 Good evening. Good evening, everyone. I'm Luke Schaefer, Associate Dean in Herman and Amalia Cone, Professor of Social Justice and Social Policy at the Ford School in the University of Michigan. On behalf of Dean Barr and the faculty and the students of the Ford School, it's a great pleasure to welcome you to tonight's policy talks at the Ford School with my colleagues, Shabita, Partha Sarathi, John Chachari, and Justin Wolfers. No doubt many of you may have noticed that I'm not Michael Barr, although I hope to one day perhaps play him in a made-for-TV movie. Michael, and you may have noticed that Justin Wolfers is not Betsy Stevenson, his decidedly better half. They are no longer going to join us for tonight's discussion because they've both been named to the President-elect transition advisory team. So in the interest of allowing for an unencumbered discussion about the next administration, they have graciously bowed out of tonight's event. That our faculty and our affiliates are advising the new presidential administration, I think, is one of the great things about the Ford School. And in fact, our faculty have served at high levels in the Obama administration, the Clinton administration, George H. W. Bush, Carter, and Nixon administration when Marina Whitman, our faculty emeritus, was the first woman named to the council of economic advisors. So this is just one of the assets of a place that is committed to rigorous research and policy analysis and done for the common good impacting the world. So John, Justin, and Shabita and I are thrilled to be here, though, and we look forward to a wide-ranging discussion on the policy priorities and goals of the next administration. Before we dive into the conversation, I want to thank our co-sponsors for tonight's events, the University of Michigan Club of Washington, D.C., and the U of M Alumni Association. The University of Michigan has a significant presence in Washington, including our public service intern program, the Michigan and Washington program, the University of Michigan Office of Federal Relations, alumni efforts, also fund need-based scholarships for promising D.C. area students to attend the University of Michigan. So a warm welcome to our U of M alumni who are watching here today, especially in the D.C. area. Let me briefly introduce our panelists, each of whom represent a slightly different area of policy expertise. Professor Shabita Parthasarathi is a professor of public policy and the director of the science and technology and public policy or program. Her research focuses on the comparative and international politics and policy related to science and technology. She's interested in how to develop innovation, innovation policy, and how to better achieve public interest in social justice goals. One of my favorite things about Professor Shabita is that her work has influenced the 2013 United States Supreme Court case challenging the patentability of human genes. Justin Wolffers is a professor of public policy and economics. Justin's research interests include labor economics, macroeconomics, and the political economy. He is a contributing columnist of the New York Times and a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for international economics and the Brookings Institution. And he was recently named to a list by someone as one of the 10 most influential economists leading into the Biden administration. Finally, John Chichari is an associate professor of public policy and director of the Ford School's Weiser Diplomacy Center and International Policy Center. His research focuses on international law and diplomacy. He has been an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, an Asia Society Fellow, a Fulbright scholar, and a policy official in the Treasury Department's Office of International Affairs. All right, welcome to all of my colleagues. Shabita, I want to start with you. So, obviously, President-elect Biden has talked about the importance of getting a handle on the COVID crisis. And, you know, we might imagine major shifts in policy as it relates to dealing with the pandemic. Could you talk to us a little bit about some of the things that you're thinking about, some of the top priorities in this area, and what you'd like to see in day one, and maybe what you expect to see? Yeah, sure. So, and first of all, thanks, Luke, for having me. And I'm excited to speak to everyone, including University of Michigan alumni and probably hopefully some of my former students out there. So, yeah, clearly, Biden's top priorities, COVID is at the top. And he, just today, in fact, was having a meeting with governors, I believe, about the COVID response. And in his plans, he's planning first to expand testing significantly, which I think is incredibly important. He's also talking a lot about creating something called, he's calling a US Public Health Corps of Contact Tracers. And that part of it, I think, is interesting, because one of the things, obviously, we've all lamented this year about the scarcity of COVID tests. And it seemed at one point that we had, perhaps, we were supply and demand for meeting, but we're now again in it, I think, as the demand increases, we're in a scarcity situation again. So, certainly, it's welcome, this push for increased testing. But one of the challenges that I think we've also seen, but we aren't talking as much about, and I appreciate that they are doing so in the new administration, is to talk very seriously about contact tracing and actually making sure that we have enough contact tracers. I think that's really, really important and key in the response. It's also, though, important to think when we're thinking about contact tracing and testing and isolation, the three pieces that we've been talking about in terms of COVID prevention, to think about cultural and social specificities. So, there have been numerous examples of how testing isn't necessarily being given in the right neighborhoods, in the right places, that people are reticent to participate in testing systems, because they're concerned about being surveilled. There's concerns also that they might get a COVID result, but then what do they do with that information? That there aren't social supports available, for example, for proper isolation. For a lot of people, it's very costly to isolate. You have to leave your job. You might even lose your job. So, these kinds of things, I think, need to be a more significant part of the response. I'm glad that they are taking some steps. I would like to see even more attention to questions around how do we make sure that people properly isolate themselves, and how do we ensure that they have the economic and social supports to do that? How do we make sure that the public health core that they develop has the cultural competency to really have people participate in these systems? So, those are the kinds of things we're thinking about. The nice thing that I've noticed in the COVID task force is that there actually does seem to be some expertise on that task force focused on questions around structural inequality. So, there are clearly people thinking about it. The question is, how integrated will that be in the test, trace, and isolate response that might emerge? I think that remains to be seen, but I hope that when we move forward, we'll actually think about it more holistically than we have over the last year. Great. Thank you. I'm going to just do a round with everyone and then come back again with some follow-ups with folks. Justin, we are in sort of an economic time that there's just no comparison in history, right? And so, I'm wondering if you could just take us through what's happened to the economy as a result of COVID, where we're heading right now, and what you think in terms of setting economic policies should be some of the major priorities starting in January? Yeah. So, look, one way of thinking about this is we do have to turn the language we use a little bit on its head. So, I think there's two things happening at the same time. One, I call a suppression, and the other is a recession. If you took macro at the Ford School, you know what a recession is. You know, generalized downturn. We've seen those before. The suppression is literally what was happening in March, April and May, which is through some combination of people are unwilling to go to market or there are lockdowns that prevent them, we'll just stay home. We don't work, but at the same time, our employers don't call us into work. We don't consume, but at the same time, the shops may not be open. So, thinking about whether that's a demand shock or a supply shock, you know, the answer is yes. That's one of those wonderful exams where there's no wrong answers. Now, you know, what that suppression does is you shut down the economy. There's no economic activity. Now, in fact, we kept 90% of the economic activity going, which is its own special miracle, but losing 10% and one quarter is unheard of. This is a downturn that played out in days, whereas typically a great depression or 2008 plays out over months and years. So that suppression happened. And then if you recall, just before the election, there was a lot of talk about rapid GDP growth. Well, the thing is, if you tell everyone they can't go to work, and then you tell them they can go back to work, you're going to bounce halfway back. But if the down was big, then going halfway back up is a tremendous rate of growth. So those dynamics are dramatic, but it's some deep level of uninteresting, because it's all going to go away. The question is, when we get to the end of that suppression, what states the economy? And we're certainly at the end of that first stage of the suppression is a different question, whether the second or third wave of COVID is going to cause us to lock down again. And, you know, we're discovering the unemployment where we're still 10 million jobs down. The recovery is rapid because basically put everyone on furlough and you just tell them to come back to work. Getting