 How do we balance the threat of the COVID-19 pandemic and the need to get on with our lives and get back to work? Is it time to liberate the U.S. economy from government lockdowns? That was the question on the table during the online SOHO forum debate held on Tuesday, April 21st. David Henderson, an economist and research fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, argued for an immediate opening of the American economy. Justin Wolffers, a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan, argued against the resolution. Here's David Henderson versus Justin Wolffers in an online debate hosted by SOHO forum director Gene Epstein. Defending the resolution, which is the U.S. economy should be liberated from the government's lockdowns right away. Hoover Institution fellow David R. Henderson opposing the resolution University of Michigan economics professor Justin Wolffers. Now, the affirmative goes first. The negative is going to be the cleanup hitter. So David, I want your up in a moment. Jane, please close the voting. David, take it away. Oh, and also I should mention that that when you have five minutes to go, I'm going to interrupt you briefly and tell you, give you the five-minute warning, and I'll also give you the one-minute warning. Again, David, take it away. Hope it didn't start because now it starts. Well, first of all, I want to thank everyone for showing up, thank Reason for doing this, thank Gene for doing this, and Justin. We had a very pleasant talk a few minutes ago, and I want to just say I think there's one lockdown that Justin and I are both against. He's from Australia, I'm from Canada, and I'm guessing that he like me thinks Trump should not be stopping immigration. So I'm proposing that the economy be liberated from government's lockdowns today. The lockdowns have caused enormous destruction. The odds are extremely high. They're basically 99.9 percent that the unemployment rate today, if measured correctly, would be over 15 percent and maybe higher. Economists now estimate that on an annual basis, quarterly GDP will be at least 30 percent lower during the current spring quarter. That's amazing. And so let's put that in perspective. US GDP last year was 21.4 trillion. Even with just zero growth there for, we would have had 5.35 trillion GDP in this quarter. A 30 percent drop of that from that is 1.6 trillion. If only half of that drop was due to the lockdown, and I think probably more than half was, that's 800 billion. Let's put that in perspective. The price of a no basic Ford F-150 truck is $30,000. So the cost to our economy, if you think in terms of trucks, is 300,000 Ford F-150s per day. Those aren't the only losses. There's a loss in health also. A new story in yesterday's print edition of the Wall Street Journal noted that state governments have ordered medical providers and patients to delay so-called non-essential procedures. We're not just talking plastic surgery here. It includes hip and knee replacements, mastectomies, and preventive screenings. Interestingly, this has resulted in furloughs of health care workers and might result, in fact, in bankruptcies of some hospitals, which is kind of ironic. Those are some of the economic and health losses. There's also a huge loss in our economic freedom. On the freedom front, Justin Wolffers and I have a huge advantage over most people. We are what sometimes are called academic scribblers. We make our living by writing, speaking, teaching, dealing with colleagues, this debate. And we can do all of that from home. So there are certain losses to our lifestyle. It does get old being at home, but those are really minor compared to what? Compared to waiters, people in restaurants, factory workers who are losing their livelihoods, and retail who are losing their livelihoods, sometimes 100% of their livelihoods. Classical liberals and libertarians, and I'm in that category, have often been charged with not caring about the working class. Well, that charge never stood up to scrutiny, but it's especially not applicable now. We who defend the right of people to make a living are the strongest allies of the working class. And why did these lockdowns happen? Well, started with Donald Trump declaring a national emergency and then over 80% of state governments imposing lockdowns. Was this because government officials at various levels knew what would happen, had good information about how bad this would be? No. Indeed, early on, some of those same government officials really minimized it. At a January 17th press conference, Dr. Nancy Massonnier of the Centers for Disease Control stated, quote, based on the information that CDC has today, we believe the current risk from this virus to the general public is low. For a family sitting around the dinner table tonight, tonight, this is not something that they generally need to worry about. Similarly, politicians were badly uninformed when it mattered. New York's mayor, Bill de Blasio, did no one any favors on March 5th when he wrote a New York subway and said, quote, I'm here on the subway to say to people, nothing to fear. Go about your lives and we will tell you if you have to change your habits, but that's not now. And on March 6th, New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority, which operates the subways, aired badly when it forbade employees from wearing masks. The fact is that no one knew how bad this would be. And government officials went from saying it was minor to saying it could take more than 2 million U.S. lives. They seem to have throttled back on that last estimate. Although one major government official is not throttled back. Yesterday, Eric Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles, in criticizing protesters against the lockdown, said quote, the worst thing would be to lift the floodgates and watch all of your friends and neighbors die. All of your friends and neighbors die. Let's compare the COVID-19 to the flu, not because of the same, but because it gives us a baseline. According to the CDC, the worst flu season we had in decades was just two years ago with 61,000 deaths. Yet we had no lockdowns then. That's not because we had a great vaccine. The flu vaccine was 34% effective against flu A, influenza A, and 56% effective against influenza B. How bad would deaths have to be for it to be reasonable for government to impose the extreme measures they've imposed? I honestly don't know. But if we had three times that number, say 183,000 deaths, I don't think it would be justified. Interestingly, Anthony Fauci, in his latest estimate a week or two ago, said he expects about 60,000 COVID-19 deaths by the end of August, putting it in the same ballpark as our worst flu season. Of course, some of that reduction is due to the lockdown. But some, and possibly a large part of it, is due to our private voluntary activity. And that brings me to a key distinction we need to make, which is the distinction between social distancing and lockdowns. People sometimes equate them. They're very different. They're related, but they're very different. Many of us were social distancing well before the lockdowns. Look at the NBA. They canceled or they delayed their season and now it's likely to be canceled at least a week, maybe a week and a half before most lockdowns. NCAA followed quickly and just decided not to have March Madness and basketball. The NHL, from which I'm from Canada, so that's a very, very fond of that, basically ended the hockey season. That was all before these lockdowns. That's important for two reasons. First, it shows people were taking this very seriously. Second, it shows that the flattening of the COVID curve that has clearly taken place cannot all be attributed to the lockdowns. Economist Tyler Cowan argues that Utah Jazz basketball player Rudy Gobert by getting and publicizing COVID-19 indirectly saved thousands of lives. Tyler doesn't have good evidence for that, but it's plausible. The good news is that if we end the lockdowns, people who want to shelter in place will be free to do so as they've always been. No one is making them come out, or at least no one should make them come out, take the elderly among whom are my wife and I. We are at the greatest risk of the U.S. deaths that CDC attributed to COVID-19 up until yesterday, 78% were of people aged 65 and more. The vast majority of people in that age range are not working outside the home, so it's relatively easy, easier for us to stay in our homes and not get the disease. Be careful, though, in thinking that sheltering in place is the right idea. People in nursing homes are sheltering in place almost by definition, but in some countries, including my native Canada, over half the COVID-19 deaths are linked to care homes, which are another word for nursing homes. That's according to the LSE, London School of Economic Study. Also, I want to point out that in a market, in a labor market, there are what's called compensating differentials. People who take risks get paid for those risks, and in fact, that's what's behind many economy assessments today of what's called the value of statistical life. They get paid to take risks. That gives employers an incentive to care about safety because they can cut their wage bill by doing so. I just want to point out an example from last weekend's Wall Street Journal. Quote, Smithfield, Tyson, Cargill, JBS, and other meat companies over that past month have offered bonus pay to processing plant employees, and in some cases are installing barriers between meat cutting stations on processing lines. Is that perfect? No, because the employees just think about their own safety, but the point is it's a substantial improvement from the