Dr. Carvalho received his Ph.D. in Statistics from Duke University in 2006. His research focuses on Bayesian statistics in complex, high-dimensional problems with applications ranging from finance to genetics. Some of his current projects include work on large-scale factor models, graphical models, Bayesian model selection, particle filtering and stochastic volatility models.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before moving to Texas Dr. Carvalho was part of the faculty at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business and, in 2009, he was awarded The Donald D. Harrington Fellowship by The University of Texas, Austin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dr. Carvalho is from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and before coming to the U.S. he received his Bachelor's degree in Economics from IBMEC Business School (Rio de Janeiro) followed by a Masters's degree in Statistics from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).<\/p>\n","post_title":"Carlos Carvalho","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"carlos-carvalho","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-10-29 17:59:59","post_modified_gmt":"2020-10-29 17:59:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/cepa\/?post_type=speaker&p=693","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"guests":[{"ID":613,"post_author":"42","post_date":"2020-07-03 20:15:42","post_date_gmt":"2020-07-03 20:15:42","post_content":"\n Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He is the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and eight books in 5 languages, most recently The Market Loves You<\/a>. He is also the editor of The Best of Mises<\/a>. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jeffrey is available for speaking and interviews via his email<\/a>. <\/p>\n","post_title":"Jeffrey Tucker","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"jeffrey-tucker","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-07-03 20:29:18","post_modified_gmt":"2020-07-03 20:29:18","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/cepa\/?post_type=speaker&p=613","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"transcript":" Welcome to Policy McCombs, a data focused conversation on tradeoffs.
\n\ue5d4
\nI’m Carlos Kavala from the Saban Center for Policy at the University of Texas at Austin.
\nThey would have with us Jeffrey Tucker, the editorial director of the American Institute for Economic Research.
\nJeffrey writes on economics, technology, social philosophy and culture and has been a very active voice since the start
\nof the pandemic. Jeffrey, thanks for joining us. It’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me. So let’s go back
\nto March, early March. You started writing about there’s like maybe the second week of March 5 to go back to
\nthe Web site here and found some few pieces. How are you thinking about what what was in your mind at the beginning of March,
\nmaybe late February, as the news from China and Italy started writing and and
\nand you start see what our governments were starting to think about?
\nMy first article on the topic was actually January 27, because I had
\nseen the news out of China and and I knew that the
\nU.S. government had quarantine powers. And. And I
\nhad already been to the Senate from Disease Control’s website about the vastness
\nof the quarantine power. And it was very interesting to me because I don’t think that most Americans had any
\nclue that that such power existed, that they had the ability to just go into an entire
\nneighborhood and round everybody up or pull you out of your home or push you into a camp.
\nI was explaining explaining this and I and what I argued was that it was it was you shouldn’t
\nuse acquainting power because people who are sick don’t want to get don’t don’t want
\nto be out and about. They don’t want to get other people sick and other people don’t want to get sick from them. So that’s what my argument was,
\nthat we had society contains within itself a mechanism to manage diseases
\nwithout the kind of enormously coercive and disruptive thing we call acquainting power. Now,
\nthat was interesting article because at that time nobody was really talking about Kogut. You know, there
\nwe have a tendency with disease to think it’s always over there, but it can would be here and there. And that’s
\nwherever you are. You always think the disease is somewhere other than where you are.
\nThat’s sort of that’s been true since ancient world. So in those days, people weren’t thinking about.
\nCovidien coming here. But most pressure is Kranti because, you know, we live in a globalized economy
\nand viruses don’t expect Bautista’s is ridiculous. And we know now in retrospect that coverture I’ve
\nbeen here probably is in December. But Americans wouldn’t believe it anyway.
\nI get really heavily criticized for that article because people said it was alarmist. They said, look, look, this is ridiculous.
\nThe idea that the Center for Disease Control is going to work with FEMA and the State Department
\nto round people up, who is sick? What could possibly be the point of that? That’ll never happen in this country.
\nAnd I had several radio interviews on it, and they were they were kind of
\nsaying, well, this is so extreme. It’s ridiculous. But, you know,
\nwhat was interesting is that.
\nI hadn’t thought about the subject are all between then and about February 28,
\nand that was when the New York Times podcast, which I listened to. I used to listen to very
\ncarefully to find out what was going on. You know, what’s what’s in the air, what’s
\ncoming. Take The New York Times always gets its way in a strange way and is the leading
\njournalistic venue in the United States. And eventually, every other venue follows them, whether it’s The Boston Globe
\nor the Los Angeles Times or whatever it may be. Chicago Sun-Times. They all
\nfollow The New York Times. And on February 28, they had an interview with a virus reporter
\nthere named Daniel McNeil. And New York Times delivered
\nkind of a voice for sanity and sobriety and calm. And I was a little centre-Left, you know,
\nbut always very much in favor of.
\nNot too much disruption. Keeping keeping the peace. That seems to be their line.
\nWell, February 28, I had an interview with McNeil, who told the listeners,
\nthe three million listeners of this daily podcast that covers 19
\nwill kill eight point two five million people
\nin the United States unless we lock down the economy.
\nSo I thought moment I thought that is weird. And he added,
\nsix of your friends will die from carbon 19. And I thought, this
\nis this is not normal. This is strange. And Chris didn’t believe a word of it.