rid of unemployment when it's just calling people back to work is easy, most of whom the people left, the people who've lost their jobs altogether. So the hard work begins now. So the dramatic recovery we've seen, it's over. And now it's going to be a long, slow grind. And the question is how long and how slow and what role does policy have to play in that? Obviously, Biden's brought to the table the idea that we need another major fiscal stimulus. This is a case where we are in unprecedented times. After the 2008 recession, a fiscal stimulus of $700 billion was seen as a lot. We went through $2 trillion already with CARES and we're talking about there are big debates between the Republicans who want $1 trillion and the Democrats who want $3 trillion. These are phone numbers. Talk about shifting the goalposts. Totally. And it's really hard to know because the suppression is so dramatic, it's hard to know what the underlying damage is. If it's as bad as some hope, fear, $3 trillion won't be enough. If it's as good as some hope, most people are getting back to work anytime soon and $3 trillion would be a terrible answer. And so the best I can say is we live in interesting times. John, let's turn to foreign policy. Gosh, this is so much fun, by the way. I'm having a really good time. John, take us to foreign policy. So I can't imagine what it's like to enter in a new administration that's going to take a completely different, I imagine have sort of very different views of how to interact in the world internationally. But to do so in a time when you can't really travel. So my understanding of foreign policy is that state department folks and presidents, they go over, there's huge divides, they have dinner together and suddenly either people see connections with each other they didn't before. It seems like there's a lot of the personal and the international. So talk us through what you hope to see in the circumstance and whether or not they're sort of unique things related to the current period that make it more challenging. I think we've lost your sound. I'm going to give you a couple minutes and I'm going to come back. Sound good? Shabita, I have been, of course, like everybody else, following vaccine development very closely. And I was just struck by the notion of the Pfizer vaccine that has to be kept at a negative 70 degrees Celsius, which I believe is something along the order of negative 90 Fahrenheit, which is something along the orders of like really, really, really cold. Something on the order of really, really cold. Yeah. So how can we possibly deliver a vaccine in the huge numbers and maybe you could just walk us through like even just like if it were easy to distribute, what kind of logistical task that we're talking about here? It's huge. And let's be clear about it. We don't have, we've demonstrated this year that we're not necessarily the best at distributing technologies in a sort of equitable or any way systematic way. So we don't have the best track record. The first good news is that there is a vaccine that looks promising. And in fact, there are multiple vaccines that look promising. There are just news today that the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine also looks good. Does that be number three? That's number three. I think there's also some hope about a Johnson and Johnson one. So there are multiple ones. The only one that requires the giant freezing really, really, really cold freezer is Pfizer. Moderna's requires only a regular old, I believe, refrigerator even, not necessarily freezer. So there's some variability. But it is an enormous task because we don't just need, we need to have a sense of how to distribute. We need all kinds of equipment in order to distribute at the levels that we're talking about. We are talking about millions, tens of millions of doses in the next couple of months. And what we know is that at present, the states, different states in the US have begun to offer plans and say, this is how we're going to distribute it in the states. And of course, in a federalist system like ours, that's how we're, you know, the responsibility gets devolved. But even within that, we're making a lot of assumptions about distribution channels, capacity, you know, personnel. And this is a place where, you know, there are many places, and maybe we can talk about it later, you know, what have we learned, what, what in the, you know, once we're past COVID, what can we, what can we learn from our experience? But we are likely to face staff shortages. We're likely to face equipment shortages. We might have transportation challenges. So, you know, we should still be breathing, certainly not holding our breaths as we're waiting for the vaccine. One of the concerns that I haven't figured, we haven't figured out how to manage, but I think is something that we need to be thinking seriously about is the fact that even if you think about the super cold freezers that Pfizer is talking about, one of the things that's already begun to happen is, for example, that rural hospitals are starting to buy up freezers at a rapid clip. And that's problematic for a few reasons, right? Are we going to run out of freezers? Are we going to run out of freezers? Are, is it going to drive up the costs of freezers, which is going to again distort where the freezers go? Who is managing this? Can we build freezers quickly enough? Those are the kinds of questions that the Biden administration is going to, is probably already thinking about. They're going to have to deal with hitting the ground running. And at the same time, you know, and this is something that's incredibly important, that we have to make sure that we're still doing the test, trace, and isolate at the same time. And so, if, for example, places are moving all of their investments into super cold freezers, what are they not paying for health wise? And that's, that's a serious question, because this can potentially be a very destabilizing moment at a moment when the COVID, the number of COVID cases is going up. And I think the final thing that I'll say, and, and, you know, I'm happy to go into this further is that it actually, there's also, you know, it's important to remember that, of course, COVID isn't just a local or national problem, it's an international problem. And the Trump administration has really had a go it alone approach in terms of buying a lot of doses. The operation warp speed has been very successful. It's an interesting case of how we can invest and produce medical technologies quickly and effectively. But in order for us to get back to some semblance of normalcy, as someone who spent, used to spend a whole lot of time on airplanes, it certainly matters to me. And many, I think of the people who are watching today, that we're, we think about a global vaccine distribution. And that raises questions that are near and dear to my heart around intellectual property. And there have been a number of countries, for example, who have suggested that especially since the government has already paid for the US government has already paid for these vaccines, vaccine development, that the industry has not laid out money. You know, there's a question about how much profit should they be making? Should they be charging outside of the US? Should they be making their intellectual property, not just their patents, but other forms of intellectual property available so that generics companies in Brazil or India or South Africa can start to develop their own dosages? Because that's going to be key, you know, in order for us to quickly, as a globe, really respond to the, respond to the pandemic. So there are those, I think, foreign policy dimensions of it too. And, you know, given that this is an not to step onto John's toes, but this is an administration that hasn't necessarily played nicely with other countries. One could imagine that an interesting way that the Biden administration could start with global diplomacy would actually be a much more open position when it comes to vaccines distribution and development and intellectual property that could perhaps get us back into many countries, good graces. So before I go to John, let me just do one quick follow up on this. If I'm the guy who created a vaccine that has to be stored at negative 70 and my competitor just created one that just has to be cold, I think I probably, you know, in a normal world, I just close up shop, right? But it sounds like it doesn't quite work like that in this case. And that they have the benefit of the products already been bought. They do have the benefit of the product already been bought. That's true with all of the major vaccine trials. It's also true that we need as many players as possible to produce as many doses as possible. And then finally, it's important that we don't know what the data looks like. We've, we've heard about the data, but we haven't actually seen the data. And so we don't know what kinds of challenges might emerge along the way in which populations, which, which kinds of vaccines are likely to be most effective. So those are all questions to be asked. So these are not, these are not just vaccines that require different kinds of storage and distribution. They're also different compounds. And so they might have different effects. And so, you know, they're all sort of angling for obviously the largest possible market, but often what you see is that different vaccines may have different efficacy in different populations. And so that, that is the question that we don't know the answer to, but could mean that, you know, Pfizer's vaccine might be useful in a particular population. But again, the market doesn't look the way we might think a traditional market looks like because they've already sold all of their product before they even began actually creating any doses. So if I'm understanding you right, we should let a thousand flowers bloom, the more the merrier. And, but it's not time to stop wearing your masks anytime soon. And we