case if we didn't have that. Will the market outcome be perfect? Of course not. But let's compare the imperfect market outcome with the imperfect government outcome. To show that the state governments improved the situation with their lockdowns, we would have to be able to show that the additional safety produced was quite large relative to costs. We know the costs were huge. What we don't know is the additional benefits. We can't just assume that the flattening of the curve is due to the lockdowns. I looked at one of Justin's syllabi online, and one thing that really impressed me was in one of his courses, his public policy course, he emphasizes marginal analysis and he's right to do so. What we would need to know is the marginal deaths prevented from the lockdown over and above the deaths that social distancing was creating. And if you look at most of the studies that say, hey, this is a good idea by economists, they're coming up with them very quickly, they do two things. They assume a huge number of deaths without the lockdowns, and they fail to separate between the lockdowns and the social distancing. Lockdowns are an instance of central planning. Governors with apparently little information and little thought decided which businesses were essential and which ones were not. In Michigan, for example, Governor Whitmer saw the sale of lottery tickets as essential, but her order does not allow people to buy paint, go out on their motorboat, go to their cottages, or hire someone to take care of their lawn. Her priorities seem to reflect those of a narrowly focused prosecutor, which she actually was, rather than of someone who cares a lot about Michigan citizens. And in my own state of California, Governor Newsom imposed the same lockdown on all the rural counties that's imposed on San Francisco and Los Angeles. This is despite the fact that 37 of the 58 California counties have had three or fewer deaths so far, 21 counties have had zero deaths, and five counties have had zero cases. Newsom has used a sledgehammer rather than a scalpel, but that's what governments do. And when we're talking about a lockdown, we have to look at what governments actually do, not what someone's favorite version of lockdown would be. And why was that free demanded for tens of millions of people? Because the proponents argued, ventilators and other key medical resources were in short supply and we needed to flatten the curve. That is, make sure that the number of COVID-19 cases plus the number of emergency cases of other types wouldn't overwhelm huge parts of production. Now, there's a standard idea in both economics and in operations analysis, which is when you have a bottleneck like that, you focus on the bottleneck. You don't say, let's shut down a huge amount of the rest of the economy, so to reduce demand for the bottleneck, you focus on the bottleneck. That takes time, of course. And Donald Trump's invocation of the Defense Production Act to make GM produce more of what they already said they wanted to produce, probably slow things down. The biggest mistakes in this whole episode have been due to central planning. Early on, the CDC, rather than letting coronavirus test kits from the World Health Organization do the job, insisted on producing their own, and then screwed up, produced a defective product. That lost us about a month, which with a fast-moving disease is a huge amount of time. Then, as the New York Times reported, in a first-rate investigative report, the FDA prevented Dr. Helen Chu in Washington State from using samples for another reason to test for the virus. When she went ahead anyway, despite the FDA's prohibition, Dr. Chu found COVID-19 present in a young man who had not traveled abroad. Did the FDA admit its error? You joke. They did what governments do. They said to her, cease and desist. And of course, the FDA has slowed down both tests for the virus and for approval and approvals of drugs that might help. Most of that other than the FDA slowing down drugs is a sunk cost. Here we are. The curve was flattened. Even New York City, which is in the worst shape, seems to have excess capacity. So if the purpose of such an extreme shutdown was to flatten the curve, let's declare victory and move on. So how should we end the lockdown? A good principle is that no one should be forced to be in a risky situation that he doesn't want to be in. Does ending the lockdown involve opening schools again? Yes. Some parents and their children may be afraid, but they should be allowed to act on that fear. That means compulsory schooling should end. Parents who keep their age 18 children out of school should not be charged with a crime, as they sometimes are now. Let the parents choose whether to put their kids and themselves indirectly at risk. I think ending compulsion is a long long run excellent idea. Many people listening to this might disagree with me. I think it's a great short run deregulation. Will there be COVID-19 deaths if the lockdowns are ended immediately? Absolutely. Will there be more deaths than if the lockdowns were not ended immediately? Probably. But that won't be enough to pronounce that ending the lockdowns was a bad idea. The reason is that there are trade-offs between deaths and other parts of economic well-being. And especially given how badly state governments and the federal government have handled the situation, we should be free to act on our own information and make our own trade-offs. Do we have perfect information? No one does. Partly because of my age, I'm 69. I talked to a number of friends in the 75-65-75 age range. A few of them are quite afraid of the virus. They've told me that even if the lockdown ends, they're going to be careful. It's perfect timing. They're going to be careful about going out. And that's how it should be. Scott Sumner, one of my co-bloggers at Econ Log, recently made the point that many people overstate seem to exaggerate their risk. Let them act on that exaggeration, which they should be free to do. Lockdowns are incredibly expensive financially, medically, and for our economic freedom. Lockdowns have undoubtedly reduced some deaths, but voluntary action gets a good chunk of the credit. The government's making one mistake after another. And yet through all this, we flatten the curve. Let's set the American people, who've been socially distancing, who've been washing their hands? My hands are raw. And doing all those things, let's let them act on their own good sense the way the vast majority of them are now. I'll close with this. Let's end the lockdowns and let's end them now. Thank you, David, that was perfectly within your time. And Justin, you have the same amount of time to oppose the resolution. Take it away, Justin. No, Justin, no, no. It wouldn't be Zoom. It wouldn't be Zoom if I forgot, if I didn't forget to unmute myself. Thank you, Gene. And thanks, David, for kicking things off, I think so constructively. Let me tell you where I'm coming from. I'm an economist. I'm not a card-carrying libertarian, although some of my best friends are. And, you know, so I think for me, this counts as an away game. But I'm going to have my best crack anyway. Let me start though. I think right now we face the greatest public health crisis, the greatest economic crisis, and potentially the greatest financial crisis of my lifetime. Probably many of our lifetimes. Given the gravity of that situation, I'm not going to try and win the debate today. I think that, David, my job as responsible public intellectuals is to try to bring reason to the debate. And so when David makes a really good point, I'm not going to give you a glib counter. I'm going to underline it and I'm going to emphasize it and I'm going to tell you why you got it right. The other thing I'm not going to do is I'm not going to play the role of fake epidemiologist because I struggle to even be an economist. So if you want to argue about an epidemiological study out of Santa Clara County, I'm just going to punt on it. But what I do need to do is define the terms of the debate a little bit. The U.S. economy should be liberated from government lockdowns right away. I want to begin by conceding a really important point here. The terms of the debate are not, is this a good moment for libertarians? Although in many respects it is. And so I want to open by conceding that much of what David said is exactly right. We can look at the response and see government failure everywhere, which is an ongoing theme of libertarian thought. We can see excess regulation in various parts of the federal government, particularly the FDA and some of the drug approval processes. We can see concerns about monopoly power potentially creating real problems through supply chains right now. We see enormous rent seeking from big corporations trying to get their favorite favors written into the fiscal rescue package. So in many respects it is time to tip my hat to my libertarian friends and say many of the themes you've been wanting us about for a long, long time have been exactly accurate. I can say all of that and vehemently disagree with emotion, which is that the U.S. economy should be liberated from government lockdowns right away. Let me be clear. The terms of the debate here are that it should be liberated from government lockdowns right away. So the question is not should the lockdown end? There's no question the lockdown should end. The question is when should the lockdown end? Should it end right now? Now I was invited to give to this debate, I think it was maybe 10 days ago and actually the longer time goes on, the stronger David's case is going to be because eventually these lockdowns are going to have to end