\nBut but but what struck me as odd was the fact that they were actually going
\ngood, saying this is completely unlikely in your attempts to do that. I wanted to really fuel
\na kind of media panic. So I really smelled a rat. From then on, and I really
\nstarted directing our editorial attention to trying to dial back the panic and that sort of thing.
\nAnd I’m not sure you may be right that my next article was maybe the first week of March
\nor some kind. I’m not entirely sure, but we started running editorials about it to
\nexam the demographics, to report on what serious epidemiologists
\nwere saying, contrary opinions. John I had an I o danas I noticed
\nfrom Stanford University was was I really radion stat news? And this is what
\nwe’re considering here. This is a catastrophe. So we really did throw ourselves into
\nit as best we could, provided some balance to what was. What
\nwas what emerged between February 20th and something like March 15th was a new
\nkind of media consensus. And you could see it happen in real time because even
\neven the first week of March, center left journals of opinion in this country were calling
\nfor calm. Psychology Today says your doctor is not worried about Kogut. You shouldn’t be either.
\nSlate magazine said it’s not that deadly. It’s actually a mild, mild flu. Like saying
\nflu. Flu like a cold. And meanwhile, the
\nright right wing has country. I mean, some some right wingers in this
\ncountry, we’re we’re we’re being all apocalyptic about it. They were the ones that were saying
\nthere. They’re saying like what The New York Times is saying, we’re going to die. A good thing you’re a prepper, but go
\nout and buy your groceries and toilet paper now. And that’s where they have been. Tucker Carlson, these guys
\nwere in those days harsher, more alarmist about this than, say,
\nPsychology Today or Slate or The Washington Post. So what we saw in those first
\ntwo weeks of March was a like a weird bending of of of the
\nnational conversation. So I was leaning more and more towards locked down. The drumbeat just grew
\nand grew and grew. Where do you think that came from? You think that had a lot
\nto do with epidemiologists models that came out. And a lot of the people that I talked to,
\nI think put a lot of focus on the bureau college model. The question
\nin everybody’s mind and and the reverse, of course, of the UK
\nturn a lot of minds around here as well. It was very interesting because there are a number of epidemiological
\nestablishments around the country. The chance of Johns Hopkins, Stanford was actually University,
\nOxford University. And there’s the Imperial College, the Imperial College
\nprediction of 2.2 million deaths in America. Unless we socially distance floods criminal. The staff
\nbecame the dominant theme. They somehow won out. I
\ndon’t think it was an accident. They’d won out in getting press attention and that’s what flipped things.
\nI think that might have been fair remembering correctly March 14th from that when
\nthe news of that of that model came out. But already, already
\non March 9th, 10th and 11th and 12th,
\nyou can see things changed and there was a drumbeat in the air
\nfor lockdown so they could feel it. I was on a train to New York. I had Broadway tickets
\nthat weekend going to a Blue Note concert the next night and so on. As
\nheaded into New York for a television interview and I got that interview done, hop right back on the
\ntrain and got back back home. And I was glad to be safe because I had a sense that they were gonna shut down Amtrak.
\nSo it was getting really intense out there. So it was a media fueling panic. The public
\nwas genuinely scared because people didn’t know what to do, what this what was really happening,
\nwhat. So anyway, that so all my research just got busy and
\nstarted examining things like why do we have a problem with hospital scaling or do we
\nhave a problem with hospital scaling? What was the basis of the school closings that happened?
\nYou know, March 15th, something like six. Why did why do we think
\nthat the cupboard magically appears when when when ten people stand together
\nor it spreads and shearers or why did we say why did we adopt
\na Cudi theory of viruses? I mean, why did we think that if you run away from the virus,
\nthat the virus will get bored and go home? That that was the weirdest. That’s the
\nlevel of public ignorance about about virus basics that my mother always knew
\nwas amazing. The idea that occurred was never to avoid the virus. It
\nwas to slow the pain so the hospitals should scale. But once it
\nbecame clear that there wasn’t a scale and problem with hospitals, then there is a second rationale that was introduced
\nwhich was you should just stay away from the virus, which is not true.
\nIt turns out lethality under the age of 65 is is is is barely even
\nregisters as 0.02. That’s not even the thing. You know, whether
\nhalf the kids are asymptomatic, I can go through all this, you know. But so we started trying to pump out
\ninformation to be. Contrary point of view,
\nand one of the ways I began to do this was to look back at other really serious
\nepidemics in the 20th century and examine how society responded.
\nAnd so I started with 68 69 Hong Kong flu.
\nI wrote all about that and pointed out that The New York Times at that time was saying, everybody, calm down. It’s
\nyou know, if we can get we can get it get we can get immunities to this is no problem. You can take
\nvaccine. But there weren’t that many did also talk
\nabout that. I want to say so were the sort of magnitude about the 1968
\npandemic. There were there were 100, 100000 people died from
\nit. And it was it was not so focused demographically as
\nas Cuban, 19, very young people, a lot of young people died from it. So it was it was kind of a scary
\nthing. But it’s like all viruses, you know, you get the virus, you get the immunity. So that’s why it worked. And
\nso I wrote this. I wrote those articles. And by the way, the. The
\nlifespan of the average American that was in those days were 10 years shorter than it is now, so it’s 68.
