Sam Harris and Paul Bloom discuss the false tradeoff between the economy and public health, putting a price on human life, framing effects for moral questions, how Covid-19 may change human behavior, "turn-key totalitarianism," the future of education, the long term psychological effects of the pandemic, the 2020 election, the prospect that Sanders supporters won't vote for Biden, and what Sam means when he says "the self is an illusion," and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.
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I am back with my friend Paul Bloom.
Paul, thanks for joining me.
Nice to be with you, Sam.
It seems like in Earth time it hasn't been that long since we've spoken, but in pandemic time it has been, I don't know, a year, a year and a half?
How are you?
Time is moving funny.
I am good.
Since we spoke last, absolutely nothing has happened to me.
I stayed in my apartment.
I go for walks and for runs, and I sit in front of my computer and watch.
Absolutely nothing interesting has happened to me.
What about you?
Yeah, I've been surprisingly locked down.
I mean, actually more locked down than I even sometimes intend.
I notice that there are days where I can actually just sort of forget to go outside, which doesn't seem entirely healthy.
Yeah.
Yeah, I've learned from this that I really would not like prison.
I kind of knew I wouldn't like prison.
It was kind of over-determined, but yet another reason is I gotta go outside a bit.
I gotta go outside.
I like walks.
I like sitting outside.
I like hanging out with friends.
It's just, it really taught me that I've got to avoid finding myself in prison later in life.
OK, well let's talk about this situation and what of interest we can glean from it.
There's a bunch of questions I've gotten from Twitter, and we won't be entirely on COVID as a topic, but let's just get all the COVID stuff out of the way first, because I want everyone to have access to it, and hopefully some of it will be useful.
idea that has been circulating as people struggle to figure out how and when we can reopen society.
And it's this difficult equivalence between economic cost and lives lost, or the risk of lives lost, And people seem anchored to what appear to me to be patently false claims and false comparisons here.
You have someone like Andrew Cuomo, who's been a superstar through this, but even he will say patently absurd things like, you can't put a price on human life.
Right, like as though we are thinking about when to reopen society or whether or not to close it and fully lock down as we have.
It's obscene and impossible to even attempt to put a price on human life, which is Which is obviously not true.
I mean, we put a price on human life all the time.
We know companies and governments do that explicitly sometimes.
But even when it's not explicit, it's absolutely there.
And it's there whenever we decline to spend all the money in the world on the project of pushing the risk of dying as low as it can go.
We could make every car cost a million dollars by engineering maximum safety into them.
We could treat every plane flight like it was a rocket launch, right?
We could check and recheck everything prior to takeoff.
And the reason why we don't do this is that we've put a price on human life.
The fact that it's implicit really doesn't matter.
It's still there.
We've weighed some implicit price against the time and the money required to guarantee everyone won't die in a circumstance.
And this opens on to kind of an interesting ethical question because there's an obvious price disparity when you look at a country like the United States and the developing world.
A human life is Obviously, and even necessarily worth less in the developing world, because there's much less wealth.
And the trade-offs in the use of wealth translate into different kinds of lives lost.
I mean, when you think about what we would spend to resurrect someone from the dead, if we could.
Let's say we had the power of resurrection, but it cost a billion dollars to resurrect somebody.
Well, We would do that in the United States at least once to prove that we could do it and see if it works.
And there'd be a few billionaires who would probably resurrect their mothers or somebody.
But even in the U.S., there's no way we would spend a billion dollars per life.
We wouldn't spend $300 billion to bring back 300 people, and then 301, and then 302.
There's no way that would happen, even in the richest country on earth.
But when you look at the developing world, if it cost a billion dollars to resurrect someone in Kenya, Well, there's no way you would spend that even once because you can spend $5,000 on bed nets and save a life.
So, I mean, there's literally something like a two-million-fold difference in the wise allocation of resources there.
So, I just wanted to kind of open with that reflection that we're putting a price on life all the time.
And this is just a very uncomfortable fact when you spell it out, especially in a global context where it's just obvious that we can't help but put less of a price on lives in the developing world where this pandemic is going to land and, you know, is certainly landing now with very likely much greater consequence in, you know, well over a hundred countries.
