(upbeat music)
- [Interviewer] Just introduce yourself,
say who you are.
- Absolutely, I'm Jay Richards.
I'm the author or the co-author of "The Price Of Panic."
And I'm a professor at The Bush School
of Business at Catholic University of America.
I've been working actually in the academic realm
since I graduated from graduate school, actually in 1998.
But I spent most of my career at Think Tanks,
places like the Discovery Institute and the Acton Institute.
And I think this is my sixth
or seventh year at Catholic university.
Well, the COVID-19 narrative started in the mid spring
with this idea that we were gonna flatten the curve,
or we're gonna slow the spread.
In fact, The White House campaign was 15 days
to slow the spread.
The flatten the curve idea came from this
this famous image of two different case and death curves.
And so it was a spiky curve
in which a lot of people got sick all at once,
overwhelmed the healthcare system.
And so you got people dying
both of COVID and also just from not getting care.
So the idea is that by locking everyone down,
we would flatten the curve.
That is the same number of people would still get it,
it's the same area under both curves
but people would get it spread out over more time.
And so that would give time essentially
for the healthcare system to handle it.
Well what actually happened
is the healthcare system absorbed the shock.
We had thousands of beds at the Javits Center
that continued to be open and Navy ship
that sat next to Manhattan that had no use.
And so the story almost immediately changed.
The narrative for a couple of weeks, was that,
well we're just as a temporary measure in order to ease up
on the pain of the healthcare system.
It transitioned seamlessly into effectively
a kind of rolling barrage of lock downs
and shutdowns and quarantines and mask wearings,
presumably in order to just prevent
the spread of the virus itself.
Which was very much an untested idea.
In fact, an epidemiology is well known
that you're not gonna be able to do that indefinitely.
And of course the effects of the lock downs themselves
when you do them over a long period of time are devastating.
We're now seven, eight months into this
and we're still trying this idea of the lock downs.
And it's not even exactly clear
at this point what the argument is.
Perhaps you're waiting for the perfect vaccine or something.
But it's clear that from the very beginning
in say March of 2020 until late 2020,
the narrative changed three or four times.
Always the same policy, massive lock downs
and quarantines, but with changing justification.
- [Interviewer] And what did you think
when you saw the narrative change the first time?
- Well, I initially got worried in late March
because I realized that the response was based on
initially a speculative single speculative computer model
out of the Imperial College London
which there was no reason to trust.
And we learned within weeks was entirely untrustworthy.
That's when I initially got worried.
I then got really worried in April
when I realized that the idea for the lock downs
wasn't going to be a temporary measure,
it was gonna be something we were gonna try for months.
It became clear almost immediately
that lock downs were gonna be devastating
to the economy and to frankly, to just human wellbeing.
It's one thing if you did that for two weeks
while you were trying to buy yourself time.
It's another thing if you're gonna do that
for months and months on end.
And so it got really really worrisome by late spring.
I honestly thought that by say June or July
most of the population would realize,
okay this doesn't make sense,
this isn't working.
The costs are greater than the benefits,
but unfortunately even into the late fall,
it seems like maybe half the American population
is still terrified.
Initially, I suspected that the lock downs
are gonna be a bad thing.
It didn't take a whole lot of economic acumen to realize
that if you shut down schools, you shut down businesses.
You're gonna destroy people's jobs.
You're gonna destroy people's well-beings, their lives.
When you start shutting down hospitals
or clearing out hospital wards
in order to make room for COVID patients,
you're essentially saying COVID patients
have priority over say people
that need to get cancer screenings or cancer surgery.
So I think it's very likely
that just those first three months of the lock downs,
we could end up with something
like 80,000 missed cancer screenings
just in the United States.
One early estimate put deaths of despair
in the United States about so in other words,
drug and alcohol overdose suicides.
It's something like 75,000 excess deaths.
So in other words, the lock downs themselves
in just three months will probably
have caused 75,000 excess deaths of despair.
Now those have to be weighed.
Those are costs, those are the price of panic.
Those have to be weighed
against the cost of the virus itself.
At some point when the argument keeps changing,
the people making the argument lose credibility.