\nSo and also the population is a lot smaller. I can’t remember the exact number. So in a sense,
\nif you scaled that that death and a thousand deaths up to a
\nadjusted for the population and for the age, it was
\na much more serious, serious pandemic then what we’re going through right now. So so I
\nput that article out and noticed right from it to print that that was the same year that Woodstock
\noccurred. And I thought that was really interesting that Woodstock occurred in the middle of a pandemic, which
\nis what I called the article. That article went wild because it
\nconfused people with a serious pandemic and there is no newspaper
\nreports about it. There was just a little talk. But be careful. Kind of stuff. But otherwise,
\nthe rock concerts and civil rights protests and everybody this went among the normal. As much by point
\nwas just simply to say society can manage a disease better than than
\nthan lockdowns and governments and quarantines. I was I was mapping so that I start going back in time. I went to 57,
\nAnd 116 thousand Americans stayed with the much. Again, I think we were only
\nonce again, there are times that are better calm down. Medical professionals will handle this. It’s gonna be okay.
\nAnd so nobody paying attention has very little attention paid to it at all. And then
\nI went back through that 1949 to 1950, once polio scare,
\nwhich was that you talk about. Terrible. You know it here. One quick point
\nabout the 57 58 is that that that flu was particularly vicious on
\nexpectin mothers. So can you imagine if covered and particularly
\ntargeted pregnant women, you know, how much panic there would be around today? So.
\nSo that was a vicious disease, have far less cruel than covered
\nseven to eleven. I mean, look, through most wicked thing you can imagine, there were a little hotspots
\nwhere they shut swimming pools and things like that. But in all three of these pandemics, so they were all in
\nbreak because too many people were absent. There were no mandatory school closing.
\nTo say nothing of Kassel’s cancelation of passports at the end of international travel would have been unthinkable
\nand nothing was done. The polio epidemic
\nin particular was was was horrible. So anyway, I began to really get curious what like why
\ndid previous generations have a different attitude towards viruses? And it really comes about
\nin the post 1918 flu pandemic where there were some clothes in San Francisco,
\nChicago and a few other places. And scientists later really regretted that. They thought that
\nwas a wild overreaction. And then there became a consensus within the within
\nvirology and epidemiology and immunologists and things that
\nthat that the old way of running away from a virus was not
\na workable way to manage virus, you know. And my mother knew this.
\nAnd they’re tired a whole generation after World War 2 about natural immunities and
\nvaccines and how this is for millions of years, humanity. Two thousand years have
\nwhat you might call it. Humanity is coexist with viruses. We need to learn rational ways of dealing with it. And we
\ndid that the 20th century. So then the question became in my mind, what
\nhappened and what went wrong? Where is the turning point
\nwhere we went from being smart to being stupid? And as far as I could tell, that turning
\npoint came in 2006 and that’s where I found my most interesting
\ninformation. And that was what what what was that
\nturning point? Exactly. George Bush, would
\nyou remember, had invaded Iraq after 9\/11, and that didn’t go so
\nwell. And he began to get very concerned about bioterrorism. He thought that
\nsome bad guys were going to unleash chemical warfare on the United States and wanted to know what
\nto do about it. He read a book on the 1918 flu pandemic. He claims to read the
\nbook. He probably has read the flaps. But he’s sent out an order to the
\nState Department, the Veterans Administration, to the CDC and FEMA that
\nhe wanted all kinds of input for a national plan to deal
\nwith bioterrorism and pandemic conditions.
\nAnd so there emerged in those days two broad camps.
\nOne of the doctors. Who had old fashioned medical advice,
\nyou get immunity. We build up herd immunity and it goes away. Don’t disrupt society.
\nBut there is another camp that developed and really it started with
\na guy named Robert Glass who was working out of a government laboratory
\nin Albuquerque, New Mexico. Never knew a first thing about viruses,
\nnever studied them. He was a physicist and a computer modeler, and he was inspired
\nby his 14 year old daughter, Laura Glass connoisseur named Laura
\nGlass. And she was doing a high school science project to which she
\nwas speculating about how you prevent the spread of a disease among high school students and came
\nup with this idea of social distancing. And it showed her father was a term coming
\nfrom from from from her. There is a whole new language apparatus that was invented
\naround this time. I don’t know if I think think figures, I think was Sarah Glass, not Laura,
\nbut actually that term was used in that paper that came out in 2006. So he began to model
\nthis as like what he called his eureka moment. And so he put together all his fancy 3-D
\nmoving PowerPoint presentations. And that paper is the first one that I know of that use
\nthe term social distancing. And then what they started at later started calling targeted,
\ntargeted, layered containment or t._l._c. That’s a heck of a thing. And the curve flattening
\nanalytics were the first time that appeared in that paper and so on.
\nIt was signed by Robert Sarah, this academic. And one other authors
\nseems to vanish on the planet. Both Sarah herself went on to get a master’s in divinity, has
\nnot talked to the press ever sense. She’s now 29 years old and nobody can get a hold of it has
\npretty interesting. But they’re so there began to be this whole nother language apparatus
\nand they began to recruit other computer scientists. And this is read Bill Gates
\nand Gates Foundation come into it. So there began to be like this SIM City style modelers
\nwho who actually don’t know anything about viruses. Bill Gates himself doesn’t know about viruses and watch several of its future
\nkids clearly. And so when they presented at the
\nWhite House and I talked to several people who were there at the time. Oh, let me just back up say.