need to take contact tracing a whole lot more seriously. Yes. Yes. Exactly. Well said. John, let me put you into conversation. So Shabita has a plan to improve our standing in the world. Maybe tell us what you think about that. And then also what, you know, some of the particular unique challenges are about foreign policy in the time of COVID. Oh no. Still no, still no sound. You get one more try before we vote you off the island, actually. Justin, I have a quick one for you. And then we'll kick it back to John in a minute. You can ask me foreign policy questions. I'm going to just channel my inner John. You had Devine's on this actually. I had it on. All right. So yeah, you can ask me the capital of any country in the world. And I'll Google it and then I'll window that one. So Justin, I, a friend of mine actually sent me a quote of yours and there's a fairly significant amount of nuance in it from one of your appearances on one of the news channels. I believe you said Larry Kudlow is a clown and hasn't gotten a single thing right in the last six months. So I wonder if you could, you could pick apart that nuance for us. Yeah. This is one of the problems about the Zoom age that we live in. When you go into a TV studio, you know, you're meant to, you know, wear a tie and look absolutely serious. And when you're at home talking to someone over over a webcam, sometimes you say what you mean. Oh, it sounds like there's a paper to be written there. People letting their defenses down. You know, look, the reality, Luke, is it was an unbelievably underqualified economics team. And I want to say that without a hint of ideological bias one way or the other. Kudlow is a maid for TV. You know, he looks like an economist, a little ugly in your average economist, but beyond that, he has the overconfidence and the people to man, frankly. But, you know, watching, there's a deep question, hmm, not about Republicans, but about my profession of economics, which is we became, as did many professions, decreasingly relevant to public policy over the last four years. The quality of people attracted into government service was a lot lower. The quality of people chosen and also the influence. The Council of Economic Advisers was no longer a cabinet position, for instance. The president went shopping on his favorite network for his next economist rather than looking through the universities. And it's easy for us to sit at home and say, well, you know, I didn't like this guy. And a lot of us have that view. But I think there should be, for all of us who are in fields that have become decreasingly relevant, you know, remember the president was elected. He was nearly re-elected. We need to look within and see how it is that we failed and how we failed to communicate to a broader public in such a way that it was politically acceptable to recruit, hire, retain, and take advice from secondary people. And by the way, the cost of this in economics may be large, but the cost in public health is even larger. You've got Scott Atlas in there who has literally no more expertise around these issues than I do, suggesting what we should do is go for herd immunity, which is basically let the virus rip and hope a few people are left standing at the end. And he was one of the leaders on the coronavirus task force. So, you know, how we restore the integrity of advice from tall people like John is, you know, a challenge. Could you tell us a little bit about the role of economists in a typical administration? So, when you think about how do you envision a president Biden using a council of economic advisors and what role they would play? Yeah. Look, for some of my past students I had there watching tonight, and you know, the promise I made you in class is that economics is an important language within public policy. And for a variety of policy debates, it may be the most important. And that has historically been true. And I think we'll be true again. There is sort of the technocratic center of the Democratic Party. There were challenges to that through the primaries, but Biden is of that technocratic center. You know, look, the reality is policy is boring. You know, it's meant to go through these long processes. You meant to have feedback from all sorts of wonks at all sorts of places. We run models. We try and figure out cause and effect. And, you know, it's slow. It's boring, dreary work. And I can't wait for the day that public policy is boring again. Make policy dull would be, I think, you know, what I'm, so many of us are hoping for. And I think we're about to see it. And actually pulling politics off the front page back to page three, page five, page seven, I think, will certainly be very good for my mental health and possibly many of the rest of us. John, do we have you? No, you actually are muted. Have you got me now? Yeah. Sorry, switched to my phone. Sorry about that. All right. Take it away. I've given you a couple of different questions. So you get to just pick whatever you want to talk about. Nobody. Sure. The first, I do. The first question you asked was about how diplomacy is conducted in this virtual era and the difficulty of reaching out to partners at a time when you can't take trips abroad and hang out in the in the conference rooms and in diplomatic dinners. I think that the new Biden administration has a real advantage in this regard in that he personally and the people he's most likely to appoint to senior positions have a lot of foreign policy experience. Obviously, Biden does not want this to be the third term of the Obama presidency. He wants to put his own mark on this administration in a variety of ways. But much of the message that he needs to provide internationally in order to restore US image and credibility is a message about normalcy, continuity, a return to a more conventional foreign policy approach. And for that reason alone, he probably will want to appoint a number of senior people who who were from the from the Obama administration. The benefit of that in this virtual era is they don't need to start new relationships. They need to reconnect in many cases with people whom they've worked with for many years. And the current administration, the Trump administration chose deliberately to bring lots of new faces into Washington to show its break with the past and that it was going to pursue a very different foreign policy. Biden's approach is likely going to be to want to restore a sense of continuity. And that should help a lot in this regard. It'll also help him in that any president who arrives in office always has to make the difficult decision of where am I going to take my first overseas? Who am I going to please? Who am I going to displease by my choice of travel? In this virtual environment, they won't have to make some of those choices. And they'll have mechanisms that have become normalized and routinized by audiences around the world to broadcast foreign policy messages to a very, very wide audience rather than an audience that's geographically defined. Now that does have a drawback. Diplomats sometimes tailor their messages or often tailor their messages to a particular locality. That's a little bit less possible if you're operating through some of these virtual channels. But still, I think on balance this is an advantage for the initial messaging. Biden didn't get elected for foreign policy reasons. Biden got elected primarily to deal with the things that Justin and Shobita are talking about. And he's going to have to spend and his administration will have to spend most of their early political capital, whether it's in Washington or in the States, addressing issues like COVID and the economy. He's not going to have a lot of bandwidth to deal with foreign policy. And so some of that initial messaging might actually be conducted more efficiently through technological channels than through a series of overseas trips that would take him away from Washington and the crisis at hand. I like your point about it's possible that President Biden could be on like three Zoom meetings with three different countries at about approximately the same time. So maybe he can just not alienate anyone. He can be everywhere. That's good. But tell me a little bit. It's my understanding that you, so I hear what you're saying about sort of veteran folks coming in for top posts and already having established relationships. I'm sort of studying a message. It's sort of my understanding that a lot of career folks have exited, especially from the State Department. And is there a concern about there just sort of not being enough bodies to do all of the work that we need to do? There is a very real concern about that. There are different categories of people, of course, who left. One is a category of people who were in very senior posts and chose to take early retirements. I don't think that a large number of those folks will necessarily get back in government. Some will probably seek to return. And then there's the question about whether the Senate will confirm senior level appointments promptly. So there's very much a concern at that level. A second very important category of people who left were people who were in their mid-career phase and climbing fast, who had to make a decision about whether to double down on their career as diplomats or whether to do something else with the next phase of their careers. Many of those chose to do something else for the last several years. And it's my hope, but also my expectation that a good number of them have been, frankly, displeased with the way American foreign policy has been conducted for the last few years and will eagerly jump at the chance to come back in a deputy assistant secretary role or an office director role, a political counselor in an embassy, and hopefully, replete the very lean foreign service that we have at the moment. You mentioned this question about cabinet selections and approval from a Senate. So, you know, obviously, as we look back on the election, it returned a Democrat in