I mean, I myself actually didn't buy
the flatten the curve argument
from the very beginning, because it was quite clear
that we were overestimating the deadliness of the virus.
But even if that were the case,
the fact that the argument not only kept changing
but it actually changed in contradictory ways.
So the original assumption was that
that we would not be able to prevent ultimately
the spread of the coronavirus through the population.
In fact, that's the premise
of the flatten the curve image.
Same area under both curves
will just change the sort of shape of the curve.
Very quickly though we changed to this idea
that lock downs could actually prevent
the spread of the virus.
Well this is a respiratory virus, spread probably
by aerosol the way other viruses like this are spread.
Unless we're literally going to isolate everyone
and put them all in bubbles.
We're not going to prevent
literally the spread of the virus.
And yet we keep thinking we're going to do that.
And so at some point I would hope
that the population would wise up and realize,
look our policy makers, they don't,
they're not actually following the science,
they're following maybe
what a public health official told them.
But I think more often than not
maybe they're just shooting from the hip.
Something that I realized in working on this book
was that, that public health itself
has become highly politicized.
You might think of public health is nursing
or civil engineering or something like that.
But the reality is that the very field of public health
over the last say 15 or 20 years
has become highly politicized.
So there's this kind of shadow bureaucracy starting
with the World Health Organization
which is the public health arm of the United Nations.
And then public health entities in every developed country
in the United States it's the CDC.
Which are in some ways the kind of national counterparts
the World Health Organization.
And there's kind of intellectual orthodoxy
that pervades these bureaucracies.
And so instead of getting iron sharpening iron
and the smartest scientists in the room
all getting together and duking it out.
Which again it's kind of intellectual orthodoxy
of public health bureaucrats.
And unfortunately, that's what we got when it came
to the response of COVID-19.
We didn't ask all the smartest epidemiologists
in the world to duke it out about what we should do.
Policy makers, presidents, prime ministers,
they listened to the public health officials
that they happen to inherit from the administrative state.
And that I think is what we call in "The Price Of Panic",
the tyranny of experts.
The problem isn't expertise,
it's when a few public health officials end up
with the power effectively to shut down the world.
That's a serious problem.
Perhaps one of the greatest prices of the panic
is the loss of our basic freedoms,
basic human rights and civil liberties.
And most people of course, if told,
okay you need to stay inside for your own good.
At least in the United States,
we would all object to that.
On the left people would object to fascism.
On the right we'd be talking about the first amendment.
No one would just be told
you gotta stay in your house for your own good.
Instead we were told, you need to stay in your house
for the good of other people.
You might be fine,
but you go to church and you're an asymptomatic carrier
and you sneeze and you kill the old man.
That's sitting in the, in front of you.
I think that's the kind of moral jujitsu
that allowed us to so easily surrender
the civil liberties that we claim to prize.
Because we believe that we're actually doing it
for the benefit of other people.
I think we need to rethink that.
We need to realize that what we actually have here
is the mother of all arguments
for the eroding of the civil liberties
that we claim to price so much.
Yeah, I mean the reality is that
the public health bureaucracies can end up
being mechanisms by which I hate to say it
but populations can be controlled.
And I don't mean that in a conspiratorial way.
I don't mean that every person working in public health
of course wants to control what you're doing.
What I'm saying is the apparatus of public health
becomes a really good tool of choice
for controlling populations,
and for increasing the extent in the control
of the administrative state over populations.
- [Interviewer] Does that harm you?
- I'm really worried about the growth
of the administrative state in general, and certainly
the public health administrative state in particular.
The World Health Organization as an arm
of the United Nations has been around
since the United Nations charter began.
Most Americans though,
we don't really know anything about it.
It just sounds like a nice thing, World Health Organization,
they're just helping the world with its health.
What they don't know, is for instance,
that, well a leading ethno-nationalist communist
from Ethiopia is now the director general
of the World Health Organization.
I mean that sounds like some kind of conspiratorial novel
but that's actually what we're dealing with.
So it shouldn't be so surprising to discover it
for instance, in the spring of 2020
that the World Health Organization
was carrying water for the regime in Beijing
for the people's Republic of China.
