Speaker 1: Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show
Speaker 1: where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news.
Speaker 1: I'm Noah Feldman, and we are still talking about coronavirus
Speaker 1: in particular. We're going to talk today about the interaction
Speaker 1: between the virus and the economy. How soon can we
Speaker 1: go back to work? How safe will that be? How
Speaker 1: unsafe will we be if we don't look out for
Speaker 1: the economy. To discuss these very difficult issues, I spoke
Speaker 1: to Paul Romer, a Nobel winning economist at New York University.
Speaker 1: He used to be the chief economist of the World Bank,
Speaker 1: and he's been thinking hard about this subject. Paul, thank
Speaker 1: you very much for joining me. I want to start
Speaker 1: with a very influential essay that you and Alan Garber,
Speaker 1: the provost at Harvard, published in the New York Times,
Speaker 1: where you were the first I would say serious people
Speaker 1: to put in a major public venue the economic concerns
Speaker 1: about what we do about coronavirus on a par with
Speaker 1: the public health concerns, or in relation to the public
Speaker 1: health concerns. Describe to me, if you will, your current
Speaker 1: thinking on that very challenging question. Yeah. I mean to
Speaker 1: be honest, I think there were a lot of people
Speaker 1: who were recognizing the size of the economic cost that
Speaker 1: we were going to bear. I think what was distinctive
Speaker 1: about our op ED was a very specific proposal about
Speaker 1: how to craft a middle ground where we get out
Speaker 1: of this trap where we either have to kill the
Speaker 1: economy or killed lives. So if I can, let me
Speaker 1: just try and explain the basics of the challenge, please do.
Speaker 1: There's this notion of the replication rate. If one person
Speaker 1: is infected, how many new people does that person infect?
Speaker 1: What people call the R not or the R zero
Speaker 1: yep ur zero are not a replication rate. That number
Speaker 1: has to be less than one to keep the pandemic
Speaker 1: in check. If it goes above one, then it just
Speaker 1: grows like wildfire. Social distance is one way to get
Speaker 1: it below one, but of course it's really hurting the economy.
Speaker 1: The way to keep it below one that is guaranteed
Speaker 1: to work is find the people who are infected and
Speaker 1: isolate them. Now, right now, what we're doing is we're
Speaker 1: isolating everybody because we don't know who's infected. So all
Speaker 1: we need to do is switch to a strategy where
Speaker 1: we're testing everybody with regularity. As soon as we find
Speaker 1: somebody who's positive, we have them go into isolation for
Speaker 1: say two weeks, and that's all it takes to get
Speaker 1: on a path where this pandemic is dying out, and
Speaker 1: we can stick with that policy as long as it
Speaker 1: takes to get a vaccine, which is the other way
Speaker 1: to protect ourselves. So all it takes is to figure
Speaker 1: out who it is who's infectious and to isolate them
Speaker 1: without isolating lots of people who could otherwise just go
Speaker 1: back to daily life and work. I am not an epidemiologist,
Speaker 1: and I want to be clear about the caveat to
Speaker 1: that to that effect, but I want to ask a
Speaker 1: question that's informed by my conversations with epidemiologists and what
Speaker 1: I'm reading, and it's this, under circumstances where we already
Speaker 1: have community spread, unless everyone we're tested nearly every day,
Speaker 1: isn't there a substantial risk that even testing every week
Speaker 1: or every ten days, which requires a tremendous number of tasks,
Speaker 1: much greater than I think it seems realistic, at least
Speaker 1: according to what I've read, for us to be able
Speaker 1: to produce in the next few months, would leave open
Speaker 1: the possibility of continued spread. I mean, your key line
Speaker 1: is all we have to do is but the question is,
Speaker 1: you know, is that in fact doable? We don't want
Speaker 1: to be the people in the punchline of an economist
Speaker 1: joke who assumed they can opener. No, I hear you,
Speaker 1: And this is a good way to phrase the question.
Speaker 1: Here's the way I would respond to the epidemiologists. It's
Speaker 1: that you guys are supposed to be the ones who
Speaker 1: take the numbers seriously, so do the numbers here. What
Speaker 1: they're saying is something like, oh, we can't get enough testing,
Speaker 1: so my gosh, you'd have to test people every every day.