So it's certainly true.
We often have to deal with this trade-off, particularly in this case.
Now, to some extent right now in America and Canada and other countries, there really isn't such a trade-off in that what a lot of economists would say is that the goal of helping out the economy And the goal of saving lives, they actually lead to the same action at this point.
So pretty much every economist is saying, look, the lockdown is actually an end.
If all you care about is business and money, the lockdown's still good for that.
And so you have a convergence of people on the right and the left agreeing that some degree of lockdown, there's going to be disagreements at the margins, is right.
Later on, there's going to be trade-offs of exactly what you're saying.
I don't think anybody would say we should keep locked up in our houses.
Until the virus is entirely gone, until we have a vaccine that puts everybody out of risk.
You know what they're going to say?
We're going to open things up a bit.
And if they're honest, they'll say, yeah, a few more people will die, but the trade-off is worth it.
And I agree with you.
And one way to think about it is, it's a mistake to think of this inherently as money versus lives.
What it ultimately is, is human flourishing versus human flourishing.
In that, you know, the people who want the lockdown to be alleviated are not just saying because it leads to more money.
It's because they want, you know, they want people to get their jobs back.
They want businesses to flourish.
They want people to be able to get married and attend funerals and be present when their loved one is having birth and have elected medical procedures and all of that.
There's no easy answer, but you're trading off different things.
But they're not different kinds of things.
They all revolve around what you've been most interested in, human happiness and human flourishing.
So you bring up what has struck me as a second fallacy here, which, you know, I'm hearing many people resist the lockdown even now, suggesting that this cure is worse than the disease, you know, that the economic costs are too high and these costs will translate, if not immediately, into lives lost.
There will be, you know, livelihood lost and sanity lost and the cost to human well-being is just too excruciating and will be in very short order such that we should just roll the dice and open everything up and realize everyone's going to get this virus anyway.
And the reason why this seems to be a fallacy to me is These people are not properly comparing two states of the world.
They're comparing the economic costs of lockdown to the way the world used to be, right, before lockdown.
They're not comparing the costs of lockdown to even just the economic costs of doing nothing, or doing much less than we are now in terms of social distancing.
And letting the contagion explode, right?
So you just have to imagine what does the economy look like when literally everyone you know has a story about a friend who went to a restaurant or to the mall or to a movie theater and wound up on a fucking ventilator?
Where is your economy then when we've basically just ridden the exponential curve as far as we can with contagion?
People aren't making that comparison.
They're comparing the obviously scary and depressing effects—I'm sure they're only going to increase now in the coming months—of lockdown to the way they remember the world of yesteryear.
But that world, there's no scenario under which that world exists before we get to a place where we've got a vaccine or a truly effective treatment for COVID-19, where the risk of getting this thing by living normally is absolutely tolerable and economic behavior can return to normal.
Yeah, I agree.
I think some people have a fantasy where you say, well, look, let's make a hard choice here.
And we snap our fingers.
We snap our fingers and life goes on exactly as it had.
We go to sporting events and restaurants and everybody keeps their jobs.
And then just magically some fairly small percentage, 1%, half of 1%, whatever, Of humans disappear due to the virus.
And they say, well, that's the cost we paid.
But that's, that's bizarre.
It wouldn't happen that way.
Every projection done by a serious person, for instance, points out that the fact is as people got sick, they would flood the hospitals.
And that would cause enormous collateral damage.
And so, besides being incredibly cold-blooded, because often this comes in with saying, well, just the old people will get it, which isn't true, and to the extent it is true, that the proportionate are more likely to get it.
Well, some of us all love old people.
Some of us are old people.
Beyond being cruel, it's just irrational.
It doesn't take into account that economic damage cannot be disentangled from all the lives lost.
What do you do with the moral non-equivalence between this kind of real-world decision and a thought experiment we could easily cook up that could leverage the empathy module in a way that would be, at minimum, misleading?
So, like, obviously people are willing to accept some number of deaths here for life to go back to normal, and given the way we're anchored to certain figures, I mean, given that people have accepted that In the worst year the normal flu can kill 80,000 people in the U.S., right?