because the public health threats will be smaller and the benefits of the lockdown will no longer exceed the costs. But as of today, I feel pretty confident on my side of the debate. We've seen in the U.S. that new cases of coronavirus being diagnosed or being confirmed, the data here of course are totally confused somewhat by the extent to which we're testing, but new cases look like they may have peaked. I got my fingers crossed and I hope that's true. Now it's important that none of us mistake what that means. The most dangerous day in a pandemic is the day with the highest number of new cases. The second most dangerous day is the day after that. We're pretty much in the second most dangerous day right now. And so if there's any point at which the motion that I'm supporting is true, it was either true yesterday or it's true today or it's never been true. So I'm in some sense on my strongest possible grounds. I think it's important that what we don't do is fiddle about and debate, should we have a full lockdown except for David and I because we're the two responsible people. Let's just say that small variations on a lockdown, we'll call that a lockdown and small variations on opening up, we'll just call it opening up. So the thing that David missed and so what I want to do now is I just want to go ahead and make six key points. The first is the one word David didn't say once and as a fellow economist, he knows better than this. He didn't say the word externalities. The whole question here is one of externalities. That's economics jargon four. When I take actions that harm others, if I don't take others into account then I'll do too much of that. Externalities are the reason that we might want to regulate the extent to which factories can pollute the environment. If not, factories will pollute as much as they want and the rest of us have to breathe in the smog. The externalities here are far greater and far more serious. If I walk down to the local park and sneeze near three or four other people, I might kill them. That's an externality. The basic economic logic is if people are not forced to pay for the costs of the damage they do to others, they'll do too much damage. What we want to do is we want to fix that externality. The question is how to fix that externality. An economics textbook, I just wrote one, says we'll tell you that with an externality, you might want to tax it away. A tax, of course, would be a great idea. For global warming, we could have a carbon tax, but how do we tax social interactions that might cause others to die? That's almost impossible. We might want, you know, the standard libertarian argument is let's invoke the coast theorem and allow people to make a bunch of side bargains so that they don't do bad things to each other. But how do other people at the park bribe me to not turn up to the park to potentially infect them? The coast theorem clearly doesn't apply here as it doesn't have so many other issues. I totally agree that a shutdown is a very blunt instrument. And under most circumstances, few economists would be in favor of it. It turns out that the nature of this externality is one that's very, very difficult to tame using our alternative and otherwise better tools. And that's why for much of what we need to do, it's going to be some form of regulatory solution. Either we prevent people from various forms of social interaction, or we don't. I'm arguing we should. David's arguing we shouldn't. So that's the logic. And I really think that's the terms upon which the debate should proceed. You either think the externality is large and it's very difficult to tame it using alternative instruments. Or you argue that the externality is somehow being internalized through some magic which no one has yet explained to me. So then the question is, is the externality large enough to justify using this very sharp form of government intervention? And so what I think we should do, what I would do as an economist is a very simple form of cost-benefit analysis. So the first question is, and I'm going to do the absolute roughest back of the envelope, but that's so that we can all follow at home. You're all going to argue that I made small mistakes along the way, but it turns out that when your cost-benefit analysis is so overwhelming in one direction, you don't have to go back and dot the i's and cross the t's because it's already clear what the right answer is. In this case, let's think about the benefits of the shutdown. Using reasonable epidemiological estimates, let's say that if we just let the disease rip, a million Americans would die. We're going to get it down to 60,000, hopefully. So let's say we've saved a million lives. Are you going to round here? Let's use a standard cost-of-life estimate, the standard the American government uses as we value life. We value it extraordinarily highly. We think each life is worth $10 million. For those who think that economists don't value human life, they're exactly wrong. Economists in this public debate have been more vociferous about suggesting human life is deeply and profoundly valuable. So if we could save a million lives at each worth $10 million, if you get a calculator, you'll discover that's $10 trillion. That's the benefit of the lockdown. What's the cost? Well, the cost is that we're going to be producing less. I'm going to stick to the economic. I know David wants to talk about economic freedom as well, and I'm simply going to let my libertarian friends who can have stronger views about that than I am. But let's just stick to the standard economic cost benefit. The cost is, as David said, that economic activity is slowed. He said that, and he's right, the US economy produces $20 trillion a year, so that's about $5 trillion a quarter. And he cited a recent forecast, Goldman Sachs is a standard source, that GDP growth next quarter will fall by 35%. And then he said that that adds up to a lot of money. Now, actually, it turns out David made a very simple mathematical mistake just there. What the Goldman Sachs forecast is, is that GDP will fall. This is like the nerdiest point I can make. So like, if you're geek, lean in, and if you want to be entertained, I'm sorry. Goldman Sachs forecast that GDP would decline at an annualized rate of 35% in the next quarter. An annualized rate means this is the rate that would occur if it continued for an entire year. Goldman Sachs is only forecasting that GDP is going to decline in one quarter. So in fact, Goldman Sachs is predicting that GDP will decline by about 9.9%. Let's round and call that 10% next quarter. So that in turn says that the damage is one third as large as David has suggested. So let's say that GDP should be $5 trillion in the quarter. It declines by 10%. So it's going to be $500 billion. That is how much lower output will be. So remember, I saved just $10 trillion worth of human life and we're doing so at a cost of $500 billion. That's a stunning cost-benefit calculation. Now, I want to go on and make a related point. The $500 billion that we're going to lose next quarter is not the cost of the lockdown. That's how much worse output will be as a result of the combination of COVID-19 and the lockdown. The real question is how much worse is economic activity going to be as a result of the lockdown with COVID compared to not having a lockdown and still having COVID? There's a reasonable argument to be made in fact that the economy will perform more strongly as a result of beating the bug than simply letting it rip. So it may be, even if I concede everything David wants, he's at $500 billion versus my $10 trillion, but I don't want to concede even that. He may even have the sign wrong. It may actually be that a lockdown infected economy outperforms a non-lockdown infected economy and that's the relevant perspective here. So one of the things I hope all of the audience takes from this is it's really important not to confuse the costs of coronavirus which are massive and devastating with the cost of the lockdown. The lockdown is meant to ameliorate the cost of the virus. So the next thing that the lockdown is doing is preventing the possibility of a second breakout. And that's the reason why I feel comfortable who needs to stick with the lockdown for quite a bit longer. The IMF have done some projections where they looked at what would happen if we had a second outbreak and their argument is that the economic costs as in the reduced output caused by COVID-19 could be twice or three times larger than what we're currently looking at. Putting it back into the terms of this debate, the benefit of the lockdown if it prevents a second outbreak is two or three times larger than I've said so far. Finally, I just want to come back and I think the bar for me to win this debate is incredibly low because at the end of this debate, it could be you think on balance David's right. He's most likely to be right. Perhaps he is. But there's some chance that I am. If David's right, then we've got a little bit of a lockdown going on for a few weeks longer will all be okay. If the worst of the epidemiological models are right, then hundreds of thousands, potentially even millions of people may end up dying as a result of this. So the balance of risks here is incredibly asymmetric. You only need to put a small probability on me being right to think that lockdowns make sense from a public policy perspective. I can do better than that, Gene, because I'm about to adjourn because I just want people to think about this is one of those cases where good decisions aren't based on what you think is most likely to happen. It's based on the full distribution of risks. The full distribution of