Speaker 1: That's just not true. All you have to do is
Speaker 1: do the numbers here. If you tested people on average
Speaker 1: about once every two weeks, and even if your test
Speaker 1: has what they call a false negative rate, you fail
Speaker 1: to catch some people who are actually infectious. Even under
Speaker 1: those circumstances, you can get rzro below one. And I'm
Speaker 1: really disappointed and want to challenge them. Why do they
Speaker 1: switch into this kind of know nothing mode of that
Speaker 1: just won't work? And then they the ones who claim
Speaker 1: they're the ones who do the math, they just stop
Speaker 1: doing the math. Now, let me be clear about what
Speaker 1: it would mean to test people on average about once
Speaker 1: every two weeks. This means running about twenty million tests
Speaker 1: a day. That is a huge expansion in the testing
Speaker 1: capacity that we have, and it's never been the case
Speaker 1: that public health authorities had the kind of resources to
Speaker 1: do that kind of testing. So I understand why they're
Speaker 1: saying it's not possible, but just think about other cases
Speaker 1: where we've done something like this. The TSA screens about
Speaker 1: five million Americans a day, and you know, you could
Speaker 1: have imagined a time before nine to eleven where people
Speaker 1: were saying, oh my god, you could never screen all
Speaker 1: people who get on airplanes. That's just impossible. And you know,
Speaker 1: so we have to stop flying because we might have
Speaker 1: a terrorist attack or something. You know, if we're serious
Speaker 1: about scaling out to millions a day, we've got this
Speaker 1: economy that could produce twenty trillion dollars worth of value.
Speaker 1: We've got sixty million workers. We could organize ourselves to
Speaker 1: administer twenty million tests a day. It's really not that
Speaker 1: big a challenge. It isn't something that was ever available
Speaker 1: to public health authorities before, but we could easily decide
Speaker 1: to do it now. And I really want to just
Speaker 1: insist and I'm going to get aggressive about this. The
Speaker 1: epidemiologists can't just go into know nothing mode and dismiss
Speaker 1: this without actually doing the math and engaging seriously. So
Speaker 1: I think that many epidemiologists that I know at least
Speaker 1: would say, it's not that we're not doing the math
Speaker 1: at all. That they say, you know, we live on
Speaker 1: math and we're not ignoring the math. I think that's
Speaker 1: the first thing they would say. The second thing I
Speaker 1: think they would say is that they have to recognize
Speaker 1: not the normative claim that we ought to or we
Speaker 1: might be able to generate twenty million tests a day,
Speaker 1: but rather the predictive claim, because they engage in minute
Speaker 1: a minute prediction too of whether this particular president, with
Speaker 1: this particular configuration of economic forces facing him, is even
Speaker 1: plausibly capable of doing what you think we normatively ought
Speaker 1: to do. And I think someone would say, we concede
Speaker 1: that it would, we should have twenty million testing. I've
Speaker 1: not heard any of bidemiologists saying, oh, it doesn't matter
Speaker 1: about the test. They all say we need the testing
Speaker 1: we need in a very serious way. But if they
Speaker 1: have a different assessment of the empirical probabilities. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: let me let me just say, you know, I understand that,
Speaker 1: but I think people have to you know, stick to
Speaker 1: their area of expertise. They understand the math of these models.
Speaker 1: They're not experts in politics, public expenditure, mobilization. I don't
Speaker 1: think they're the ones who should make for everybody the
Speaker 1: judgment about what's politically feasible, and then, worst of all,
Speaker 1: having made that judgment, hide it behind some phony assertion
Speaker 1: like you'd have to test people ever every day. What
Speaker 1: they should say, I think is the same thing I'm saying,
Speaker 1: which is like, look, if you want to be sure
Speaker 1: you're below with R zero below one, at any level
Speaker 1: of prevalenced the United States, you're going to need to
Speaker 1: test something like twenty million people a day. And then
Speaker 1: let's leave it to others to figure out if setting
Speaker 1: ourselves up to do that kind of testing would actually
Speaker 1: be less costly than continuing to do what we're doing
Speaker 1: to the economy. I think some epidemiologists, at least privately
Speaker 1: worry that if they say more or less what you're saying,
Speaker 1: that that's an invitation to the Trump administration to say,
Speaker 1: even without the twenty million tests a day, we can
Speaker 1: return to greater degree of normalcy, and that if that happens,
Speaker 1: it could genuinely lead to a public health disaster. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but let me just jump in, just head on in this,
Speaker 1: because this is exactly the thing I've been saying to economists.