the White House, a Democrat majority in the House of Representatives and a Republican Senate that approves many of the positions. So how much of that is an issue in terms of what President Biden, who is put up for those roles? Do you expect there to be difficulty getting people approved? And will that shape the course of policy? I do sadly expect there will be difficulty getting approvals from the Senate. Biden, probably, based on his own foreign policy proclivities, was not inclined to send radical candidates to Capitol Hill for confirmation. And so my guess is that to most Democrats or even independents or moderate Republicans, the people who he'll be putting up for senior foreign policy roles will not be very controversial, but some of them will still get held up. And there used to be the expression of politics stops at the water's edge and a bipartisan consensus on America being strong diplomatically and militarily broad. Sadly, I think that we're a lot further from that than we have been at any point in our recent history. It would be quite crippling to U.S. efforts to, again, restore our global image, our credibility if the Senate were to hold up many of our senior appointees. Shobita and Justin, let me just throw the same question to you all. As you think about the course of getting cabinet approval for science and technology and public health officials as well as the folks driving economic policy, Justin, what are we in for? Well, I mean, certainly when it comes to cabinet appointments, that is a real concern, I think. It's not traditionally, when it comes to the science, technology and health sectors, there haven't necessarily been the spaces where there has been a lot of controversy, but it's possible that the lesson that Senate Republicans have learned from the Trump era or Trumpism is that everything is subject to challenge, critique, and that includes sort of technical people. One of the big, there were a couple of concerns over the last few years, the first that even cabinet-appointed technical advisors were highly political actors, and you can think about, for example, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar as being a pretty good example or a pretty bad example depending on how you look at it, but then the second problem too has been the sub-level cabinet appointment. So the folks underneath them who are also highly political and it's sort of dipping further and further down in controlling the bureaucracy in significant ways. And I have to say, and here I echo what Justin was saying earlier, that I hope that the last four years has taught us that we need to potentially be thinking differently about expertise and bringing in voices that feel that they've been marginalized or neglected by our institutions, and what does that mean for how we think about policymaking and who the experts are and what the evidence is, but I think that some of the bald politicization of science has also been deeply problematic. And I am hopeful, certainly there's been a lot of discussion that, you know, certainly Biden says he's going to try to bring back more reasoned appointees, but it's unclear what that means in the context of what Senate Republicans are willing to accept, and if they feel like they are in a power position, they might push against people that they perceive as being too progressive or too liberal for their tastes. Justin, you want to weigh in on this? You know, one answer is it nobody knows. There's actually not a long history of knocking out a bunch of appointees at this point. Obviously, the more controversial ones do. We have to see what happens with the Senate. You've got Mitt Romney quite clearly, no longer a Trumpist. No one knows what hopes the Democrats are not going to negotiate with themselves. On the economic side, I'm not that worried. So obviously, the Treasury Secretary needs to get through. Biden's already announced he's going to figure out who his Treasury Secretary is. The leading candidates in most people's book, Janet Yellen, former chair of the Fed, unimpeachable in terms of both integrity and just qualifications. Lail Brainerd is currently on the federal board of governors, same same. Roger Ferguson used to be a vice chair of the Fed, exactly the same. Each of those three people would get through, I think, in a heartbeat. If the president wants advice from people who are unconfirmable, it's easy. What you do is you appoint them a counselor to the president. They don't get to run a big department. They can still run as much of the economic policy process as they want. And then the other set of appointments really matter for economics, the Federal Reserve Board. And honestly, the first half of the Trump administration, he made a bunch of really good appointments. They all got through. Something snapped at some point and they started nominating genuinely clowns. But the good people still kept getting through, and I think that that norm of trying to continue, both sides being committed to wanting to appoint good people at the Fed is likely to continue. So on the economic side, I think they'll get the economists there. If you want to try and appoint Bernie Sanders, the Labor Secretary, that could cause fireworks. But I'm moderately optimistic. Okay. So in some respects, we could be in a fork in the road to see if we're able to sort of reestablish some traditions, as I'm listening to all three of you, or are we, you know, continue to be in a new world of governance that in some respects we have been in the last few years, but that also there are sort of ways that maybe can move past any impasse, including sort of thinking about exactly where your personnel goes, and what it means for a confirmation. Good. So let's talk about where there might be agreement. So we have a question from the audience. What policies does a Biden-Harris administration likely see successful movement on early in their term? And which policies might face step opposition? Does anyone have a sense of what administration might bring forward when and what might get through and where we might see sort of the first fights? I think one of the big fights we're going to see fairly early on is going to be about the size of the fiscal stimulus. It's, you know, the lesson we learned from 2008 was you'd get both sides to agree on the first stimulus. The economy remained rotten through 2009, 2010, and 2011, and they couldn't get a second stimulus passed. If they went back to the same scorched earth politics of wanting to make this a one-term administration, a weak economy, it's far too cynical. But, you know, I do think the lesson of 2008 was that can be a big one. I'm much more optimistic that the money it'll take to get the rest of the COVID relief done will get through. One, a bunch of it's spent. The vaccine commitments were made. Two, a lot of it's actually very cheap. Shabita talked a bit about her concerns about vaccines being expensive and the like. But, you know, we're talking about 40 bucks a dose for something that's economically and personally transformative. You know, it might be hard to track down enough freezes. There may be labor shortages, things like that. But the stakes here are so much higher that the underlying costs hopefully won't get in the way. And the other answer is that what the feds don't do, you've then got to failsafe, which is you've got the states that can step up. Now, the big problem is the states don't have a lot of budgetary room right now. But if I were a state governor, and I had to decide where to spend my money, making sure that the virus was not going to cause death and destruction of my state would be pretty high. But again, we've seen even that has become clearly very, very politicized. Before I go to Shabita, Justin, I, one thing you said earlier was just about this sort of shifting goal post on what a stimulus might look like, right? And I still even now remain shocked about the CARES Act and how actually successful it was in enhancing the economic well-being of poor Americans in particular, right? We see some measures actually where there was almost no increase in hardship and maybe even some improvements, at least for the summer. And I just wonder like, do you have an explanation why we had never done anything like that? And was it just sort of the unprecedented moment that got that kind of package through? I think a big part of the answer is definitely much more politics and political psychology and economics, which was this was a holy shit moment. There was no book on the tech, there was no file up on the bookshelf that you could pull down. The other thing is the CARES Act had a lot for business and a lot for families. Something for everyone. Yeah, and so I think, I mean, they shoveled a ton of money out through PPP. Whether that money should have been giveaways or loans is something I think we're going to spend the next 10 years arguing about. But Republicans were very worried about businesses going under. I don't want to caricature of sides as being completely on different, but in folks like you, Luke, were very worried about families putting enough food on the table. And then there were some really weird things, right? Like why did you unemployment insurance get kicked up by $600? Because it was really hard to reprogram their computers to do anything more sophisticated. So they just said, what the hell, let's do it. And so they accidentally reduced poverty along the way for a limited period. So I think two things are remarkable. One, the size of the initial stimulus is remarkable. So was the economic shock. The second is the extent of fatigue subsequent to that reform that the unemployment insurance money ran out. Republicans wanted $1 trillion. Democrats wanted $3 trillion. So they compromised on nothing. So the follow-up was also remarkably weak as well. And so this is where, if you worry about politics, you worry about the politics of all this. Yeah. Yeah. So, Luke, yeah, you asked initially about where we think there might be movement and, you