\nSo this paper came under incredible assault from
\nthe entire epidemiological establishment and all them all the doctors. The leading
\ncritic was a man named Donald Henderson. And he is the guy who crushed
\nthe smallpox. He traveled all over the world and was basically responsible
\nfor the eradication of smallpox. And so he wrote a brilliant response to this paper saying,
\nthis is crazy, social justice is silly. You could do anything to make a virus go away
\njust by avoiding it. You should never shut the schools. If anything, you want the viruses spread
\namong schools. That’s a tremendously disruptive. You’ll ruin people’s life and possibly shut schools. You got to shut the malls
\nand theaters. And then also places workers. What you can do with the kids is suddenly the obvious. Take it home. The public
\nis subject to all kinds of abuse. We’re gonna cause mass unemployment and people are going to get hungry and you’re gonna
\nsee a rise in suicides and everything. Everything he wrote
\nin that paper became true history. And he said are distressed at no point in disrupting
\ntravel. By the time by the time we see the signs of the virus, a virus is already here. So shutting down travel
\ndoesn’t do any good. There’s a brilliant response and full of passion and fire
\nand absolutely brilliant. She, by the way, died in 2016 was just incredible.
\nBut but so I talked to one of them. So. So basically all these people came to a White
\nHouse meeting. It was kind of a big deal for them because they had never really been to the White House. You that the president
\nin states, you know, fussing over them. And so the doctors made
\ntheir presentations. Yeah. Henderson and his and his cap. And it’s like.
\nWhen the virus comes, you know, you don’t really know what it’s going to be. Could be a different strain of H1N1. It could be another strain.
\nThere are demographic and different dentists who two levels of severity. It could be severe. It could be mild. Nobody
\nknow if it’s severe or mild until after the fact or you can really do is a test,
\nwatch and mitigate when people get sick,
\nmake sure they get to get to the doctor. And if they know if it’s
\njust a lot of asymptomatic cases, you don’t worry about that. And then the virus burns itself out throughout her community.
\nCancer has some fairly boring presentation. Bush was unimpressed. Next thing you
\nknow, the computer scientists show up with their PowerPoint presentation, the 3D moving
\nmodels and a plan for basically a police state totalitarian takeover, a society where
\neverybody is forced to stand six feet apart and people live in refrigerator boxes for 3, 3 months
\nand so on. It’s like just cockamamie, crazy stuff, apocalyptic, crazy. But
\nthe Bush administration was. Very impressed. Now these guys are all schooled
\nat the Kennedy School. But then the only thing about viruses either. Right. And so there is listen to presentations their size
\nand they’re going to the for the people. They had the splashiest, most apocalyptic vision and the biggest central player.
\nSo after those three days of presentations, the Bush administration
\nordered the CDC to pound out a plan in consultation
\nwith all of these guys. His computer, Marlyn Case, was one of the two top
\nconverse. This was the doctor who stood at the Veterans Administration named Carter Nuture,
\nand he became a convert to the to the glass vision himself. And
\nso over the over, the CDC in 2007 put out their first document
\nfull of all these targeted layered containment strategy. Is Kuroda’s curve flattening, social distancing,
\nkind of Syria, which was a complete reversal of everything that CDC had ever said about
\nviruses and was it wasn’t as radical as the 2006 document from the bosses
\nand company. But it basically accepted the model of run away and stay away
\nfrom people, stay inside and hide. That was the CDC. See, this is
\na huge coup, but the computer sciences against the epidemic, all
\nthe real doctors and epidemiologists and medical professionals. Well, OK, now you have
\na 14 year gap, right? Well, the next time they could have implemented that was 2009.
\nBut hey, there is a financial crisis. I forgot about the avian flu or whatever.
\nYou know, those this. H1N1. By the way, same same same damn thing that kids newsman’s
\npeople in 1918 have all types of panic. What, in 2009? But they didn’t limit it.
\nAnd I guess about 20000 people died. 30000 or what? How many people died when that big deal.
\nBut you could see that it seemed like it could have been a big deal, but nobody didn’t think there was financialcrisis. New President
\nObama was injured in this crazy Bush theory of apocalypse. So
\nnothing happened. So then we have to fast-forward another another 11 years until this
\nvirus comes along. And in the meantime, Bill Gates,
\nBill Melinda Gates Foundation had shoveled hundreds of millions of dollars out to illogical
\ndepartments all over the world, not all of them, but especially the Imperial College people. So
\nthey gradually began to kind of replace the old doctrines and new stuff with new fangled fancy pants.
\nComputer scientists, you know, like like Neil Ferguson, who’s who’s a physicist, never been trained in
\nmath and medicine, a physicist taking over epidemiological departments.
\nPeople never cured a single disease, never saw a single patient. They’re just people, but made
\nPac-Man and SIM City, you know, are now taking over a virus. So, sir, when this thing came
\nalong, they started an email chain sometime in late,
\nlate January and started whipping up a frenzy and getting people really scared. Medical professionals,
\nall these people were on the email chains and they got crazier and crazier
\nand crazier. And I know if you’ve ever been part of an email chain, you probably have been on my this
\nemail. This was always like one or two people who dominate the list. And everybody else has to kind of go along with them because they’re in charge of the list.
\nRicardo Mutua is the leading voice there. And he just began to step
\nlate tonight. Skip Night’s Sleep is posting 20 messages a day and so on.