Speaker 1: I would say exactly these things to anybody in science.
Speaker 1: You cannot tell people things that are just factually untrue
Speaker 1: because you think that the political spin is such that
Speaker 1: will get better outcomes that way. And I'll give you
Speaker 1: a very clear example of how this is coming back
Speaker 1: to bite us. The WHO and some supporting authorities said, oh,
Speaker 1: masks don't help, so don't use masks. Now, it's just
Speaker 1: not true. If you've got everybody who goes out in
Speaker 1: New York City, for example, to wear a mask, that
Speaker 1: could reduce our zero The reason they said something that
Speaker 1: wasn't true is because they were worried, quite reasonably, that
Speaker 1: we don't have enough masks. That were worried if people
Speaker 1: ran out to buy masks, we wouldn't have masks for
Speaker 1: the people in the hospitals who need them the most.
Speaker 1: But it was a huge mistake to say something that
Speaker 1: was misleading, bordering on being false. To try and achieve
Speaker 1: a good outcome. What scientists need to do is stick
Speaker 1: to what's true, protect our credibility, and then tell others well,
Speaker 1: given that it's true that masks will protect people, you
Speaker 1: may face a sudden surge in the demand for masks.
Speaker 1: You better move right away to make sure that your
Speaker 1: hospital workers have the masks. They get the first in
Speaker 1: line to get those masks. But we just should have
Speaker 1: stuck to the truth there. And my answer to the
Speaker 1: epidemiologist right now is the same. I don't see any
Speaker 1: danger in saying consistently, if we test on the scale
Speaker 1: of twenty million people a day and we isolate everybody
Speaker 1: who's positive, everybody else can return to work and we
Speaker 1: can contain this pandemic. And if you need to go
Speaker 1: on and say, if we just start sending people to
Speaker 1: work without testing, without any strategy for identifying who's positive
Speaker 1: and isolating them, we will kill hundreds of thousands of people.
Speaker 1: I just don't see why those are hard statements to
Speaker 1: make clearly and directly to the public. We'll be back
Speaker 1: in just a moment. I want to ask you about
Speaker 1: this potential disciplinary gap that you're describing, and maybe I
Speaker 1: should be more aggressive and say maybe there's even a
Speaker 1: disciplinary war that's emerging. And roughly speaking, there are the epidemiologists,
Speaker 1: most of whom also have mds as well as new
Speaker 1: degrees in public health or statistics on the one hand,
Speaker 1: and on the other hand are economists, and each is
Speaker 1: sort of in his or her element, because the public
Speaker 1: health epidemiologists are spending their whole lives studying what happens
Speaker 1: when disease spreads, and disease is greatly dangerous and is spreading,
Speaker 1: and the economists spend their whole careers studying what happens
Speaker 1: in especially to people do macro studying the rise and
Speaker 1: fall of economies, and our economy is now in a
Speaker 1: kind of a free fall. Each says, my disaster is very,
Speaker 1: very bad. It needs to be taken seriously, and there's
Speaker 1: a kind of struggle going on. It sounds like perhaps
Speaker 1: this is hypothesis over which struggle is the greatest, which
Speaker 1: challenges the greatest, where the priorities should lie. And there
Speaker 1: also maybe some epistemological differences, because the epidemiologists are accustomed
Speaker 1: to thinking about avoiding harm, and they don't spend a
Speaker 1: lot of time thinking about costs and benefits, and in contrast,
Speaker 1: the economist's whole undertaking is to think about costs and benefits.
Speaker 1: Does that resonate at all with what you're observing. I
Speaker 1: think there's a lot of truth in what you said there,
Speaker 1: so I don't disagree with that at all. I also
Speaker 1: think that's important to remember that I think everybody, the
Speaker 1: vast majority of people operating in these different camps, are
Speaker 1: doing so with good intentions and in good faith. So
Speaker 1: this isn't a case of bad actors. I think it
Speaker 1: is hard to appreciate the perspectives and the arguments of others,
Speaker 1: But let me just say that, you know, Alan Garber
Speaker 1: is actually an MD and the p HD economist. He's
Speaker 1: not an epidemiologist modeler, but you know he certainly knows
Speaker 1: those guys. So Alan and I were really, in a sense,
Speaker 1: trying to bring these two communities together. And the ironic
Speaker 1: part if you extend that you think about the public
Speaker 1: health people, if you think about what Alan and I
Speaker 1: are saying, we're saying, in effect, those economists who are
Speaker 1: telling you all about stimulus and so forth, we're spending
Speaker 1: way too much on their proposal, and we're not spending
Speaker 1: nearly enough on the kind of thing that you and
Speaker 1: public health have been arguing for for so many years.