know, every almost everything that that almost every one of the major priorities right now, I think is highly, highly polarized. But, you know, in reflecting on your question, I was thinking about a couple of areas that where there might be some room. One is, I think, in terms of the dreamers and immigration policy specifically around DACA. Obviously, immigration policy generally is very fraught and even more so, I think, in the Trump era. This is a place where you'll see Trump, you know, the sort of legacy, I think, last for a long time. But there's, you know, we historically talk about the fact that there's a lot of agreement on DACA. And I wonder if that might be an interesting place where there might actually be a number of people in the Senate who would be, you know, who would want to push that forward, even though it's not one of, you know, the top priorities that Biden has been talking about. It could be a place where there might be some, some agreement. I think a second place could also be around, you know, to continue to move the ball forward when it comes to criminal justice reform. One of the things that Biden has talked about is how one of the first things he wants to do in office is to, you know, let's say repeal, I don't know that that's exactly how I would put it, but should put it, is the crime bill, the 1994 crime bill that, of course, made a lot of news in this election cycle and that Biden has, you know, said he made a mistake and many of the other authors, like, have also said that they, that they erred. And, you know, that criminal justice reform is actually a place where Trump said, you know, Trump actually did pass something. So in some ways, you know, there seems to be some Republican interest as well in criminal justice reform. And certainly, you know, if you look at the polls and you look at exit polls, in particular, there's, there is interest in across parties in questions related to racial justice. Now, to Biden's credit, he talks about racial justice in economic terms and health terms and not traditionally. We tend to, you know, equate racial justice and criminal justice reform. Those shouldn't, they're not synonymous, but that's obvious. Criminal justice reform could be a place, for example, where, where you could see Democrats and Republicans aligned in some places. Not all. I think there's a lot of distance, but there may be some, you know, in a lot of dimensions of that, but perhaps in some parts of criminal justice reform. Luke, let me just, I just wanted to add one thing, channeling the fact that we don't have a political scientist among us. So I'll play one on TV. Look, I think the big unknown is the future of Trump isn't after Trump. There's a fork in the road. Which way does the Republican Party go? That fundamentally shapes what's open for agreement. Is it going to be the Biden Trump land or is it going to be Biden Romney land? Those are very, very different into 60 cents. So I want to, in a few minutes, ask you all to, I want to sort of go back in time and talk about the election. And then I want to talk about the transition in particular. But as I listen to you all, and I'm, you know, if I put on sort of my glass half full mentality, it sounds like we could have at least three vaccines starting to be distributed in the, in the spring, a much more robust contact tracing program, some sort of economic stimulus that, you know, even if it were, where the sort of the lower bound that we're talking about is maybe $1 trillion. And, you know, potentially the rest of the world being happier with us, John, because we aren't behaving the way that we have been. And that sounds like a pretty, oh, and of course, Shavita, you were just saying maybe we get a little movement on immigration reform, common sense immigration reform, and changes in incarceration. That sounds like a pretty good agenda. Am I, I'm putting the cart before the horse? Anything? Well, I mean, I think I'll speak on the foreign affairs side and say that the, there's some easy work to be done. This relates to your question about what Biden could do easily and what he couldn't do easily. There's some very easy work to be done to repair relationships in terms of the tone and tenor of the way we communicate with our allies, for example. That's a day one benefit. It's like Obama getting the Nobel Prize before he had been in office very long, because there was so much hope and aspiration for his administration. The Biden administration is going to have a lot of goodwill greeting it at the door in international affairs. It's going to make it very easy to turn the page in terms of tone and rhetoric. It's going to be much more difficult to make progress on the substantive issues that have bedeviled the last several administrations. Getting back into the Iran nuclear agreement, the Biden administration would like to do that. It's not easy to do that. The Iranians realize that American leverage is much less than it was when the deal was negotiated several years ago, because the Chinese, the Germans, the French, the Russians are all invested in Iran now, and the threat of multilateral sanctions is diminished. North Korea, no administration has been able to manage that problem very effectively. Trump's approach to it was the most unorthodox and to some observers loopy approach to try to meet with Kim Jong-un going from zero to 60 in 1.2 seconds. But the follow-on diplomacy ran into the same problems that previous administrations have. The North Koreans do not have an incentive to denuclearize. To the contrary, they have a very powerful incentive to maintain a nuclear deterrent as their ultimate regime insurance. And we can go down the list. Those are just two examples. Getting out of Afghanistan. Both Trump and Biden would like to see U.S. troops brought home stepwise from Afghanistan, but Biden will struggle for the same reason that the Obama administration did. Because the Afghan government is not in a position to be able to maintain effective sovereignty over that territory. And a Taliban victory would be not just a matter of sunk costs, but a matter of potentially staggering human rights violations against the Afghans who have served alongside us for 20 years. And these are just a few examples of the vexing problems. We could add Syria, Yemen, dealing with China on trade, trying to reverse the course of the events in the South China Sea. All areas in which a Biden administration will have a more, I think, helpful approach, a more multilateral approach, working more closely with allies. All of that is the right thing to do, but still will struggle to make fundamental progress because these are difficult issues for the United States. Can I just follow up real quick? John, can you explain to me what just happened this week? I saw a headline, and then as I do, I didn't read the article. I just thought I would ask you. Didn't the Trump administration sort of say they were going to start pulling back troops from Afghanistan? And what was that, and why did they do that? They did. So one answer is that Trump wants to fulfill a campaign pledge, and that he promised that he was going to get the United States out of Afghanistan. It's something that he seems to be personally committed to. He has been pretty consistent on this point throughout his administration. He wants to pull the troops out. That's why the United States signed a deal with the Taliban, not really including the Afghan government and those negotiations, by the way. It was a deal that effectively signaled to the Taliban, in my view, that the United States wants to get out, and therefore we should bide our time, wait until the U.S. leaves, and then negotiate with the Afghan government from a position of strength. Now, the U.S. military has wanted to delay this process because there's a recognition among the top brass that despite their disinterest in seeing more American body bags come home, that the alternative to depart fully from Afghanistan would be strategically reckless and again would subject the population to possibly staggering retribution. And so you had the very unusual series of events in, I think, September when a senior Pentagon official said one thing about the U.S. intent to draw down, and a senior general in the U.S. military said, actually, we're going to do it in a more phased way. It's very rare that you have that type of discord between what's coming out of the civilian and the military leadership. But it was indicative of the fact that many people who are in the military believe it would be irresponsible to pull out too quickly. The Afghan government is shaking in its boots about that prospect, and also countries around the region. And so my hope, certainly, is that Trump, before leaving office, will only be able to do a little bit of that, and that there will be a residual force in place when Biden takes office so that if need be he can build it back slightly or at least maintain that presence, which is essential for the Afghan security forces to hold off the Taliban. It's not so much the number of U.S. troops on the ground that matters. It's the fact that the United States provides air support, provides intelligence, provides logistics, provides medical facilities, a whole bunch of supportive infrastructure, and above all, the prospect of possible major use of force and defense of the Afghan security forces. Without all of those props behind it, the Afghan army may collapse quickly against the Taliban. So it's a, in my mind, it's a very dangerous six weeks for that country. And I hope if they get out of it, that the Biden administration will take a measured and gradual approach. I guess I just, you know, when I think about a desire of a president to fulfill a campaign pledge, I think of it as in part sort of a goal of, you know, winning the next election. But do you, is this something that a president Trump just really thinks is the right thing for the country? Or, you know, I'm just trying to figure out what the reasoning is. And maybe we just