\nFinally, on March 12th, he delivered his manifesto sight in the glasses,
\ncontra social distancing and targeted layer containment. And most especially shutting
\ndown schools all over the country. And his
\nwords were, let’s pull the trigger now. That was March 12th. And
\nthat, as far as I can tell, is the memo that that turned up in the other direction. It got somebody saying
\nif you whipped up in a frenzy, that they just flipped out. And then I guess there’s two days later that no person
\ncame out, says his paper. And the Trump administration caved,
\nblocked international travel, start weighing in on behalf of shutdowns
\nand so on. And the world fell apart and the rest is history. But then what
\namazes me is that is that fortunately, we live in a country that has that has a federal
\nsystem where the president didn’t have the power to go or shut down the entire country.
\nAnd yet, of course, he has a lot of influence in the way he presents things that went how the city sees putting forward information
\nso on it. But it’s really amazing to me that 50 state in my 50, I think 49
\nstates are put down. Stan shelter-in-place orders because
\nin our businesses and our getting 40 90, which is the same thing, is not it’s not easy. Forty nine
\ngovernors, although maybe maybe, you know, you can you can say that it’s not hard if you use your power provided
\nit was territory power. Don’t know. I think there were a number. There was a number
\nof things that had to go into the. Was the media panic, media pushing panic?
\nThere wasn’t a political element to this. I think there is. You know, there’s there is a sense that
\nthis is a great way to get Trump. I don’t think you can deny that that was a real factor here.
\nYou had a real desire on the part of public health professionals now to
\ntry out the new scheme. You know, they knew there was a kind of a social experiment. So they were very
\nready for this and really wanted to give it a go. And it was this was last
\nthree months, but they were ready to try it for like two weeks. And then once the powers
\nkind of got into play and and and then the weird nightmare became
\nour reality, then it’s just been hard to back off. Thank
\nGod for like South Dakota. They never they never did anything. And their
\ndeath rates are. You know, that’s actually that’s the lockdowns. As far as, you know,
\nanybody can tell your town’s made no difference either way. I mean, it probably
\nended up killing more people just once you consider, you know, mist
\nagnostics and hospitals and suicides and drug officers and domestic abuse.
\nOther estimates, probably more people died from the lockdown than from covered. But
\na disease doesn’t care about your weird central plan. It just doesn’t add viruses. Viruses
\nhave outsmarted, you know, every governor in this in this country and every president
\naround the world. And there were some nations that didn’t do that. South Korea did some contact tracing,
\nbut at some testing. But they didn’t shut down Japan and shut down. Taiwan didn’t. So.
\nAnd Sweden. Sweden. And again, he did that. That’s what people seem to fail
\nto acknowledge, is that they like to focus on all of the death rate in Sweden as high as equal. The death
\nrate is going to webbys. And the question the only question we’re trying to avoid before it was a question of flattening the curve
\nof my not exceeding us capacity. And that’s proved right that you can have a open society
\nand not go to an explosion of off cases to deal with. But
\nyeah, it seems incontrovertible, incontrovertible to me that that all the policies of the last three months
\nhave completely failed, not to mention, you know, disregarding human rights
\nand shutting down more than 100000 small businesses. I mean, it’s just been it’s been unbelievable
\ncatastrophe. And what’s weird to me now is that you don’t see
\na lot of voices out there where you see basically none of the governors,
\nnot even those who forced covered patients into nursing homes, nursing homes, long term care facilities
\naccount for about 40 percent of the DSM covered. And a lot of them that was complete unnecessary because of the
\nlockdowns distracted us from the real growth. What we should have done is shut the nursing homes down
\nto protect it from the virus. So outside with some people, you don’t want to get the virus and that’s people
\nthat don’t get the virus. There are people who are vulnerable, who fatally are vulnerable to this
\nthing, and we should have focused on that. Instead, we forced cozad patients into the nursing homes,
\nas they did in Iraq, and even prevented nursing homes from testing people as they came in. Unbelievable.
\nSo that was that was just an amazing catastrophe. But despite this
\nastonishing three months we’ve lived through it, you still see
\nthe apologies. I mean, I don’t think that there has been a single governor or a mayor in this country
\nwho come out. So, you know, I was crazy. That is what will Cuomo has show some some signs
\na couple times are like, yeah, I don’t know. Maybe we shouldn’t have done it. They still would have done what it did anyway.
\nAnd if you don’t control over it, I think it says I’m comfortable with
\nit. It’s funny because he’s maintaining the lockdown more than more than any other state. I mean.
\nThat’s right. But I got going back going back to March. The one thing that that that I
\nknow you have this a group of people with this idea of, OK, you’re lockdowns. It’s going to be the way to deal with this.