It's not me saying this,
that's what the Atlantic magazine said.
For weeks they were literally covering
for the People's Republic first claiming
that the World Health Organization
that the coronavirus didn't transmit between humans
and then telling us that there was no worry about it
then telling us we didn't need to wear masks.
And then a few weeks later telling us
that we needed to wear masks.
I mean, ultimately these public health entities,
are political institutions.
And I think the population at large needs to learn that,
we need to recognize that reality.
- [Interviewer] And are you concerned about corruption
with the WHO, with private companies
like Big Pharma and vaccines and?
- I mean, the reality is that behind the scenes
we're not dealing with something as simple
as just sort of political entities.
We're not just dealing with governments,
we're not just dealing with non-government organizations.
We're also dealing with large multinational corporations.
I mean, I don't spend a whole lot of time worrying
about a repeat of what we got installed
on it Russia or Nazi Germany.
That's what happened in the 20th century.
I think the 21st century, we're more likely to see
is a kind of collusion that kind of cronyism
between big governments, between big regulatory bodies
and organizations like the UN.
And then big multinational organizations,
all of which have in a sense, different interests
but also aligned interests.
And so I think that's, if you actually look at the details
what you'll see is a weird alignment of governments,
the United Nations, philanthropic individuals,
people like Bill Gates and multinational corporations.
I think that's that kind of complex hybrid dynamic.
That's the kind of political economy
that I think we need to spend more time worrying about
in the early 21st century.
Yeah the World Health Organization and entities
like the Imperial College London,
they provided the kind of medical and intellectual heft
for the policy.
But of course it was the media
and social media that provided the marketing.
In fact, former Israeli health minister said
this is the first virus with public relations.
The panic itself could never have happened
but for the media propagating the panic
and social media magnifying it.
The idea of herd immunity became a sort of neuralgic word
or phrase in this debate.
But of course, herd immunity is not so much a policy
is just, it's just a fact of nature.
I mean, the reality is that the way human populations
or every population ultimately gets immunized
against a pathogen is by reaching a certain threshold.
And so the question is, how exactly do you reach that?
The whole point of vaccines for instance,
is just to speed up herd immunity.
But when you don't have a vaccine
you still eventually reach herd immunity.
That's just a kind of basic reality.
What's funny is that we all sort of panicked
about the idea that well
who would ever recommend herd immunity as a policy?
Well, herd immunity is actually it's just a fact
of biology rather than a policy.
But if we're going to talk about herd immunity as a policy,
let's try to build up some herd immunity
to media propaganda.
I mean, we're worried
about the viral contagion of the Coronavirus.
I think we need to spend more time worrying
about the social contagion and in particular,
the vectors of social contagion
that really transmitted the panic around the world.
It's important to understand that
of course media operations are corporate operations.
I mean of course there are independent journalists
and bloggers on the internet, and sometimes
they're the most reliable guides to these things.
But whether you're talking about Fox News
or CNN or any of the big three networks or even PBS,
you're dealing with large corporations
that have very particular corporate interests
and media corporate interests.
And so you can't expect to kind of independence.
In fact, what you get is an almost perfect uniformity
of opinion on issues like this.
And then you just deal with the fact
that media is naturally incentivized
to terrorize us, to terrify us.
Nobody wants a boring story about how 330 million Americans
continued to live today, right?
It's a boring news story, but we'll click on a story
about hospitals being overrun or an increase in cases.
And so there's this natural incentive
for media to terrify us.
Now give an overlay of social media
in which we have direct access to high definition video
on our bodies at roughly the speed of light.
And you have the perfect kind of,
social setting and technological setting
for a planet wide social pandemic, a social contagion.
Perhaps the most terrifying thing about the pandemic
of 2020 has been just their draconian censorship
from the censorship on social media
of people who just simply raise questions
about the wisdom of lock downs.
Or who scientists at places like Harvard and Yale
and Oxford and Stanford, reputable scientists
who simply articulate something
that was actually conventional wisdom until a few years ago.
The idea of lock downs for instance,
this is an untested heterodox hypothesis
that had never actually been run.