don't know. The answer is I don't know, but there are at least the speculations are that he may be thinking about 2024 or he may be thinking about his own personal sense of his history. Okay, I think I opened the question with a question about the possible upside on a set of things. And John, you really, I'm just going to say you took it in a much different direction. But let me, let me, let me try to flip it back to an upside for a second. I don't know, you know, Shabita, you were, we're going to, I think add something there. Maybe it's on the upside or not. I mean, John ignored where I was going. So feel free to do the same thing. Yeah, I mean, what John was saying is in keeping what I was going to say, but hopefully maybe with a slightly more silver lining, I like, I like where you're going with this sort of positive thinking. I mean, the original question or the previous question you asked us was about, you know, what does Biden do with a Republican controlled Senate? And the, I think the upside or at least the reality is that we're now in an era where presidents are using executive orders more and more when they have divided government. And, you know, Biden has already talked about the fact that on day one, he's going to be, you know, rescinding a bunch of Trump executive orders. And we can expect that he's going to issue a number of additional executive orders on priorities that he cares about. And I expect those to be, you know, along the lines of the priorities that he's already articulated, certainly I think around COVID-19. I also think climate change is another clear example where he's going to be issuing a number of executive orders. I'm sure he'll also try to use rules and regulations to his benefit. And I think that where, you know, Trump, it took Trump a number of years to figure out how to manage the rules and regulations of the US government, you know, Biden's long experience, I think that and his team's long experience suggests that they'll know how to how to move the rules and regulations process quickly. And that has long term impacts, because when you think, for example, about innovation related to climate change and some of the executive orders and rules that the Obama administration put into place, even that some of them got challenged in court, it actually forced the industry to change, to shift. And once the car industry, automobile industry, for example, starts to make, you know, to reduce its emissions and its vehicles, you know, the fact that then the next administration changes their mind, you know, it's very difficult for the auto industry to keep shifting back and forth. And so you see a number of those kinds of things from Obama to Trump. And my guess is that Biden will also try to leverage that as much as possible along the, you know, along the priorities that that he's talking about. One of those things in terms of the upside is actually taking advantage of existing regulations that Trump didn't take advantage of. So for example, when you come to COVID-19, for example, one of the controversies, if you remember, in the spring and early summertime was around the Defense Production Act that he really didn't ever take advantage of in a significant way. My guess is that that's another place where, you know, Biden will put some money with some attention. So I think that that ability to take advantage of what what levers already exist and the kind of increased power of the presidency that we've seen over the last few presidencies he's likely to use to make some as to take advantage of as much as he can. And I think that that's probably where you'll see some of the upsides that you are talking about. Yeah. So a mix of potential cooperation with Congress, but also using the executive powers. And and then it sounds like, you know, people sort of moving ahead on issues despite no action from from Washington for a while. And and that maybe is a positive thing in the long run. Can I have a chance for redemption, Luke? I wanted to say, Yeah, okay. I've just given you a long time. Of unharmed positivity. Rejoining the Paris Climate Accord is not a panacea for climate change, but it is an important signal entirely within the president's power that will that will be a concrete manifestation of a desire to lead through multilateral engagement. And that's a big deal. Yeah. In what tell us what that looks like. How how do we re-enter? And is that something that is going to happen that might happen? I think it's quite clear that that the Biden administration will rejoin it, perhaps on the first or second day of the new administration. And it's a pretty simple process. This is not a this is not a treaty obligation. This is a basically a multilateral equivalent of an executive agreement. And and you know, it's voluntary pledges. So again, it's not necessarily going to turn the Titanic in terms of international management of climate change challenge. But I think it's a very important signal and will be will be something that Biden can certainly accomplish. Another thing I think that falls in the similar category, very important symbolically as an indication of the direction the administration will take is to change the caps on the number of refugees admitted admitted to this country, which is shamefully low in the last few years, especially in light of the scale of forced migration in many parts of the world. That's something that a new administration could do more or less on its own. It can't change the asylum law, but it can raise the cap on refugee admissions. I think that would be a very, very well received move. I think it will happen. I'm very optimistic about it. Good. All right. In one last positive note before I allow professors back into their natural state of pessimism, I'll just mention that I've been working on something called the fully refundable child tax credit for quite a while that would be an expanded benefit to all low and moderate middle income families with children. Other countries call it a child allowance, but because we might like to make policy boring, as Justin says, we call it a fully refundable child tax credit. The idea is that raising kids is expensive and every family should get something like $250 a month to do it well. I love it because it affects the families I care about the most, very poor families, and then middle income families as well. I've been working on this for quite a while. Just a few weeks ago, our colleague Betsy Stevenson mentioned the idea in testimony between the Houseways and Means Committee, I think. Since then, now Mitt Romney has identified it as one very clear possible place for collaboration with a Biden administration. It just goes to prove that people listen to Betsy more than they listen to me. I like to think that I laid the groundwork a little bit. That could be exciting. Okay, we can get out of positivity. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that we here are a collection of Generation Xers. I don't know if the three of you identified Generation X, but I'm just going to sort of guess. I would just also go out on a limb and say that Generation X is the best generation, if only anybody remembered that we existed. This all relates to an audience question, which is that both the Democratic and Republican parties are dominated by leaders in their 70s and their 80s. Do you all have ideas about either side, how we can appeal to younger voters in terms of policy, perhaps by in the future putting a Generation Xer up for the presidency? What about the generational divide? I think the facts are just stunning, right? So the Democrats have got Biden at the top, Pelosi and Hoyer. Wow. And while the Republican leadership, McConnell looks that way, there's a much clearer secession plan there. Rubio, Hawley, Cruz is not that old. He's not that young anymore either. So I think you can actually see the next generation, the next Republican leader is certainly going to be younger than any of these guys. It's crazy. I don't get where it comes from. I guess one answer is you get good at doing your job and you keep doing it. And so maybe you should declare success. There's obviously some awareness that they need to groom someone under the age of 80. So they're calling maybe some spring chickens in their mid-70s. And it's also stunning seeing all this. Remember the youth of Obama and he brought a lot of youth with him. And so young voters are out there and they turned out in force. They really did care and they do care. But how it is that they can succeed within current political institutions. It turns out you can run for president. Mayor Pete proved that. But actually rising within these parties, which have very strong seniority norms, seems to be a lot harder. Although I have to speak for my fellow South Asian Vice President-elect. She is not in Generation X. I just checked. She's just one year out from Generation X. But she is a younger candidate. She obviously embodies a wholesale historic change both as a woman, a woman of color, a Black woman, a South Asian woman. So there's a little bit of hope out there, I would say. And put it in and right, I'm supposed to be optimistic. Viewers to know exactly what our faculty Christmas party is like. So I'm sure he goes over to get to the punch bottle and throws it on the ground. He yells at him because that was too optimistic. And Luke just sits in the corner saying, what about the poor? What about the poor? And doesn't anyone think of the children? Yeah, but I guess I would say, so it'll be interesting to see how she's received and what kind of power she has. I think that they certainly, Biden and Harris, there's sort of hints that they're envisioning a more of a partnership executive. So that I think will be interesting to witness, especially because clearly she has design and so on running for president again. But I also think it's worth noting that in addition to what Justin said, which is that of course young voters turned out in droves, that Biden was advised by many in younger