\nAnd and, you know, you and I live live in the world. We’re talking out to economists,
\nfor example. And and, you know, tradeoff evaluation is that isn’t the core
\nof everything would do. Right? Well, here’s a policy. There’s some good, some bad. And let’s try to evaluate
\nthat and think about a different different ideas of the other straight often and make a decision, make
\na decision based on whatever the utility function of the decision maker is. And it strikes me that there was
\nabsolutely none of that taking place at that point in time. I think you can point to one
\npaper early on by by by somebody, a Chicago Michael Grant Greenstein. I think
\nit said something like using a value of like five or six million dollars per life. And if you assume that
\nyou know that what they’ve done in the geology are telling you that if you don’t do anything, 2.2
\nmillion people would die. And if you locked down, I don’t know, 100000 people going to die down. You know,
\nmultiply 2.1 million times six million and you get a pretty big number and you might say, oh,
\nit’s worth just shutting down the economy. But but that was just not enough
\nof that kind of discussion. It’s not enough. All legislation discussion on this as opposed to
\njust giving emergency powers and a number of unintended thank you things that you
\nalready mentioned, things about about child child abuse or mental health issues,
\netc. Now, that was considered in in the calculation. That’s
\nright. And then you wrote a lot about individual liberties. That’s something
\nthat that was just not I think your you were one of the few horses that I saw consistently making that
\npoint, that just being house arrest have a bill of rights. We have
\na constitution that, you know, they’re stages. They’re taking place. You’re shutting down a business operated
\nequivalent to takings. Right. You know, where we’re at, where our friends
\nthat defend our liberties. Where are the ACLU? Where are. Why do they.
\nI don’t know. It’s a little confusing. I I’ve never
\nin my wildest dreams imagined that anything like this would happen. And the reason
\nis that I thought we were too smart to do something like this. As I was thinking
\nabout this more and more, though, I’ve been thinking that maybe haik
\nshed some schruder cakes, shed some light on this. So what happens in the
\nmidst of peace and prosperity where everything’s functioning really well and we have access
\nto food and travel and theaters and sports and life going on as normal
\nis that we we gain an illusory sense that people are really intelligent, but what’s actually,
\nyou know, and smart and that social media is making a smart or that we’ve got access
\nto information, you know, and that we’re somehow causing society to function
\nreally well. And so therefore, nothing bad can happen. But what’s actually happened is a little more closer to what
\nHYG describes, describes social processes
\nas themselves, really intelligent, not constructed by any
\nsmart person, but rather the intelligences of millions
\nand billions of people are embedded in institutions
\nlike prices and interest rates and social norms and knowledge that we
\nhave about supply chains. And this knowledge is extremely decentralized,
\nbut there are certain kinds of things that are embedded in the market process or in social
\nnorms and that sort of thing that cumulate to Serzh and put it together in a way that makes life function
\nreally well. But that doesn’t mean we are smart as individuals. We might
\nall be unbelievably stupid if we just create we have an illusion
\nthat we’re unusually smart because we’re so prosperous and peaceful and life works.
\nSo what happened with the lockdown is once once you put you take a sledgehammer
\nand you smash all those institutions new crushed the price system, you and you
\nand you bludgeons supply chains and you shut down people’s businesses and making
\nit possible for their stores to function. They worked for it for people to go out to restaurants or whatever.
\nAnd you do this across the board and you do it in three days. What you what you’ve done is you’ve taken
\nthe intelligence of society and and put it through a meat grinder. And all
\nyou’re really left with is what you’ve always had all along, which just is a bunch
\nof extremely stupid people.
\nAnd that’s what we’ve been exposed to over the last few months. We’ve found out how
\nunbearably each of our successes, our social interactions here and our system.
\nAnd if you break that and then our success goes away. Yeah. And all you’re left with is
\na bunch of a fearful people who forget about things like human liberty
\nor the constitution or virus theory. You know, just like every kind
\nof level of of of appalling ignorance that you could ever expect from humanity we’ve
\nall experienced over the last few months. This is one of the reasons people are so unhappy.
\nYou know, all the surveys show that people have never been unhappy. People haven’t been this unhappy since World War One.
\nAnd the reason is that we’ve all been exposed to the shocking reality that we’re
\nnot very smart, but we do really stupid things all the time that
\naren’t the intelligence that we want is embedded in social institutions. It’s out
\nthere. It’s institutionalized, but it’s not it’s not any one particular person’s smartness.
\nSo we put a bunch of fifty central planners into 14 and central planners in charge and travel.
\nThe whole world just falls apart. So I think I think the expansive last few months have really
\nverified was very profound insight that that
\noccurred. And the high that the knowledge problem is something that I was I was not writing necessarily
\nabout in the beginning was always very worry when we start using the terms essential non-essential.
\nA central planner is able to know what’s a central non-sentient or even, you know, we like to tell stories
\nlike the ISIS or our students watch that video and nobody knows what to make on Bessel. So
\nwhat is essential to make the point so we don’t know. So to deem this thing essential, that activity essential,
\nnot understanding how all the supply chain goes behind it and makes, I think possible works.
\nI actually I actually I’m shocked and that that we did not see disruptions in
\nsupply of goods. There were severely worse than what we saw. The market really did save
\nus. The market really market the market and the big businesses that think if anybody out there is complaining about their business these days
\nand I thank God for big businesses, they were the grocery stores, the Wal-Marts. And they’re just phenomenal.