risks ranges from everything's overblown. Hardly anyone's going to die from coronavirus. So that would be where 60,000 lives better off than we think we are. Two million, three million, four million Americans might die. I think those are unbelievably high numbers. I don't take them seriously. But I do think the distribution of risks, it's not minus 60,000 plus 60,000. It's minus 60,000 plus two million. And that distribution of risks, I think pushes one towards making the case for continuing the lockdowns. So let me stop there. And it's just because I want to hear more of what David's got to say. Okay. Justin, thank you very much. Certainly that was a very gracious presentation, aside from other merits in what you said. David, you have, again, five minutes to rebut. So please take it away. Okay. And I'll do my best. You kind of beat me to it, to some extent, Gene. I want to say that it's very gracious in your part. And I'm just really glad the debate is going the way it is. So first of all, I wanted just acknowledge that you pointed out these government failures. And by the way, if these government failures hadn't happened, if the FDA hadn't been able to prevent these things, we might not even be having this debate because we might have had all kinds of ways of testing. Now, you said that I missed externalities. You're right. In a narrow sense, I didn't use the word externalities, but I did implicitly talk about them. If there weren't externalities, there'd be, I would have won the debate from the get-go. In other words, there are no externalities, but I grant that there are externalities. And that's, by the way, why I emphasized, I think I emphasized that many people are very nervous about this, and they are going to stop social distancing just because the government ends the lockdown. And so a lot of the externalities are being handled by people's behavior. And again, remember, so in Italy, the average age of someone who dies from this is 80.5 years. The United States, 78% of the people who have died from this so far are over age 65. So that's why I emphasized the people most at risk can stay indoors. And so that solves a lot of it. You're right. The Coast Theorem, I'm not going to go there. The Coast Theorem is not relevant for a bunch of reasons. We're talking tens of millions of people. We're talking, we don't even know who has it. And one reason we don't even know who has it is because, of course, the government has held up these tests. Now to the cost-benefit analysis, I think that's our biggest difference. Justin talked about one million Americans potentially dying. I simply think that's why I'm realistic. And if you look, the way those numbers have come down is a result of two things. Social distancing, which I'm in favor of, and practicing as is Justin, and lockdowns, which I'm against. And we've got to separate those out. The value of life, that's a standard thing we've used. And by the way, that's a thinking on the margin thing, as I mentioned, what's the marginal impact of the lockdown? The value of life, that's a number I've used. I taught cost-benefit analysis for about 20 years at the Naval Postgraduate School. I've actually been led to question that. And let me tell you why. Luigi Zingales had a piece last month in which he said he had a high number, 7 million people might be killed. And he said with a $9 million value of life, that's three years of GDP. And I started thinking about that and saying, does that make sense? Would it make sense to cut down three years of GDP to save 7 million lives when cutting down three years of GDP is probably going to lead to the loss of 50 million lives? And there's a big overlap between the 50 million and the 7 million. So it's reductive out of certain. And I think for these kinds of numbers, we have to take that seriously. The Goldman Sachs thing, I'm pretty sure I'm right on that, Justin. If it falls at a 35 was yours, I'd use 35 percent annual rate. Then during that quarter, we lose 35 percent of output. Now, how long do I have, Gene? That one, I'm right on. Well, okay. You say you're right. I'm not sure you're right. I'm not sure you're right. How long do I have, Gene? Say that for the Q&A when you guys banned. Yeah, yeah. How long do I have? Gene, how long do I have? Oh, you have a minute and a half. Okay. So I think what was happening here is we have very bad information. So imagine some new world in which someone else comes, some other disease comes along. We don't know much about it. If you say, okay, we're going to take the most extreme assumptions, which by the way, involve no one responding to the incentives and no one responding to the risk, which is what these models assume, we're going to have these every few years. At least that's quite conceivable, because there are going to be other viruses. One minute ago, go ahead, Gene. There are going to be other viruses. And we're going to have the government doing this every few years. Maybe it's every 10 years. But Justin, you said up front, this is the greatest public health financial economic crisis in your lifetime. Certainly financial and economic, I grant you. And I'm not sure about public health, but you're young, I'm old, and you've got a longer lifetime. And there might be other public health crises. And just giving the government this incredible power when they know so little is a bad idea. All right. Thank you, David. Justin, you're a butthole. Take it away. Five minutes. Great. Thank you. I want to come back to three important points that David made, and they are important. The first is he took me on the right terms. He said, let's talk about cost and benefits. The basic numbers I laid out are very close to what I've read now, a dozen different estimates by various economists, some are higher than mine, some are lower than mine. I'm not here to convince anyone I get the right number. I tend to think one should be humble at a time like this. And so what I tried to represent is a rough consensus of cost-benefit analyses across the economics profession. And for sure, it's possible to jack up the costs and jack down the benefits in order to fit some particular story, but I think I've tried to honestly represent the median view among economists. David wants to quibble about two important things, and I think they're both really critical. Good thing when we're talking about benefit and cost, he only wants to quibble about the benefit and the cost. So let's talk about those. The benefit, I suggested maybe we've saved a million lives by having a lockdown. He says very, very reasonably that when we think about this, when we're trying to think about the effect of the lockdown, we need to realize that even in the absence of the lockdown, people would have taken a lot of private precautions. And so is it reasonable to believe that a million people would have died absent the lockdown? Here, I think the answer is yes. I think the critique of epidemiological models that they don't take this into account sufficiently strongly, this is a critique by economists of epidemiological models that people change their behavior in response to incentives and the chance that you might die is a strong incentive. And so it leads them to take precautions, private precautions. The debate today is about public precautions is right. But to David's point, New York right now, one out of every 582 New Yorkers has died. So if you scale that sort of estimate up to the United States as a whole, that gets you to half a million Americans. And that's using New York, which is not yet finished with its epidemic. So all of this says it is absolutely quite realistic to believe that absent serious interventions, we would see a million people die. So the benefits I think are genuinely substantial. On the costs, I think getting the quantification of this stuff right is really, really important. The thing that's different about this economic downturn right now is it's the most rapid we've ever seen. It's also very deep. But the costs of a downturn are a product not just of how deep it is, but also its duration. Again, I don't know what's going to happen to the economy, but I do know what the consensus forecasts from private sector forecasters are saying. And if you look at the total amount of lost output over time, most private sector forecasters see the economy bouncing back relatively quickly. So the total cost of this downturn is absolutely serious. It may be as large as, it may be about two thirds that of the financial crisis. But it's not a great depression. In fact, it's not even one-tenth of a great depression. So it's important to keep that in mind. I noticed in the comments, people worrying about a million people being homeless. This downturn is going to be incredibly costly, but it's not going to cause that massive scale of dislocation. The second thing David said I wanted to come back to is his comparisons with the flu. He said, well, this is as bad as the flu. 60,000 people have died. 60,000 people normally die of the flu. Now, the thing to realize is 60,000 people will die in the United States in one month. His number is that 60,000 people died of the flu in one year. And in fact, if you look over the last 10 years, 60,000 people have died from the flu in only one out of the last 10 years. In fact, already COVID-19 looks to be four to five times more deadly than the flu is on average. But it doesn't matter because actually David's point is really good. It's really helpful for my case because he's saying, look, the flu kills so many people. Do you know a really good way of preventing the flu spreading and killing lots of people? Having a shutdown. So we're not just going to save lives because we prevent