Speaker 1: So oddly, you know, on the public health side, we're
Speaker 1: coming in from the outside, but we're saying, actually, you know,
Speaker 1: you guys were right, and we should have been spending
Speaker 1: billions more on you, and so let's just do it
Speaker 1: in a hurry. Now. There's a special dimension that makes
Speaker 1: it a little bit tough in the epidemiological community right now,
Speaker 1: which is that they have been attacked, basically by trolls
Speaker 1: who are trying to say, like this Imperial College study
Speaker 1: with many deaths and some of these other studies were
Speaker 1: politically motivated. So they've been blindsided by suddenly being pulled
Speaker 1: into the world of the trolls and vitriol and lies,
Speaker 1: and they don't quite know how to respond. Some of them,
Speaker 1: understandably are feeling defensive, and you know, at first glance
Speaker 1: they may worry a little bit about, well, how do
Speaker 1: we know that Romer and Garber aren't just you know,
Speaker 1: kind of one more subtle attempt at troll lists and
Speaker 1: undermine our credibility. But here I think what we need
Speaker 1: to do is just engage and engage on the specifics.
Speaker 1: Take each other's arguments seriously, and I think we should
Speaker 1: be able to all come to consensus around some of
Speaker 1: these basics, like even if we don't know things like prevalence,
Speaker 1: if we test at a sufficient scale and then isolate
Speaker 1: the people who test positive, we can get below our zero.
Speaker 1: And then from the on a side, I think we
Speaker 1: can say, and this is a policy we can stick
Speaker 1: with indefinitely. Everybody who tells you, well, I've got this
Speaker 1: policy and I know it's so damaging that we can't
Speaker 1: do it for very long, but let's just do it
Speaker 1: for a little while and then and then they never say, well,
Speaker 1: and then we'll do something else. We should be extremely
Speaker 1: skeptical right now of anybody who says, well, just do
Speaker 1: this really damaging thing and then we'll make it up
Speaker 1: as we go. Do you have a view on whether
Speaker 1: President Trump should be invoking the Defense Production Act in
Speaker 1: order to compel the kinds of investments that you're talking about.
Speaker 1: I mean, the analogy to World War Two and to
Speaker 1: other wars is pretty striking here. What the World War
Speaker 1: Two historians are always telling us is that the build
Speaker 1: up post Pearl Harbor actually really took a while. You
Speaker 1: know that it took a couple of years for the
Speaker 1: United States to generate the kind of They also think
Speaker 1: that the United States won the war because if it's
Speaker 1: capacity to mobilize production. So, don't get me wrong, they're
Speaker 1: in broad agreement with you. But there's a question of temporality.
Speaker 1: There's two ways to respond to a question like that.
Speaker 1: One is yes, indeed, President Trump should or President Trump
Speaker 1: should not. I think we, just as economists, have to
Speaker 1: get out of the mode of thinking that we're philosopher
Speaker 1: kings who can tell somebody else here's what you should do.
Speaker 1: You know, and it takes self control and discipline. Those
Speaker 1: are not the right kind of answers to provide. But
Speaker 1: here's the kind of answer that I think would be helpful.
Speaker 1: Here's why something like the Defense Production Act might help
Speaker 1: us ramp up production very quickly. Think about just masks
Speaker 1: or body suits. We say to a manufacturer, we'd like
Speaker 1: you to increase the output of your equipment by a
Speaker 1: factor of ten so we can get a surge of
Speaker 1: production in the next few weeks and months to then
Speaker 1: meet the sudden demand we're facing. And we want you
Speaker 1: to do it at the same price. Sell your goods
Speaker 1: at the same price you were selling your goods before. Well,
Speaker 1: the manufacturer then says, listen, you're asking me to buy
Speaker 1: all this equipment which will last for like ten years,
Speaker 1: and you're asking me to run this equipment for maybe
Speaker 1: two or three months, six months. The demand might go away,
Speaker 1: and then I've paid for equipment that could have been
Speaker 1: producing for ten years, but I only get to use
Speaker 1: it for six months, and then I'm going to suffer
Speaker 1: huge losses if I operate that way. So if the
Speaker 1: market operated the way we describe it in the textbooks,
Speaker 1: we just say, okay, well, the market price for a
Speaker 1: surge in production of masks is like ten times what
Speaker 1: the market price was before, and that will help you
Speaker 1: give you an incentive, mister manufacturer, miss manufacturer, to take
Speaker 1: a risk that you're going to end up with obsolete
Speaker 1: capital equipment in a few months. But now we have
Speaker 1: this constraint, which is just a fact, which is that
Speaker 1: many people, the vast majority of people, respond moralistically to
Speaker 1: what they see as price gouging or kind of opportunism.