\nThey’re amazing. What they did was miraculous. That allows us to continue for the most part of
\nour lives. So so but at this day, I thank for it for it. There’s in order to exist
\nsomething that that a lot of politicians, a lot of a lot of folks these days have. And it’s it’s unfortunate they don’t
\ntake the message from my heart. Well, I think I think, if anything, this should drive us to
\nread more seriously about how can you know? In the end, I think this experience is going
\nto work. It’s going to be defining for a whole generation people. And it’s going to make us really curious
\nabout things that we’ve never been curious about before. The history of disease,
\nhousehold pro-social processes, work. You know what what thinkers are out there that explain the failure of central
\nplanning because it has been tried and it has failed. You know, what
\nis it we can rely on in the case of of emergencies where if it’s a genuine pandemic, you know, what
\nshould we do next time? We’re going to learn a lot from this experience. And I hope one of the lessons we will learn
\nis to never, never lock down, never take that sledgehammer to social processes ever again. Donald
\nHenderson was right. The most important thing you can do in the middle of a pandemic is
\nkeep society functioning. That’s the only way. So let’s talk about that, because we’re
\nwe’re in to help. Not a situation where lots of governors are opening up. I mean, for the most part, we are
\nback to normality in this. As far as much as possible, at least here
\nin Texas, things are somewhat normal. But. But
\nfair enough. Cases are coming back in some places and again, as expected. Is anybody
\nthat have any idea about the progression of disease who I wish to sneak away? Right. It’s around us is going to be
\naround us for a while. And I feel that a movement for for the prolog
\ndown this discussion is coming back. We’ll see you open it up too early. Now it’s gonna come back
\nand say, this is serious. It’s so crazy because the whole idea with a lockdown
\nwas not really to get rid of the virus. It was to slow it spread. Not that
\nit’s not going to do anything about that on
\nnet the number of people who are going to get infected or die from this. The idea was to somehow control
\nthe pace at which it. Which, by the way, I’m not convinced that that that that happened. But
\nlet’s say it did work well. All you’re doing is kicking the can down the road. So you would expect then
\ninfections and deaths to rise after the emancipation, which I don’t think has really happened. I mean,
\nlook, if you look at hospitals, hospitalizations nationwide there, they’re really, really down there up
\nin Texas. But that’s part of the reason for that, is that Texas has some pretty wicked laws about getting
\nrid of elective surgeries and and hospitals in
\nTexas that basically emptied out for three months. I they are furloughing workers all over the place. So now that
\nthings are loosened up a little bit, a little more inclined to go to the hospital, the news, you know, you’re more inclined
\nto close your doctor, whereas before you were afraid, you didn’t know what would happen if you got covered. They’re going to they’re
\ngoing to trace trace all your friends and neighbors and arrest them, you know, as a Crisco type. So I think
\nthat’s one of the reasons for the increase in hospitalizations and in Texas. But it’s also possible that,
\nyou know, it’s possible that there’s an uptick, right? Of course. I got I got to tell you, though, privately
\nto epidemiologists associated with who with one of the smartest institutions in this country have told
\nme privately that this thing peaked in April and it’s gone now. So
\nthey won’t say this publicly, but they’ve told me that privately. I don’t know if that’s true. I
\ncan only hope. I would agree with you that that I would hope that that the lockdown
\nvernacular is going to be gone. But what I think I’m afraid that we’re going to find ourselves
\nin discussions, political discussions that, again, would would now learn from what what we’ve done here so far. And again,
\nI did a cataloging of the costs that we face is just gigantic and the benefits are questionable. So
\nwhy even consider that? That’s like the sledgehammer. Here’s that. I’ll tell you a funny story actually about
\nthe kinds of costs that we’ve faced. It was about a month ago I started it because I had
\nI had at some point in my life had a what you call a root canal. And my legs
\nleft malaria essentially a little bit something. Am I right? Mullainathan Oh, crap. I need to get
\na root canal some here in Massachusetts, but I don’t really have a dentist here. sesto
\nKlein around the. Well, we’re closed. And we’re only open for emergencies, and I well,
\nwouldn’t a root canal qualify? And they said, well, maybe, but you have to be a patient.
\nYou have to have a preexisting patient. You have to have a relationship. Right? Oh, this is terrible. So
\nI called my mother, who lives in Texas. And I said, hey, mom, I usually come to the
\ndentist. I can visit you. Can you just give a quick call here to the dentist there and
\ntell them that I may have a look down and may have to take a flight down? Have to get that, she said. OK. So she called
\nthem up and they said, well, it’s true, he is a patient here. However, we have a rule
\nthat if you arrive in Texas from another state, you have to be in quarantine
\nfor two weeks before you can see us. So I said, sir, ma’am, what you’re telling me
\nis that I need to. I mean, if this if this is bad, it’ll give me that she made it up. She wants
\nto stay for two weeks. Maybe it’s
\ngonna get bad. Three days. Was gonna get bad side. I said, Mama, this is terrible. But we
\nwe don’t have dentistry in this country. Least for me. We got rid of dentistry.
\nAnd so my only hope is that I’m wrong. Well, it turned out I was wrong. I got better
\nand it wasn’t a problem. So thank God for that. But it was so terrifying. But then for
\na couple of days to think that if I desperately needed a root canal, I could not get blood
\nbecause it looked so unbelievable. So little things like that quarantine rule. You know, that’s
\na design I couldn’t have taken two weeks off work. That’s just utterly insane. So this is the kind of thing and
\none of the things I’ve done routinely throughout this crisis is I write my Twitter
\nfollowers and ask them. I’m writing an article on the psychological toll. Tell me about it.