the spread of COVID. We're going to save more lives because we prevent the spread of the flu as well. So David's point here goes my way. The final thing he says, and I think this is absolutely critical, which is we need to distinguish between the economic, the cost of a shutdown, a lockdown versus social distancing. And he's right. What does a lockdown do? Well, before the lockdown, 90% of us were social distancing. So what the lockdown does is it makes 10% more people socially distant. These are the people who didn't care much about their own lives before. Presumably, they didn't care much about others. These may well be the super spreaders. These may be the people we really, really need to cut down on. But even if that's not true, if even without the government lockdown, we do 90% of this distancing and 90% of us would stay at home, what that says is that the benefits of the lockdown are only 10% as large, but so are the costs of the lockdown. So David's point, I can concede it entirely. It's an important one. What it says is this entire debate about whether to have lockdowns. If in the absence of a lockdown, we'd have a 90% lockdown, then it's like all he's saying is the present debate that he and I are having is only 10% as important as he and I used to think it was. But if he's going to use this 10% to knock down the benefits of the lockdown, he does need to use the 10% to knock down the cost in equal measure. Look, he said no one should be forced to confront risks that they don't actually choose. And I agree with that. And that sounds like a libertarian principle. The only, but I'm not going to be able to go to a public park, a shopping center, a school without confronting risks, unless we can beat the bug, unless we can eliminate it, and that's what the lockdowns are all about. Thank you. Thank you, Justin. We now move to the Q&A portion of the evening. And at any time, one debater or the other is free to ask the other debater a question. David, do you have a question for Justin? Justin, do you have a question for David? That's your option at the moment. Go ahead. I do. Yeah, go ahead. Justin, you said at one point that this might just be a few weeks longer. Where's your cutoff? What do you look for in order to say, yes, let's end the lockdown? What would you have to see? So I'm going to live up to my promise earlier of not being a bad public health official. So I don't have a four-point plan. I do think that I would want, well, the most important, sorry, the obvious one that everyone agrees on, I think, is we need to make sure that the hospital system is not overwhelmed. That's the whole flatten the curve logic. I think we want to go a step further. We want to feel quite confident that the rate of transmission, what the epidemiologists call R, is substantially less than one and likely to be sustainably so. So R is, if I get COVID, how many other people will get it as a result of me? And if that number is more than one, then we go into this exponential growth, exponential like growth, where millions get it, millions die. So I want to see R substantially below one, and I want public health officials to be able to assure me that a move to private actions, social distancing, is going to keep R below one, because otherwise, we're going to move straight back into this and we're going to have a second cycle. Is that responsive though, mate? I think it is. Can I ask a follow-up? Oh, yes, yes. Okay, so look at South Dakota, which doesn't have a lockdown. It's had seven deaths so far. What would you say, so I just like you, I don't have a really good formulated question, but think about South Dakota. Are they doing it badly? And I think you would have to say yes, but if you do, if so, why, if not, why not? So I will answer your question, but I'm going to do it in a roundabout way. I'm going to say the most painful words an Australian has ever said. Look at New Zealand. Which is the one? Look at New Zealand. Oh, look at that. Within a couple of weeks, there'll be no cases in New Zealand. Zero. New Zealand had the most dramatic lockdown, I think, pretty much of any country. They've got the advantage of being an island, and so it's easy to prevent it getting back in. And so for larger island economies, this seems like an incredibly useful way forward. So David, your question is about South Dakota. So this is a case where, you know, when you've got incredibly low population density, it may be that the natural transmission rate is very, very low. This is sort of like why I began the debate, saying, if your argument is, oh, we should have lockdowns nearly everywhere, but not in South Dakota. We're not really disagreeing much, are we? Now, I do think that I am very worried about what's going on in the South with the Southern Governors removing lockdowns early or saying that they're going to remove lockdowns earlier. You know, it's a little bit like having a peeing end at the swimming pool. You're allowed to pee up this end, but not that end. I don't want to get in that pool. And frankly, I don't want to live in a country in which folks in the South are allowed to pee out coronavirus. And so that is coming back to government failure. And national policy here makes a hell of a lot of sense. And I am really worried about the damage that the South could do to the rest of the country. Justin, any question for David or at this point? Let's go to the, you got a lot of other people here and they've got great questions. We had, I actually do want to intervene and say in all fairness that it is true as as an economic journalist for 25 years who tracked the GDP numbers. Justin is technically correct that indeed, by the way, Japan does not annualize their numbers, but the habit for the Bureau of Economic Analysis is to annualize every change in quarterly GDP. So Justin is technically correct that a 35% decline is an annualized number and that if you actually calculate the loss, you have to de-annualize it approximately, divide by four. So what I do want to say that is somebody who's tracked the numbers for about a quarter of a century. I think you've divided twice though, because I already took, I think you've divided twice, I took a quarter of GDP is five trillion. So if you lose 30% of it for that quarter. Oh, well, no, no, well, that's 1.5 trillion. No, the truth is, David, that if you actually look at the decline in GDP, that it's essentially like a 9% decline in GDP and that in terms of actual dollars, and then they take that 9% and then they annualize it. They take it to the fourth power. That is actually what they do. They double annualize. It's guaranteed to create confusion. Here's my commitment, Justin. I will back off on that. If I'm right, I'm going to post on or an econ log, and if I'm wrong, I'm going to post on or an econ log. This was an unusual moment in which the moderator ganged up against one side, especially on a very noble of me, since I happened to be a libertarian myself. But indeed, it really is true, David, and you'll post it because you're a very honest guy. But one of the questions that came in, and actually a question in my mind, Justin, was this point about calculating the human life and the 10 million. First of all, even in terms of the way that it's formulated, doesn't it come to a different number, for example, when it comes to the life of an 80-year-old versus the life of a 30-year-old? Aren't those drastically different numbers and isn't the technical calculation you made a little bit different for starters because we're mostly talking about people over 65, 70? No? They're all 10 million people, 10 million dollar babies? It's an excellent question. Let me be totally clear. When the US government sets regulations about a range of things from speed limits to backup cameras on cars, they often face these trade-offs between, we're going to save this many lives versus not. We need to compare this to the dollars. What we use is a value of a statistical life. The US government has decided to use 10 million dollars, and it gives good economic studies that suggest that's a reasonable thing to do. As a matter of policy, so this is not an argument, this is just a matter of policy, the government has decided to value all lives the same, black, white, young or old. You may have an intuition that that's crazy that an 80-year-old has fewer years to live than an eight-year-old, and we should think about them differently, but just as a descriptive matter, that's not how government policy is implemented. The question you asked is a good one, which is let's take your idea seriously. Let's knock my value of a life from 10 million dollars down to 3 million dollars. The cost-benefit calculation I gave you, the imbalance was so great, nothing changes. Let me just add for your listeners, there's a wonderful, there's a very nice paper by Chad Jones, Bob Hall and Pete Cleanout at Stanford, where they take your idea, Gene, very, very seriously, and they suggest that if you take your idea as seriously as you might want, the value of the lockdown will be worth it if it can come at a cost of reducing consumption by less than 25% for a year. I think it's going to end up being less than 25%, you could make an economic argument, it's going to be greater than that, so it is going to get a lot closer. Do you have a comment on that, David? Yeah, just again, the key number, though, we're actually in the same range, roughly, with the value of life, as I said with the Luigi Zungal's thing, it may be a little nervous about how wide a range we can do that in, but I think the key number is a million, which I think is unrealistic. I'm trying to follow the rules, and Justin is a very great guy at this, and so can