There's a really strong argument
among series epidemiologist about whether that made sense.
And unfortunately, social media and big tech
in particular decided to put their finger
on the scales on that debate.
So they decided almost immediately
that essentially the word of official entities.
So officials at the World Health Organization
or the CDC, that was going to have priority
over other epidemiologists.
Even if there places like Stanford, it's almost as if
if you're a government or public health official
that's like winning the gold medal
of scientific wisdom or something like that.
Well that's not how science works.
Just because you work in an entity in the federal government
doesn't mean that you know anything about more
about epidemiology than somebody at a medical school.
But unfortunately the media and social media
overwhelmingly decided essentially to
to weight the scales in favor of the scientific officials
against those who had questioned their wisdom.
I'm worried about the future
with the transmission of information.
I mean, the great thing
about the internet early on, I think about,
the early days of Google in which you could just
you could find something immediately,
you could search it and you'd get an organic answer.
Unfortunately, when it came to this subject
in particular, my co-authors and I
we watched Google actually bury stories.
So you'd get an important interview
with say a European scientist challenging lock downs.
We'd find it and within a few days it would just disappear
unless you actually knew the name of the scientist.
We often get buried but often even get pulled from YouTube.
That's terrifying because first of all
it's actually really effective.
I mean, the reality is that almost all of us,
get most of our information
from our social media news feeds or from YouTube.
Even the major media operations are ultimately dependent
upon these social media platforms.
And so the fear that you'd essentially
have private actors censoring the free flow of information
in this way, and censoring frankly the honest debate
about scientific issues that are absolute importance
to everyone that's terrifying.
And the fact that it seemed to be fairly effective
in 2020 makes me worried
that the social media giants may just
try more of this in the future.
Honestly, if you spend too much time studying
the pandemic of 2020 especially
at social and political aspects.
You constantly have to remind yourself
that you're not, you're not
inside one of those 1970s apocalyptic novels
that some of us read that grew up during that time.
I mean it's really very strange,
but you have these kind of weird collusive actors
between multi-billionaire philanthropists
and large multinational corporations and large entities
like the World Health Organization, the United Nations
even discussion on a unified currency
and the control of people's movements based on vaccines.
I mean, it almost sounds like something that you'd make up.
But it doesn't take very long in studying this to realize,
gosh I don't wanna believe a crazy conspiracy theorist
a theory, but if people were conspiring to do bad things,
I wanna know.
And even if they're not conspiring,
even if this is a kind of conspiracy of consensus,
which is what I tend to think.
I tend to think that you don't
actually need a central command telling everyone what to do.
If you get a large number of elites in positions of power,
all thinking exactly alike,
there's a kind of spontaneous order to that
and that they simply think about the world
in exactly the same way.
They think in the kind of technocratic way in which the
if the smartest technocrats can just be put in charge
we'll all be a lot better off.
I think that's what we're dealing with.
We're dealing with the rise up
the kind of 21st century technocracy on a global level.
- [Interviewer] Is it taking some, some courage
for you this year to talk about this?
- Anyone that wants to write about this
has to sort of take a deep breath
especially if you're an academic.
My co-authors and I all sort of worried,
okay, what's gonna happen,
are we gonna lose all of our friends?
The reality is you have nasty things happen
to you on Twitter.
I've had interviews pulled off of YouTube
for advocating self harm, which is of course absurd.
But the worst thing that I've had happened
is probably being attacked on Twitter.
And so I always feel like,
look that's the worst thing that ever happens to me,
I should thank my lucky stars.
But the reality is it does,
especially if you're in academic circles,
it takes, it takes some courage
or at least take some craziness.
There's some willingness
to challenge the conventional wisdom.
Because the conventional narrative on this,
it was set in 15 minutes in the middle of March
and it never moved.
We were told what the official story was supposed to be
from the very beginning before we knew anything.
And now we know far more than we did seven months ago
and yet we're still being told the same thing.
I mean, at some point we have to let
the evidence challenge the official narrative.
- [Interviewer] Or what would happen if you don't?
- If we don't allow the evidence ultimately
to challenge the official narrative,
the official narratives gonna set in concrete.