generations, Generation X, millennials, and Generation Z. And for example, and it's interesting how they all, many of whom were supporting Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, sort of came into the tent and came into the tent in, in fact, in advising Biden. So the example of that is the sunrise movement, for example, which is very progressive when it comes to issues of climate change. But then people in the sunrise movement became major climate advisors to Biden. So it will be interesting to see whether and how that sticks, what that means for the next the sort of next generations of leadership and also what that means more generally, I think, for the direction of the Democratic Democratic Party. But there's clearly some sort of legs now that I think are more clear into those younger generations, but not as clearly an elected officials. I like that you alerted me to the Vice President-elect that Harris is just one year away from being Generation X, but it turns out we're not choosy. So maybe we can just adopt her. I was just going to say, I think she's going to have a really, a much more consequential role than some Vice Presidents do, because she needs to be the one who connects with younger, more progressive voters whose concerns are somewhat distinguishable from those of older Democratic voters. And the administration also will probably need to appoint a few people who can communicate. They're clearly getting a lot of requests from the young progressives who supported them and saying, we turned out, we helped you win this election, we want representation, we want a voice in the cabinet, we want a voice in the White House. And so the personnel selection there is going to be key. If the administration is seen as limiting or shutting down those voices, they're going to hear about it in the midterm elections. And I'm sure they're smart enough to know that. And so above and beyond, they're sort of desired to reach out and cultivate the next generation. They also have a near-term self-interest in making sure that they continue to draw on that energy, because that's where the energy is in the Democratic Party. It's from young progressives, it's from minority voters and who are turning out in record numbers. And so Harris is certainly has a potential to be really influential as a VP. Shabita, you started as sort of starting to talk about how we interpret the election. And so I wanted to just turn it back to you. And then I'm going to go to Justin, who's already said he's very happy to pretend to be a political scientist. But how do we think about this election? So I just think about the fact that Biden-Harris got more votes for presidents than any other candidate in history. And now Donald Trump got the second-most votes for president for any candidate in history. And of course, there's population adjustment and such. But it certainly wasn't, it was not terribly close in the popular vote in the end or really in the Electoral College. But it was not a matter that there weren't people who a lot of people, the most ever in history, that sort of showed up. So how do we think about this? And some of this question that's already been raised about what happens with constituents who really feel passionately about President Trump. Yeah. So, and I should say, I play a political scientist at 8.30 every morning, Tuesday and Thursday. So today is my day, I guess, of being able to say, you're in the evening show now. That's right. This is the evening section of my Politics of Public Policy class. Yeah. I mean, I think it was certainly a surprise, obviously, for many people, how much support there was for Trump. I mean, certainly there was obviously a repudiation of him as well. And that's really what this election was about. And I think it's it's important to understand, you know, that it was a very diverse and significant tent of people who voted against Trump. But I think I do want to emphasize something that I said briefly before, which is, you know, I know there's a lot of critique of the endless gazing at Trump voters to understand what constitutes a Trump voter. But I think that there is a something going on that's been going on, I think, in black and brown communities for decades that now we're seeing in, you know, more on the right, which is a real feeling of disenfranchisement from government, alienation in our government institutions. And, you know, we see that all over the place. And I think that as I personally, this is something that I think about as a professor of public policy, how do I train my students to operate in that world? And what are the kinds of challenges that emerge? How do we, you know, so many of these people, I think, on both sides of, you know, on the margins have been on the margins, they, I think many of the people on the on the right saw in Trump an opportunity to be heard. He sounded like he heard them, right? Whether or not he actually did is a separate question to me. But he sounded like he heard them. And that is why they voted for for him. And so I think that the that we can talk about misinformation and conspiracy theories and how they were wrong, you know, the sort of the racism, which I certainly am deeply concerned about. But I think we have to think about what, how do we have to think differently about government? What kinds of perspectives and knowledge is not is not a part of the system that needs to be? Are we relying too much on too narrow an establishment in terms of expertise? And what kinds of new mechanisms can we include to ensure that communities and publics are part more centrally part of decision making? Can we make it more flexible? So those are the kinds of things that for me, this was a signal that even when for many of us, it was a shocking turn of events that he continued to get so many votes, even after everything that he's done that seems so traumatizing, it's because people felt heard. And I think that that should cause us to really rethink our the centrality of our expertise. Justin, can I turn it to you? Yeah, I got lost what the question was, mate. The question is about how you interpret the election and sort of things that you see as you look at who got votes where and in the overall levels and what they mean going forward. Sure. So look, one answer is that Biden won the popular vote easily and clearly has the confidence of the country as a whole. And it's only an accident of the electoral college that this even looks close. And even when you look there, it doesn't look that close. I think one of the more interesting things is you can go a step deeper. Where did Trump come from? And what are the deeper institutions that led to not Trumpism? That's what should be to spoke about. But actually, how is it that someone so outside the mainstream could have captured the presidency? And a big part of that is our literally our first past the post electoral system. And so one of the interesting things that came up was Alaska just passed a move to rank choice voting joining Maine. That in fact, I think is the original sin, which is in 2016 you had Cruz versus Kasech versus Trump. The Kasech and Trump Cruz voters both hated Trump. And there are a majority of the Republican Party. So a majority of the Republican Party did not want Trump. But we had a first past the post system, which effectively led Cruz and Kasech to crowd each other out, allowing a minor player to take the nomination. And so, you know, I do think it's a great time to be thinking deeper about our electoral institutions. You know, rank choice voting always made a ton of sense to me. It eliminates, you can never, we have deep theorems, you can never eliminate all the, you know, strategy strategic voting stuff. But there'll be less of it under rank choice voting. You know, let me sit throw a few others out there. Lots of people are pretty unhappy about the Electoral College and trying to explain to my daughter, how you can win an election by 5 million votes and only barely sneak across the line. You know, the good thing about kids is they have a pretty innate sense of fairness. And it's her, pretty undemocratic. And I explained her that I had something to do with some people a couple hundred years ago, and she was wondering what the hell that should, why that should dictate her life and the value of her vote. So as it currently stands in most presidential elections, most Americans don't matter. That's absurd. Let me give you my favorite. I come from Australia. We have compulsory voting. You know, Americans have never flinched about having a draft. It's okay to tell people they have to go overseas and shoot other people. But God help me. If you make me go to the ballot box once every four years, that is an affront to freedom. That's absurd. It's a civic duty. In Australia, we have elections on the weekend to get out of work. Even better, they have a barbecue there so you can get a good sausage while you're there. It's fantastic. You know, these things are pretty simple. And I think everyone in the sixth class at age 15 would agree that they were a good idea. And the question is how do we move from that to actually reform our institutions to make them somewhat more democratic? So let's move there. How do we move to institutions that are more democratic? And I mean, I've always sort of thought the one surefire way to get rid of the electoral college is if a Democrat actually won by the electoral college and lost the popular vote. But I don't see that happening anytime soon. So the Constitution is pretty tough on this question, right? But perhaps we're going to see more states do ranked choice voting. I mean, the states run a lot of... So getting rid of the electoral college is hard. But the electoral systems within states are up to the states. Explaining ranked choice to a population that's not used to thinking about electoral specifics is hard work. But Alaska showed it can be done. So there is a moderately serious grassroots movement there. And maybe we should be optimistic about it. Yeah, I think