I just make a statement without asking a question? Let him, Gene! I can pose it as a question. So let's say you could require everyone who goes out where they're around other people to have a really good mask and to have really good gloves. Isn't that like a fraction of the cost of what's going on? And would that do it for you and is it a matter of not trusting people because they get in the business and they rip all that stuff off? I'd just like to understand how you think about that. Yeah, so here I think we're really close to agreeing, which is there's a bad externality, a usual market-based mechanisms for getting rid of the externality don't work, so we need a heavy-handed regulation. Yours is a very heavy-handed regulation from a libertarian perspective, which is you would force everyone to wear his mask and gloves, and if you could prevent, if those masks were sufficiently rigorous that you could guarantee me that, you know, I'm not going to kill anyone when I go to the local park, we've solved the externality. Okay, and that's not a lockdown. Just notice that's not a lockdown. Right, so I want to solve the externality, I want to solve it in the cheapest way possible, I can't do it through the market, so I'm going to use heavy-handed regulation that would offend the libertarian sensibilities in normal times, but among the menu of regulations, let's choose the lowest cost one. You got me, brother? Well, I'm sorry, what's the last thing you said, Justin? You said about... I said, you've got me. He wins. Let me, since I've been a little bit aggressive, let me point out, Justin, that libertarians accept restraining orders imposed by courts, and so this is really in the category of a restraining order that a court would impose, so it's really not that offensive to libertarians. So if you've said, Justin, that you simply pass a rule, which of course most people would abide by freely because they don't want to hurt other people and they want to protect themselves, that everybody has the precaution of the mask and the gloves, and that it has to happen in the workplace as well, then we can avoid the lockdown and David gets his way, is that right? Can I tell you where this is really important? So right now, when the business community is talking to the White House, they're saying the biggest reason we refuse to open is because we're worried that we're going to be liable for COVID that's spread in the workplace, and they're asking the federal government, don't make me liable for one of my co-workers killing another. And I think if you took libertarian principles seriously and if you took the coast theory remotely seriously and if you took economic ideas seriously, you absolutely want the employer to be liable there. They're the least cost avoider. We want to make people responsible for the consequences of their actions. And I would be, at the moment, it's a very left-wing position to be saying, no way, businesses have to be liable for actions that kill their workers, but I would be delighted if my libertarian friends join me in that call for responsibility. If you can show with the very high probability that that's where the person got it. Yeah, absolutely. You and I got some details to work out, but I stand in the street liability in the workplace. Yeah. Well, yeah, again, I take it, Justin, that you don't believe that this is necessarily offensive to libertarians because there's a whole body of libertarian rules and rules having to do with restraining orders and having to do indeed with harm that people do to each other. That's what I prefer to call the zero-aggression principle. And if somebody is guilty of severe neglect, then indeed they can be sued or they are liable. So it's all quite libertarian. So welcome to the fold of libertarians. It looks like this is a key moment for you especially. But I want to ask, as a matter of fact, David's question was anticipated by somebody in the audience that indeed the other way we can go about it is simply to require that those 10% of people who are responsible, most people would indeed not want to harm others, that there'd be a crackdown on them because as you said, Justin, they are imposing danger on other people. But then with respect to your, you used the phrase quite a bit longer, that this, you did indeed say that and maybe you want to and you're not necessarily responsible for it. But in terms of the cost, a number of questions are coming in. One of the questions is that while economists make interesting statements about the harm to human life, health, morbidity, and misery from economic downturns, that people do commit suicide more often, people do turn to drugs and alcohol, a lot of costs there potentially. And another question that came in is apart from our issue about the quarterly annualization of a downturn, if you said quite a bit longer, that sounds like you're almost annualizing it for a whole year potentially. And then apart from that, another question that came in, a lot of libertarians out there that are on your case, another question, how about those trillions of dollars that the Federal Reserve is printing, the huge increase in debt, the indebtedness that we're incurring from all this, which is going to continue the more we continue the lockdown. So how about the deaths and then on top of that another question that came in which underscores David's point, a lot of these people are already not going to die because they're old people like me and like David, we're not going to go outside anyway. So we're not going to die even if the lockdown is lifted. So that's a lot of questions that came in attacking you, Justin. So you're going to get about six minutes to answer. Go ahead, please. I think I started by saying that this was going to be an away game for me. And I think you just convinced me of that. There's two issues I want to speak to specifically, and then I'll ignore the others just because I can't answer six things at the same time, but you should come back to me with the ones you want me to hit. You pointed out there's beyond the purely economic costs, downturns are far more costly. Look, I'm a center-left economist. Absolutely. Downturns suck. One of the things I study is happiness. Downturns have a big effect on happiness well over and above any effect that you would think just because people lost income. So the simple back of the envelope I gave was far too simple. But when we start to get into these second order things, it's not going to overturn that logic. But I do want to acknowledge suicides are almost certainly going to go up here. Rates of depression are almost certainly going to go up. Interestingly, though, in this way, I wanted to come back to this point, deaths are not going to go up. It turns out there's a nice literature studying the effects of recessions on health. The only cause of death that goes up during a recession is suicide, but actually almost every other cause of death goes down during a recession. For fairly obvious reasons, traffic accidents go down. We're out driving less. But heart attacks go down because if you think about what you're doing during an economic boom, you're working all day every day. You're making hay while the sun shines. And so it's actually quite clear that recessions actually tend to increase the quantity of life. Now, the flip side is I'm pretty sure they reduce the quality of life. So not for a moment am I suggesting we should have more recessions, but simply to say what you're worried about is lives. The economic downturn is actually more likely to help than to hurt. The other thing is when we start thinking about these extra things that I didn't account for, you've got to do it on both sides of the equation. So it's absolutely the case that unemployment will cause depression and misery. The other thing is deaths are not the only cause of COVID. One, there's enormous anxiety. And I'm sure many of you, particularly those of you with older parents can feel that anxiety every day. But also for those who recover, there's permanent scarring of the lungs. And actually the number of people who recover is so much larger than the number of people who die that you don't have to put a very high price on how valuable is it to avoid permanent scarring at the lungs to think there are even larger health benefits from avoiding more broader spread of COVID. I'll let you comment. David, go ahead, because Justin told me to repeat a couple of questions that didn't necessarily answer. Do you want to comment David, what Justin just said? Well, actually, no, I think I kind of agree. I just want to go back though to the point about employer liability. I like the idea of employer liability when the employer does something that could be known in advance to cause a problem. I'm not, look, why are we even having this debate? Because we don't know it's this invisible thing that's out there. We can't necessarily test people for it and we keep hearing it's asymptomatic and that's a big part of it. So people come to work, the employer takes their temperature. Disneyland said if they're going to go back in business, they're going to take people's temperature. And if they do all those things, and it turns out someone got it. So I don't think employer liability necessarily gets you very far. And it can be a big setup. And now let's be realistic about juries. It's not like juries are looking at the value of a life and saying, oh, this person lost this many quality life years. You'll see people with very sketchy evidence giving someone $150 million. When I wake up in the middle of the night and can't sleep, I see these ads on TV all the time. And so employer liability isn't this great solution. Do you