Speaker 1: So the realities, we can't let the market do its
Speaker 1: job with high prices to motivate surge production. So what
Speaker 1: might work in a case like this is for the
Speaker 1: government to say, Okay, we'll buy the equipment for the
Speaker 1: production line. We'll rent it to you on a month
Speaker 1: by month basis. You provide the workers, you do the design,
Speaker 1: the manufacturing, sell the masks is something like the prices
Speaker 1: you sold before, and then if it turns out the
Speaker 1: demand falls off in a few months, you can stop
Speaker 1: paying rent on the machines. We the government eat the
Speaker 1: loss of machines that are now obsolete. I think this
Speaker 1: would be a socially acceptable way to radically scale up production.
Speaker 1: And the trick here is to avoid the moralistic kind
Speaker 1: of analysis and just look pragmatically and say, gee, if
Speaker 1: we're talking about a surge, somebody might bear some costs
Speaker 1: because equipment be obsolete in a few months, and we
Speaker 1: as taxpayers would like our government to bear that cost
Speaker 1: because we really want to get this equipment very quickly.
Speaker 1: And that I think could be done either with or
Speaker 1: without the DPA. The DPA might be an effective way
Speaker 1: of doing it, but I think their statutory room for
Speaker 1: the president to do what you described in a voluntary
Speaker 1: deal with the companies without having to invoke centralized industrial control. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think, And there's just been some lack of clarity
Speaker 1: like this is also unfamiliar, and we're moving so fast.
Speaker 1: I think some firms are worried that how the DPA
Speaker 1: will be used is that some official will say you
Speaker 1: have to expand your production of masks, you have to
Speaker 1: charge the prices from before. In effect, you have to
Speaker 1: bear the cost of the equipment which may turn out
Speaker 1: to be obsolete very soon. So as long as we
Speaker 1: make it clear that the DPA is really a mechanism
Speaker 1: for just brokering a deal that is the deal that
Speaker 1: we as taxpayers and citizens want, but which for variety
Speaker 1: of reasons, we can't allow through a mechanism where we
Speaker 1: just pay a very high price for production. Right now,
Speaker 1: this is just a mechanism that would let us use
Speaker 1: our government to broker the deal we want, which is fundamentally,
Speaker 1: we just need the masks as fast as possible. Paul,
Speaker 1: let me ask you one more question before you go,
Speaker 1: and this has to do with the relationship between your
Speaker 1: own academic expertise and trajectory and the work that one
Speaker 1: of the Nobel Prize and your views in this particular crisis.
Speaker 1: So at a very gross level of generality, your works
Speaker 1: innovation had a lot to do with taking into account
Speaker 1: in models of macroeconomic growth the way that new ideas, innovations,
Speaker 1: and technological change actually affect trajectories. Do you find that
Speaker 1: when you're thinking about this set of problems and you're
Speaker 1: staking out your own position, that your view maybe in
Speaker 1: some direct way influenced by your sense that, yes, we're
Speaker 1: in this crisis. Yes there's a trajectory that the epidemiologists
Speaker 1: and others are predicting, but they're not taking into account
Speaker 1: the kinds of innovative interventions they could be undertaken of,
Speaker 1: precisely the kind you are talking about. Yeah, I'm one
Speaker 1: thing about using Twitter, as it does force you to
Speaker 1: boil things down. I sent out a tweet where I
Speaker 1: said that I've spent my whole career trying to make
Speaker 1: a single point, which is just because something is unfamiliar,
Speaker 1: it doesn't mean it's impossible. Now, I mean, who can
Speaker 1: argue with that. But it's something which we don't keep
Speaker 1: track of, we don't think about. So when somebody says,
Speaker 1: testing twenty million people, basically I've never seen that. I
Speaker 1: have no experience with that. That's so unfamiliar. Oh that
Speaker 1: must be impossible. No, actually, it's not impossible. And every
Speaker 1: time we go down a path where we try and
Speaker 1: do something new, when we try to estimate, well, how
Speaker 1: hard is this going to be, it's inevitably much less hard,
Speaker 1: much less costly than we think, because we discover ways
Speaker 1: to do it once we start trying to do it.