\nI get flooded with these terrible emails, a sad, sad story. So it was a shocking and a experiences
\nare different. And another one of as people to tell me about miss diagnostics
\nor miss surgeries and missed things that the
\nthings that they would plan to go to the hospital for. And I got, again, a whole flurry of terrible
\nstories of a woman feels a lump in her breast. You know, she can’t get it
\nchecked out. Some of these people missing their cancer, their chemo treatments and stuff
\nbecause those are considered elective. And so, I mean, it’s like one should put it all together
\nand you start chronicling all these catastrophes. I mean, like 41
\npercent of the business failures in this. Among
\namong African-American owned businesses, 41 percent are now out of business.
\nUnited States because of because of lockdowns. Yeah. And that’s one thing that is very, I think, incompatible
\nwith with a lot of these social movies that we have in the country right now. So
\nwe have had this enormous focus on inequality in the past 10 years, that the word inequality became a central
\npart of our discussion in politics and policy. And yet we decided to go on to
\nsomething that it’s obvious the worst possible thing for inequality is
\nthe jobs that you can maintain our jobs. We can’t work from home and our kids are going to be okay.
\nAnd meanwhile, the most vulnerable, the poor, our societies are ones suffering the most. They’re losing their jobs.
\nTheir the business got closed. They’re the kids. They’re going to be suffer more. They don’t want to get more affected
\nby it, by disruption, health, healthcare. It’s just unbelievable. It’s a shock.
\nAnd I don’t know, you know, it’s very interesting, too. Like it was reflected on this today,
\neven read in The New York Times and some of the mainstream press did not want to talk about
\nthe lockdown. See, they then look at all the. Disaster
\nthat’s happened over the last few months and they’re inevitably blaming the various.
\nThey always do this and they don’t want to talk about what what actually happened. His face trend has become like a
\nalmost like a taboo, but that can’t possibly last is ridiculous. I think he will
\nlook back at this in 5, 10 years and just be in utter shock how we could have taken
\nthe peaceful, prosperous nation and triggery with
\na roaring economy and happy people and just in a matter
\nof three days in March decided to destroy everything. It’s in
\nthe name of virus mitigation. It’s just that does happen to ASRS is
\na shock of my lifetime. I can’t believe it. And and we’re gonna have to come to terms
\nwith it psychologically, intellectually and every other way to make a prediction. So go
\nbefore we close it out. What’s the what do you think the next year must look like? I think,
\nRita, most people have moved on from Cruet already and are fed up.
\nSo the governor is gonna be under increasing pressure to restore normalcy. And
\nI think it’s gonna be about six months. But eventually,
\npeople, once they decompress from this experience, like right now. People are really over it in the sense that they
\ndon’t even think about it happening. It’s like what you said about Texas, things seeming normal.
\nYou just want as much of life back, you know. But in six months now, people are gonna be pissed. PTSD
\nwill start to go away a little bit and we’re gonna have to. I think there’s going to be a mass movement
\nin this country against lockdowns. And we’re going to extract promises from
\nevery one of our elected leaders never to do anything like this again. I think in a weird
\nway. And here’s the other thing. The lockdown is themselves. I mean, the CDC
\nhas been discredited. The FDA, you know, all these people. And by the way, one
\ngood thing coming out of this is this is the third movement against qualified immunity and police unions
\nin this country. So that was really good. That’s that’s a good thing. So I think in this
\nin a way, even though we’re not can get our output back economically for a very long time,
\nwe may get if everything remains painted today, we may get 90 percent of it back by December. But
\nI don’t think that’s going to happen. I think it’s gonna probably we’re gonna be in for a rough two or three years before things get back,
\neven in a rare close to normal. But I think in the end, it’s going to be good for the cause
\nof freedom of commerce and capital investment.
\nAnd we’re gonna we’re gonna figure out ways to restrain the states so that nothing like this ever happens again. But I’m
\nI’m an optimist. That’s but that’s what I would idea. I can only hope you’re right, because there’s
\nthat there are safeguards have to be strengthened. This is not this is not okay.
\nThank you so much. This is wonderful. And thanks for all your writing. Then very I want to share a lot of it with
\nour students. And. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
\nThanks for listening to Policy McCombs.<\/p>\n"},"episode_featured_image":false,"episode_player_image":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/cepa\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/21\/2021\/05\/SC_PolicyMcCombs_Art-scaled.jpg","download_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/cepa\/podcast-download\/541\/jeffrey-tucker-covid-19-interview.mp3","player_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/cepa\/podcast-player\/541\/jeffrey-tucker-covid-19-interview.mp3","audio_player":null,"episode_data":{"playerMode":"light","subscribeUrls":{"apple_podcasts":{"key":"apple_podcasts","url":"","label":"Apple Podcasts","class":"apple_podcasts","icon":"apple-podcasts.png"},"google_play":{"key":"google_play","url":"","label":"Google Play","class":"google_play","icon":"google-play.png"},"google_podcasts":{"key":"google_podcasts","url":"","label":"Google Podcasts","class":"google_podcasts","icon":"google-podcasts.png"},"spotify":{"key":"spotify","url":"","label":"Spotify","class":"spotify","icon":"spotify.png"},"itunes":{"key":"itunes","url":"","label":"iTunes","class":"itunes","icon":"itunes.png"}},"rssFeedUrl":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/cepa\/feed\/podcast\/policymccombs","embedCode":"Jeffrey Tucker – COVID-19 Interview<\/a><\/blockquote>