want to come in, Justin? Yeah. Look, David's right. We know enough about how tort reform works, tort law works to know that the way it works in our textbooks is not the way it always works in our lives. I still think allowing the employer not to be liable at all, and the employer allowing customers to come through and infect me and setting up workplaces is actually a really, really bad idea. Gene, you asked earlier about taking this a step further, saying instead of banning people, if I go to the local park and I infect other people, then I should be liable for that. And as an economist, I love that idea. It's the cost theorem again. It internalizes the externality. It would potentially solve everything. The problem with it is twofold. One, if you catch COVID at the local playground, you don't know who you got it from. And two, the defendants have small pockets. The nice thing about employer liabilities, you've got defendants with deep pockets and big incentives to avoid those expensive funds. Well, yes. Well, yes. The questioner, and actually that was David's initiative as well, was simply saying that you have rules and regs that are imposed that say that not, as you indicate, the difficulty of proving anything or with respect to going to the park, as you indicate, is not something you can easily do. But the idea was simply that people are told that you've got to wear the mask. You've got to wear the gloves. You've got to take precautions. And if you're found not doing so, then I guess you've got to fine. Then that's the idea of prevention, which is a form of restraining order that you can't go within. So that's the idea. And David was suggesting that if we let's say we impose that in a very draconian way, wouldn't that satisfy you as sufficient? Because you seem to acknowledge that all people like me are going to stay inside anyway. A lot of us are going to take precautions where probably are not going to go near crazy teenagers and other doofuses who tend to play with their lives dangerously. So a lot of that will sort itself out anyway. And on top of that, restrictions will be imposed. Perhaps by anybody, I run the cell forum. I'd like to put people in an auditorium. And of course, I'm wrestling with what I will do because obviously I don't want anybody to die. But certainly, people are not going to be admitted if they misbehave in any way. They will be told to leave. So all of those restrictions imposed by business and imposed by government, aren't they enough for you? And wouldn't you want to then lift the lockdown? That was David's question and the questions I'm getting from the audience. Do I think private precautions are enough to solve things? Nothing is enough. But again, you find people. I said the government precaution too. The government imposes a rule that says however you want to write. You've got to wear a mask. You've got to wear gloves. Certain things are not allowed. That's prevented. That's like a restraining order. That doesn't mean you cause something, but it means you're putting people in jeopardy unnecessarily. And that is easily something you can be prosecuted for or fined for because you're putting people's lives in danger. That seemed to be... That was the drift of your suggestion, David. Is that correct, David? Yeah. Actually, I noticed I'm mostly paying attention to what people are saying. Every once in a while, I'm looking at the chat. This is kind of new to me. But I did notice Mark Bonner had, I think that's how you say it, Mark, B-A-H-N-E-R had a kind of an idea, which is you look for reasonable precautions. If the employer took reasonable precautions, he's bulletproof. And I think that's kind of reasonable. Okay. That's the employer, but then the individual. I thought you said require masks, similar to the questions I'm seeing. Require masks or whatever requirements seem to be good that are imposed with punishment fines. And if you're a three-time loser, maybe some even worse punishment for taking liberty with other people's lives. Would that be enough for you, Justin? My concern with this is the damage that you can do to others is so great that the fines would have to be astronomical to a degree that I think most people couldn't pay them. Right. So if I were to go and kill three people and we think a human life is worth $10 million, then I would be liable for $30 million. Good luck collecting that. And because of that, I'm not going to bother taking a ton of precautions. So it's simply the shallow pockets. Theoretically, Jen, I love that idea. And we can use it for lots of domains where the stakes aren't so high. But here, the stakes are too high to rely on that. Okay. The other question that said by was, you did use the term quite a bit longer and also in terms of cost. So that could go into a couple of other calendar quarters, which where the annualization would begin to become annual. And also the question that came in was all about these trillions of dollars. The other course that the government is incurring long term, the indebtedness that we are incurring because of this, all of those are cost as well. So could you deal with those costs? And then also address the question, how much longer? At what point will you be arguing for David's position? As you very generously said, you will at some point do. So now I'm going to play my only glib debating point trick of the day. The motion was the US economy should be liberated from government lockdowns right away. On the motion, I'm all in on that. Now, if we have this debate in a week's time, I'm still going to be there because we're still going to be losing 2000 Americans every day. And we'll still be at a very, very dangerous point. But I'm open to it. The thing that's really important and I should say is for people who are on my side of this debate, we need to be ready to totally change our minds and totally change our talking points. The moment it becomes clear that it looks like we got the bug beat and figuring out what that is, that's going to be the most difficult intellectual challenge I'm going to face over the next couple of months. None of that particularly answers your question. But I feel very comfortable with this situation for at least a couple more weeks. And then I'd want to look at the evidence. And if we had clear evidence of reduced transmission below one and some experiments from other countries or particular states showing that private social isolation was sufficient to keep us beating the bug, then I'd jump on. But at the moment, there was a very good question one of your colleagues asked, someone in the audience asked. No, I'm sorry, I can't see it on my screen right now, which was, you know, look, it's all so, in fact, it was Andrew. No, it wasn't Andrew. It was Frank Gambino. He says, there are so many variables and so many unknown numbers that any central planning seems more absurd than usual. I got to say, I'm pretty confident this is a bug that could go out and kill a shit ton of us. I don't want to go laissez-faire against a virus. Laissez-faire seems exactly the wrong answer for a virus. If you think about all of the uncertainties, the uncertainties are bounded from the best possible outcome is, you know, we're going to stop dying tomorrow. The worst possible outcome is we've got another couple of million people in the line. And so if you think about these uncertainties, these uncertainties move you towards excessive action, the sorts of action you would think on average will be excessive because we're worried about those states of nature where, in fact, things really do turn out much worse than we currently expect. I see. Andy, come in from you, David, on that. Well, again, I think the difference is that Justin is way overstating the deaths. Do I know that? No, but he doesn't either. So let's agree that we don't know and write down a probability distribution, which you have to concede. Yeah, write down a probability distribution about the number of deaths, and you have to concede. But remember Frank Knight's distinction between risk and uncertainty. This is uncertainty. We don't know a probability distribution. What are you going to do then? I say we open up and see what happens. I say we do that in your community, not mine. Oh, we're there. We're there. In fact, let me point out. Can I point out something about my community? I brought this along. I live in Monterey County, 434,000 people. We have a guy named Edward Marino. He's the health guy who basically persuaded the Board of Supervisors to do the lockdown in Monterey County. He presented last week. Here's what he said. He said that his data show that the county should have about 9,000 cases now and 300 hospitalizations at this point last week. What have they actually counted? 