Speaker 1: We discover ways to do it that we never even
Speaker 1: knew we're possible. So I'm not only confident that we
Speaker 1: could afford to scale out exactly what we're doing right now,
Speaker 1: but absolutely certain that if we start doing that, we're
Speaker 1: going to find ways to do it at much lower
Speaker 1: cost and much more quickly, much less disruption than anybody
Speaker 1: imagines right now. And you know, and you can actually
Speaker 1: go back and look at various episodes like how hard
Speaker 1: is it going to be to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions
Speaker 1: that caused acid rain? Or like how hard is it
Speaker 1: going to be to stop using the chlorofluorocarbons which we're
Speaker 1: destroying the ozone layer. You go back and read that,
Speaker 1: you know, the literature in the debate before it was
Speaker 1: like this is going to be the end of life
Speaker 1: as we know it if we don't have chlorofluorocarbons, but
Speaker 1: you know, we banned them. We found an alternative, we
Speaker 1: stopped using them, and you know as bradiodorant and just
Speaker 1: roll on deodorant. You know, there's an almost unlimited infinite
Speaker 1: number of alternative ways to do things, but because they're unfamiliar,
Speaker 1: we tend to think they're not possible, and we need
Speaker 1: to just lose that kind of fear and commit to
Speaker 1: let's go down this path. We don't know exactly how
Speaker 1: we're going to do it, but we're going to find
Speaker 1: a way to do it, and once we commit, it'll
Speaker 1: turn out fine. Paul, thank you very much for your insights.
Speaker 1: I think your core insight, which you described as spending
Speaker 1: your career on that unfamiliarity is not the same thing
Speaker 1: as impossibility, is tremendously valuable in this particular moment, and
Speaker 1: I want to join you in hoping that we're able
Speaker 1: to scale up testing and other interventions with the kind
Speaker 1: of speed and capacity that it would take on your
Speaker 1: account to make the interventions that you were talking about.
Speaker 1: Thank you very much for your time. Well, thanks for
Speaker 1: being so you know, so patient with my vehemence and
Speaker 1: my arguments, not at all that's that's a sign of
Speaker 1: passion in a moment when we need we need lots
Speaker 1: of that. Talking to Paul Romer was genuinely fascinating for me.
Speaker 1: The passion with which he expressed his point of view
Speaker 1: captures to my mind the intensity of this moment and
Speaker 1: the importance of listening seriously to experts of all kinds
Speaker 1: as we try to chart a course forward. On the
Speaker 1: one hand, I benefited hugely from hearing the core insight
Speaker 1: that Paul described as the primary one of his career
Speaker 1: and for which he won the Nobel Prize, namely that
Speaker 1: the unfamiliarity of a challenge does not translate into the
Speaker 1: impossibility of a new and creative response to it. On
Speaker 1: the other hand, I was a little surprised to discover
Speaker 1: myself defending the epidemiologists in this conversation against a rather
Speaker 1: sharp charge that they're not doing the math properly, or
Speaker 1: that they're failing to take into account the capacity of
Speaker 1: the system to respond and to produce twenty million tests
Speaker 1: a day. In the end, I think a significant part
Speaker 1: of the dispute between Paul and the epidemiologists depends on
Speaker 1: the question of empirical reality. Namely, can we actually do this?
Speaker 1: And on that question, you'd have to be a genuin
Speaker 1: and profit to give a definitive answer. Until I speak
Speaker 1: to you again, Be safe, be careful, and be well.
Speaker 1: Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our
Speaker 1: producer is Lydia gene Coott, with research help from Zooie Wynn.
Speaker 1: Mastering is by Jason Gambrel and Martin Gonzalez. Our showrunner
Speaker 1: is Sophie mckibbn. Our theme music is composed by Luis
Speaker 1: GERA special thanks to the Pushkin Brass, Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg,
Speaker 1: and Mia Lobel. I'm Noah Feldman. I also write a
Speaker 1: regular column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at
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