And we're what's going to happen
is that essentially a public health crisis,
primarily manufactured by a public health apparatus
to control populations will have succeeded.
And if that campaigns, that campaign
succeeds the first time,
there's absolutely no doubt in my mind
that it will be tried again.
Every time in which a person lives,
there's going to be some intellectual orthodoxy
that everyone assumes to be true, that's not true.
But all the social signals tell you,
okay you need to believe this,
and you need to affirm it.
And when that happens,
if you're gonna be a discerning person,
we're all gonna reach the stage
where you have to decide,
okay look, am I gonna be a part
of this intellectual orthodoxy,
or am I gonna challenge it?
And am I going to suffer the consequences,
am I going to suffer the social cost of this?
And so ultimately it's a question of courage
and a question of commitment to truth.
If you know the truth is otherwise,
are you going to have the courage
to stand in defense of the truth
against the official narrative?
Even if it costs you dearly.
That's, that's something that we're all
ultimately I think asked to do
and more and more of us are going to be asked
to do it here in 2020 and 2021.
The reality is that human beings are social creatures.
We're not made to be alone.
We are made to be in community.
And so we tend to go along.
We tend to do what our fellow human beings
and our neighbors and our friends and family do.
But the reality is that sometimes we are called to
to stand against that.
Now yeah, sometimes you just have some cranky idea
and you need to actually listen
to your parents who will correct you.
But there are other times in which,
maybe it's just like, you're in the matrix, right?
You see a certain glitch in your visual field
and you have to decide, okay is that
is that a sign that something's not quite right,
that things don't look as sort of initially appeared to be?
And I think that's something that all of us
ultimately have to decide, but the first,
the first step to being able to do that
is at least being willing to do it.
What would it take, what evidence would it take
for you to be willing to challenge the official story,
to challenge the intellectual orthodoxy of your time?
It's easy to recognize the intellectual orthodoxies
of the past.
It's easy to talk about the, the Dutch Tulip panic
or something that you're not in.
The real trick is to be able
to tell the intellectual orthodoxy when you're inside it.
And to be able to channel challenge it
when the cost is directly to you.
Me and my friends early on, I mean not my co-authors
but some of my closest friends were like,
oh no I don't know Jay, your students
shouldn't talk about this.
(laughs)
They came around though most of them,
they said, okay now I see what you're talking about,
(both laugh)
about June.
This idea that you would lock healthy
and sick people together inside,
makes absolutely no sense.
A quarantine is where you isolate people
that you know are sick,
you isolate them from everyone else.
And then you maybe add special protection
to the people that are really vulnerable.
Lock downs say that we should
just lock everyone inside together.
Well, that's actually what causes viral infections
and respiratory viruses.
That's why we have a flu season.
And so this idea that lockdown themselves
is gonna somehow stop it.
First of all, it made no intuitive sense.
There's no evidence it would work.
As we now know there's no evidence that the lock downs,
the government imposed lock downs anyway
actually made any difference.
What's weird about lock downs is that
this was never really tried before.
I mean, if you look for hundreds of years
what we did during pandemics is you quarantine.
Quarantine is when you isolate the sick, right?
You know the people that are sick
and you isolate them from everyone else.
And then maybe you add some special protection
to the people that are most vulnerable.
But a lockdown applied to the population as a whole.
That's why we closed down schools.
We closed down hospitals
for anything basically not related to COVID-19.
We closed down businesses, this kind of lockdown.
There's no evidence that actually it would work.
And also it wasn't like this was tried
and true method for dealing with respiratory viruses.
But of course the argument was that,
well this is what was needed.
Whatever the argument was at the beginning,
we now actually have the evidence.
And we know we can actually look at the States
that locked down and the States that didn't.
We can compare countries that locked down
with countries that did not.
And the least that can be said is that there is no evidence
that government imposed lock downs
make any discernible difference
in the progress of the coronavirus.
They just make no discernible difference
one way or the other.
So in other words, you'd like to believe
that lock downs may have been costly
but at least they are beneficial.
The reality is that lock downs
were virtually all pain and no gain.