institutionally, there are a few key things that one could point to. Media segmentation is very tough to challenge because it's very difficult to constrain free speech in the way that that might imply. Gerrymandering and having independent redistricting commissions is difficult but not impossible. I mean, some states have made headway in that direction. And look at the election results. Trump lost by 5 million votes or more. But Republicans in other races did quite well. They did better than people expected in the House. They controlled state legislatures. They won a number of gubernatorial races and so on. And so this was not a repudiation of the party and we still are going to look in the next election and the one after that, at cases where the elections for those down ticket races are decided at the primary stage. They're not really decided in the general. And that's, I think, a very important area for institutional reform, campaign finance. I know it's not likely that Citizens United would be overturned by the Supreme Court, but there has to be headway on campaign finance reform so that there's a more democratic economic access to politics. And those in my view would be two very important areas for systemic reform. I think I would just add, first of all, I totally agree with John's point about gerrymandering. And I think that there's a lot of movement, including in Michigan, in that direction, which I think is great. But I think it's also important to remember that this was actually the largest turnout election, historic turnout in part because of absentee voting and mail-in balloting. And hopefully that will only continue. That way, the day of the week that we have the election doesn't matter as much. And hopefully we'll have a leader who isn't convincing people not to use that method. And so that will continue to increase the number of voters out there. Although I'm quite enamored with Justin's barbecue at the polls idea. There was pizza at the polls this year. Platform to run on. Justin, I've been wondering about the polls. So I think there's been questions about what are the polls missing? Did they actually do all right in the end? Or what do you see for the future of that whole industry that we all follow day in and day out and run up to an election? Yeah. So one of the funny things is we write the first draft of history of the election on election night. But it turns out we count most of the votes in the week after. And on election night, it looked like a remarkably close race. The polls had said it wouldn't be close. So then we immediately started riding away with the polls so dramatically wrong. And then you start counting New York and California, and of course, Biden wins by 5 million. Not as much as the polls said. There's clearly a polling error, but it was not a drastic polling error, but certainly not historically unprecedented. Look, one of the things I've talked a lot about. I think my camera just died. We can hear you. You're doing a radio segment now. Well, the good news is I think I have a backup camera. Look at that. Oh, wow. Always keep a backup. John, didn't you have a backup? I was just about to say that you made me feel better for all my failures and then you were ready with the backup. One of the things I actually suggested in some of my past research is that we look at alternative ways of predicting elections. One of them is prediction markets. This is where you bet on the likely outcome. The argument that I'd made as an economist is that would yield a more statistically accurate result. It turns out it did. You know, I think got 47 out of 50 states right in the prediction markets got 49 out of 50. It depends exactly how you count. It wasn't an unmitigated disaster, but I will say public polling as we understand it and as we teach it is in trouble. The idea, of course, is you find a random sample of the population. The problem is that in reality, for many of these polls, as few as 3% of people are answering their phones. I know how to teach your statistics and how you can talk about reweighting, but if that 3% is in any way crazy or weird compared to the other 97, there's no statistical wizardry that can get you out of that. I think that's a big part of the problem. The future for polling is going to be what we call convenience samples rather than representative samples. We literally cannot find a representative cross-section of Americans anymore. And the question is how do you look at makes what you and I do much more valuable? How do you use statistics to take the data we have, which is not the data you want, and try to get some sort of insight? So we didn't have a catastrophic failure this year. We had a big failure, same as 2016, but I think big failures may well be the norm. All right, everyone. We have about five minutes left. Shabita, I wanted to ask you about the transition. So it seems like we're having a transition from one to the next administration like we never had, or just not a sharing of information. And I wonder if you could talk about how that impacts planning for a new sort of set of strategies and all those things that we want to do to confront COVID. Yeah. I mean, I think the first thing, which is obvious, but needs to be said is that at the same time as this transition from now until January 20th or 21st is also the greatest, we're at the greatest risk for getting COVID. And the vast, vast majority of us are not going to have a vaccine by January 21st. So that is part of what makes this incredibly difficult time. And it means that, you know, that it's going to continue to be a problem in the early spring where we continue, most of us will not have a vaccine. COVID will be raging around the country. And the Biden presidency will have to catch up. And on a really mundane basis, what this means is that right now anyway, you know, it means that lower level staffers in health and human services and the Centers for Disease Control and other places can't communicate with their counterparts in the transition team. And so, you know, what are the vaccine distribution plans, for example, that's information that they have at HHS, that they have in the Department of Defense, that they have an Operation Warp Speed, but that the Biden transition team doesn't have access to. And so if they're starting to plan out what the vaccine distribution plan should look like, what is the role that the federal government needs to play relative to the states, which is a key question, obviously, that is that kind of planning can only happen slightly in the dark. One of the bittersweet dimensions of this is that people, you know, whistleblowers like Rick Bright, who was part of the Operation Warp Speed and resigned a few weeks ago or now advising the Biden transition team, and that's happened in a lot of places. So that's the way that they're getting some of the key information. But in terms of a handoff, I think the metaphor that I heard recently that I think is useful is that it's a relay race that if someone has to stop in the middle and wait to get the baton that obviously causes problem when you have a pandemic that is not stopped, that's actually accelerating. So all of the issues that I described with regards to the vaccine is also going to be true when it comes to the test-trace and isolation program that we need to rely on for at least the next six to eight months. John, if I can rely on you to speak for a minute, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the transition and foreign policy. I'll say two things. One is there's a lot of information, especially intelligence, that needs to be passed between the current administration and the new administration. And the signals we're hearing out of Washington are not very positive on the score. I hope the people who are currently in office will have the sort of responsibility and concern for our country's security to pass that on faithfully. And secondly, there are still a number of things that this administration can do to make situation more difficult for the Biden administration when they enter, whether it's in the Persian Gulf or in a variety of other theaters. And again, I think this is a crucial time for people to put the national interest first and not a partisan interest. Things going smoothly would go a long way toward helping the new administration advance American values and interests abroad. Shobita, John, Justin, thanks so much for spending an hour and a half with me. I've really loved it and I've learned so much. And I'm just really grateful to be your colleague. And I'm really grateful to everyone who tuned in. Thanks for spending your time with us. I know there's a lot on screen. And so it's great that you would. And if you know any folks who are thinking about master's degrees, of course, the Ford School has got, you know, in our recruitment season for our MPP class. And so I hope you will consider, if you like what you saw, send them our way. So thank you so much. And I'm going to turn it over to a video that's going to play as Nicole Taylor, who's the president of the U of M Club of Washington, D.C. Hi, everyone. My name is Nicole Taylor, and I'm the president of the University of Michigan Alumni Club in Washington, D.C. I hope you all enjoyed our post-election recap event tonight. I would like to take a minute to thank the Ford School for their partnership on this event and Dean Barr and all of our other speakers for the great insight they have provided tonight. I'd also like to take a minute to thank our volunteers who have worked on this event and all of our other recent virtual events. If you'd like more information on our upcoming events, I encourage you to check out our website, umdc.org, or any of our social media channels to get more information. If you'd like to help plan events like this one or you want to get involved in our club in any other ways, please feel free to email me at president at umdc.org. Thank you all for attending this event tonight, and we hope to see you at another UMDC event.