108 cases and 22 people who needed to be hospitalized. So he was off by an order of magnitude. Did that change him at all? No, it did not. He's saying that six weeks from now, we're going to have, with the social distancing rules he calls me, I call it the lockdown, in place, we're going to have 33,000 people sick with coronavirus. So what's happening is, I'm not an epidemiologist either, Justin, but like you, I understand statistics. Maybe I was off in GDP, I don't know. But anyway, understand statistics. And when your model is off by an order of magnitude, you throw out the model or you do a major adjustment. If you work with these models and any of these epidemiologic models, the problem is that the moment you let the bug out, you can get exponential growth in the number of cases or exponential ish to be technical. The implication of that is that the errors, even if you believe fully in the models, you talk to the models and you say, what is your error range will also be literally orders of magnitude. So I want to be clear with everyone, the best possible guide we have to the future of the coronavirus could get the number of zeros wrong. That's absolutely true. But you know, I might have been an economist too long. I don't know what to do without a model. We've got to make decisions about the future. On that note, we actually are out of time for the Q&A and then you're going to get your seven and a half minutes of summation and Justin, and you have your seven and a half minutes coming up in a moment. David, so please take it away with your summation. Okay. I don't think I'm going to use seven and a half because we've covered the territory. Yeah. So let me just, okay, let's do this. Let me say where I think we are and where the big differences are and one thing that I want to correct about something Justin said. Where we are is that the government failed massively and that same government and same bunches of governments that failed massively, Justin trusts to do the right thing now. And notice what I want to go back to Eric Garcetti, the mayor of LA. I mean, he actually said, let me get the quote again. He actually said, the worst thing would be to lift the floodgates and watch all of your friends and neighbors die, all of your friends and neighbors. That's crazy. And so if he's trying to scare people that way, that's not helping anything. That's just trying to make people panic. On the value of life, I don't think Justin, not that you should because I just stated this an hour ago and it's new to me, but I don't think we can just use that 10 million if we are talking a huge number of lives. And I think the Luigi Zangala's Reducto At Absurdum shows it. If it's really 10 million and he says you would have saved 7 million lives, then that's three years of GDP. So if your model is telling you that you should cut GDP to zero for three years, knowing it'll kill 50 million people, instead of 7 million people, there's something badly wrong with your model. I want to also get to a point that I left unanswered because it wasn't my turn. And that was when Justin made the point about the 90% and the 10%. If 90% of us are doing everything right, socially distancing, wearing masks, when we go out, all that thing, and I don't know if it's 90%, but it's a large percent. It's way over half. I'm positive. That's, well, then what's the big problem he says because we've already got a lot of that lockdown? No. It's very different because the lockdown is about governments saying you can't do all these things, you can't go to work, even if you could go to work and comply completely. I have an office I rent above a shoe store beside it is a real estate firm. At its peak, at its peak, there are five people in that real estate firm. It's approximately a thousand square feet. They could easily social distance. If they tried to have that firm open, the cops would be by and shut them down. So that's why you really do need to distinguish between social distancing and lockdowns. They aren't the same. Lockdowns are this big hammer, this big blood hammer, Gretchen Whitmer saying you can't fish, you can't operate a motorboat, all those things. People around here, I don't know here, but certain parts of California getting arrested for being in their car and looking at a sunset, people getting arrested for being in their cars in Mississippi and listening to a reverend, even though no one is connecting with anyone else physically other than people in their family. So you've really got to distinguish between social distancing and lockdowns. One is not a percent of the other. I know I've got time so let me just see if there's anything else I want to say. And I guess the other thing I want to say is that when I enter a debate with someone I don't know, I'm always afraid of whether the person will use dirty tricks. And I've got to say, Justin, I've very much enjoyed the tenor of this debate. I mean, you're a real gentleman. We are both members of the Commonwealth and it shows, right? So I just want to tell you how much I appreciate that. Justin, please give us your summation. So I want to stop by thanking David as well for the brilliantly scholarly approach he takes to this as he takes to everything. David's final comment and the hammer which he wielded over me is he said, in this moment Justin wants to trust the government, which is a very bitter pill for me to swallow given this current government. And he's right. But I want to think about the flip side of this. So I am trusting the government to try to keep us safe. That's what my proposal, my side of the floor is arguing. The alternative is either to trust the bug not to kill me. And I don't trust it. Or it's to trust other people to take sufficient account of my life, my well-being, my livelihood and my value of his person that they won't infect me. And I don't trust him. That's the simple economics of externalities. People are making choices where they're risking other people's lives. You've seen the photos of spring break in Florida. That's the logic of externalities. They're making bad choices for others. They're putting others at risk. I don't like trusting the government. I don't have a better choice. David's argument at the very end there, lockdowns are a hammer. He's absolutely right. Could we find slightly better ways of designing these things? I'm just going to concede that. You probably should be allowed to fish, which we're not allowed to do in Michigan right now. But by Jingo, I'm glad that most workplaces are closed. I'm glad that schools are closed. And I'm glad that nursing homes are well protected. So could we design a better lockdown? I totally agree. If the alternative, though, remember the motion was to liberate us from lockdowns. The alternative of no lockdown is something that I worry a lot about. David had what he called a reducto absurdum where he said, he took my numbers and he said, doesn't this imply that you're willing to give up a lot of GDP in order to beat the bug? The answer is I am. Economists place an enormously high value on life. It's funny to see how we caricature it in public debates as being not at all interested in people and their lives, but actually the people who are shouting most loudly in the public debate to protect life is my fellow economists. And we do this because that's how people act. People make choices as if they value their lives. That's where the value of a statistical life comes from. So it's effectively giving voice to the set of concerns that they have in other domains of their lives. Look, I just want to come back and say, you know, I actually did my homework for tonight's debate. I knew I was playing in a way game, talking to my libertarian friends. I was like, oh, is this just going to be a debate about philosophy? So I looked up my good friend, John Stuart Mill. And Mill, of course, says the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community against his will, and that's what we're talking about tonight, is to prevent harm to others. And that's been precisely the case that I've been making. Mill goes on, and this is an important part of libertarian thinking, his own good. Either physical or moral is not a sufficient warrant. And I hope you've noticed that I've managed to make my case tonight without being a nanny state liberal trying to tell you how to live a better life for your sake. It's actually about trying to make sure that you don't harm others, which is what Mill had in mind. So look, this is always going to be a tough game to win on an on the way pitch. So I hope I might have persuaded some of you, or as David would say, at the margin. But if not, I think is a really important role for libertarians moving forward. This is a period in which we've seen the most rapid change in the role of government in our lives. It's not a government that plays by the usual rules. And there are going to be many, many rules and regulations, special favours dealt out, which my libertarian friends, I think are going to play a really, really important role in speaking up and making sure that our government doesn't undermine our civil liberties, that it doesn't do too many favours to special interests and the like. And I think it is really important time for each of you to be really involved in the policy debate. And we're going to find common ground on lots of these issues going forward. Okay. Thank you to you both for a clash of ideas that shed a lot of light and very little heat because you guys obviously like each other. And it was indeed a very civil debate, which is what we like at the Seoul Forum. And as Justin said, it is a marginal issue with respect to voting. You know how Oxford-style voting works. It's a before and after situation. Whoever moves the vote in his favour wins the Tootsie roll. And so in that sense, the votes you get in your favour initially count against you. It's the marginal achievement that matters. And I ask all of those in the audience listening to vote now because we are going to open the final voting for those people. But this is going to be released on Friday on video and on audio. And a lot of other people who voted initially are then going to be able to watch it. They will then vote over the next few days. And next Tuesday, about a week from today, we're going to award the Tootsie roll to the winner. But that's just part of the game. Meanwhile, we did have a very interesting clash of ideas. I thank you both. And thanks for watching. We will certainly have more online debates like these. But I hope to see you all at our physical space at the Substance Cultural Theatre in the not too distant future. Good evening.