I mean already by May, we had enough data
from States in the United States
and countries around the world
to know that the lock downs imposed by governments
really didn't make any difference.
In fact, some States like Florida
actually adjusted their policies based upon this.
And so the question is why in the fall,
in October, November, December of 2020
would we still be talking about lock downs?
At some point you have to conclude, this is
this is not about trying untested things.
It's just about malfeasance or incompetence
or even malevolence, because we know lock downs don't work.
When we compare countries like say Sweden and Norway,
people will isolate those two and say,
well Norway locked down in Sweden didn't
and Norway had fewer per capita deaths
but that's not how you do statistics.
You've gotta compare all the countries.
If you compare Sweden with its neighbor Belgium
on the other hand which had draconian lock downs,
so much higher death per capita in Belgium or in the UK.
In fact if there's any kind of correlation,
the more draconian the lockdown a country had
certainly in Europe, the more deaths they had.
Now does that mean the lock downs caused Coronavirus?
That's not necessarily, but we do think
that the lock downs themselves caused death.
So what we'll have in the United States
and other countries is some deaths
from the coronavirus directly.
And then some maybe equally many deaths
from the lock downs themselves.
If the lock downs made a difference,
we should have actually seen an effect.
When you look at the case curves and the death curves,
you should see a signal in the noise.
You should see the effect of the lock downs
in the curves themselves.
But if you actually do that, if you compare the States
in the United States against each other,
you compare the countries of the world against each other
and you map them according to the dates
of lock downs or against countries that didn't lock down,
there's no signature of the lock downs.
In other words the lock downs made no discernible difference
in the spread of the virus,
either in individual US States
or in countries around the world.
The data is in, lock downs do not work.
So why are we still talking about them,
and why are public health officials still advocating them?
- [Interviewer] And at what point was that clear
at what date you think that was clear?
- Certainly by May, we knew that the lock downs
didn't seem to make any difference.
We had lock downs in March and April.
We had data, spilling out certainly by May.
So before the summer even started,
we knew that the lock downs
weren't making a discernible difference.
And so the idea that we'd continue them
into the summer or re-implement lock downs again in the fall
in light of the data to me is just unconscionable.
We were always told there'd be a second wave
but in so far as there's a respiratory virus.
I mean this is how respiratory viruses go.
This is why we always have a cold
and flu season in the Northern hemisphere
during the fall and winter, it's cold.
People get inside and we tend to spread this around.
So it's a far as COVID-19 is a respiratory virus,
of course we're gonna have that kind of second wave.
But there's no reason to assume it's gonna be
as bad or worse than the first one.
And in any case, why would we do destructive policies
that we know didn't work the first time?
That makes absolutely no sense.
What's weird economically is that
of course the shutdowns applied mostly
to small businesses, small little car shops
or Mexican restaurants owned by families.
They didn't apply to large, big box stores
or massive digital companies like Amazon.
And so in many ways, this was the kind of mother
of all boons for the digital economy.
If you were working in the digital economy,
you could work from home.
Or you're one of these large companies,
you likely saw growth.
You likely saw improvement.
If you had a small family owned business,
you almost certainly had a lockdown imposed upon you.
And so the reality is that whether by intention or not,
what we saw is a kind of massive transfer
of wealth in the economy
away from all of these tens of thousands
of small and often family owned businesses
toward very large publicly owned businesses
that happen to benefit from the digital economy.
I would think whether you're left, right center,
libertarian, whatever that's something
that ought to trouble you.
That's one of the costs of the social contagion.
That's one of the prices of the panic.
What's weird economically is that,
of course the shutdowns applied mostly
to small businesses, small little car shops
or Mexican restaurants owned by families.
They didn't apply to large, big box stores
or massive digital companies like Amazon.
And so in many ways, this was the kind of mother
of all boons for the digital economy.
If you were working in the digital economy,
you could work from home.
Or you're one of these large companies,
you likely saw growth.
You likely saw improvement.
If you had a small family owned business,
you almost certainly had a lockdown imposed upon you.
And so the reality is that whether by intention or not,
what we saw is a kind of massive transfer
of wealth in the economy
away from all of these tens of thousands
of small and often family owned businesses
toward very large publicly owned businesses
that happened to benefit from the digital economy.
I would think whether you're left, right center,
libertarian, whatever, that's something
that ought to trouble you.
That's one of the costs of the social contagion.
That's one of the prices of the panic.
- [Interviewer] And you think we're seeing,
are you concerned about maybe the growth of world socialism
from this, instead of achieving the same goals
as coming communism except the true sort
of public health, economic?
Everyone's now gonna be, thrown
into the hands of their creditors
or depending on the state for, for figure outs.
I mean, they're all into this universal basic income
is now sort of, the government says like,
do they need to do that too?
- Well, what's funny is that we're all expecting
the political crisis of the past.
So I spent a lot of time thinking about socialism
of the 20th century.
But I think we need to focus
on the way in which these things happen
in 21st century digital economy.
I mean, the reality is that we could have something
that you might think of as a kind of global socialism.
In which there's the kinda cosseted costing power
of the state or a multinational organization.
But it's not going to be one
in which the state literally owns the means of production.
I think it would be a system
in which you actually have very large,
privately owned companies that are nevertheless
in collusion with the biggest government actors.
I think that's the kind of political dynamic
that all of us ought to spend more time worrying about.
Whether you're on the left
or on the right politically or wherever.
That it's, the kind of collusion
between large multinational corporate actors
and state entities.
That's the thing that certainly I spend most
of my time worrying about now.
Oh well 'cause what you think of is,
like the state ownership of means of production
like they did it in the twenties, right?
Like when they, when they centralized all farms
which even later on had to realize it just didn't work
and they implemented some market reforms.
But now, I mean you get this kind
of weird dynamic in what you have,
especially the corporations
that are in charge of information, right?
It's I don't spend all that much time
worrying about Chevrolet.
But I spend a lot of time worrying about Google.
These companies it's got big initially
by being good at what they did.
It's not like they became big by being evil.
They became good by serving customers
but now having become almost these semi monopolies.
Now I think they're misusing their power.
And we're seeing the kind of the contours
and kind of cronyism in which you get this collusion
between a vast regulatory state and these private companies.
And that's something I think that's
that's worth worrying about.
- [Interviewer] Yeah, it's pretty alarming.
- I know.
(both laugh)
I'm working on a, there's a book right now
and I'm working on a chapter on,
it's on Catholic social teaching
and different economic issues
and minus Catholic social teaching and cronyism.
So, I'm trying to try to figure this out.
- [Interviewer] That's cool.
And then maybe can you show us your book?
- Oh, absolutely, let's see.
I've got one back here somewhere.
- [Interviewer] And send it to us.
- Oh yeah, oh there is one up there.
Here it is.
"The Price Of Panic."
- [Interviewer] Could you tell us what it's about?
- Yeah so, "The Price Of Panic"
is essentially self descriptive.
So we think certainly the virus itself is a serious thing.
A lot of people get sick and some people die of it.
But we think the panic itself had as many
or perhaps even more costs than the virus itself.
In fact, we think just in the United States
more deaths will result from the lock downs than from the
from the coronavirus itself.
That's "The Price Of Panic."
It's not just a viral contagion,
it's a social contagion.
In "The Price Of Panic"
we argued that the real story of 2020,
the story that historians will write about 50 years from now
is not the coronavirus itself.
It's not the viral contagion
so much as the global social contagion of panic.
- [Interviewer] And what is, what is that doing
to our society all this madness is here?
- The panic of 2020 unfortunately has led
to untold psychological damage destruction
of human wellbeing, but also loss of basic civic
and political liberties that we all take for granted.
There's never been a greater growth
of the administrative state than we saw in 2020.
I mean if you had told someone even in 2018
that in 2020 state and federal governments
would shut down schools.
Would shut down private businesses,
would shut down churches and synagogues
and tell people they can't worship,
they can't go to parks,
they can't go to school, they can't go to a business,
nobody would have believed it.
Because it would have seemed conceivable.
But once you have a public health crisis,
in which you have to do this for the benefit
of other people, that was the key that unlocked
that growth in political power
that would have seemed unimaginable two years ago.
(upbeat music)