Like it was sort of 80,000 people died in I think it was 2017 or 2018 by the flu.
That's the worst influenza year in recent memory.
And more or less nobody noticed unless they happened to have had a loved one killed by the flu.
And so we're sort of anchored to a figure like that.
And if COVID-19 only kills 80,000 of us, Many people will be saying, we overreacted and it was no big deal.
It's just another flu.
You know, the flu came twice this year.
But when you picture it killing 80,000 people in any other way, I mean, what if we were given a choice that we could just perform a human sacrifice of Yeah.
You know, 18 people in order to rid the world of this pandemic, we would clearly balk at that.
The identifiable human life sacrificed is intolerable, and yet the statistical life, and this sort of brings us back to the, I guess it's the Lenin quote, one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.
How do you think about our failure to reconcile the moral arithmetic there?
There is a framing issue, which is how you put it.
I heard Rudy Giuliani say something to the effect of, you know, well, that many thousands of deaths isn't that much.
It's equal to the flu.
And imagine after 9-11 and, you know, the planes, you know, crash into Twin Towers and you say to Rudy Giuliani, you know, only about 2,800 people died.
That's infinite.
That's a rounding error when it comes to the flu.
Nobody should get upset at all.
You would be looked at, rightfully, as a monster.
And so the framing serves a rhetorical purpose.
You connect the deaths due to COVID due to some large number of things that we accept and not something else in order to calm people down and get them to think this is a minor matter.
But if it was any other thing, we would not think of it as minor.
And then, of course, this is something which utterly enrages me, and I've seen this more than once, including by William Bennett on Fox News, where he says, well, 60,000 Americans, we were told it was going to be much more.
We did all this, and for 60,000 deaths, it's not such a terrible thing.
Ignoring the fact that it's a number as low as 60,000, if that's what it's going to converge on, precisely because we spent a damn month in quarantine.
You know, it's like I'm saying, I'm some guy saying, you know, we really need fire extinguishers for the fire.
The fire comes.
I use the fire extinguishers.
There's not much damage.
He says, you idiot.
You thought we needed fire extinguishers.
Look, there's not much damage.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's what I referred to on Twitter as the first paradox of quarantine.
If social distancing works exactly as intended by lessening the contagion, the people who were against social distancing will feel vindicated that we overreacted.
So, it's a paradox, or a seeming paradox, but you can knock your brain against it and figure it out.
And the counterfactual is pretty clear and is being advertised to us and will be continually advertised to us in other countries that have not or cannot affect an actual lockdown.
We'll see what exponential spread looks like and what its consequences are in some places, I'm sure.
That's right.
And you raised before something which really is a genuine moral problem, which is a problem of how to compare things that aren't naturally comparable.
So, it's terrible for people to lose their jobs.
It is painful, it could be humiliating, it could lead to, you know, in this country, another country, you know, starvation, loss of medical treatment, and so on.
It is terrible.
How many jobs lost equals one life, or one death, actually?
And that's a strange question.
But it's a strange question, but it's one that people actually have to wrestle with.
I mean, if you knew that you could save the jobs of 10,000 people, but five people had to die, This isn't science fiction.
This actually could be just a policy analysis.
We'll open up these restaurants and these bars and these stores, and you look at the numbers, five people will probably die because of it.
It's not monstrous to say, go ahead.
It would be monstrous to say that there's no amount of death that's worth people getting their jobs back, businesses flourishing and so on.
That's crazy.
That sanctifies human life.
in such a way that it treats it separately from human happiness and human flourishing.
I think to some extent we have to make these comparisons, but they're very difficult to do.
But they may be impossible to do when made explicit, right?
I mean, just like the example that's always come to mind in this context for me is the speed limit.
None of us have committed ourselves, or very few people, I'm sure there's someone out there, but very few of us have committed ourselves to getting the government to pass speeding laws so as to bring the risk of death down on our highways as low as possible, right?
So the lowest possible speed limit That's still compatible with the functioning of society so as to minimize death.
None of us is wanting that, and yet our not wanting that is just paid for in blood every day, right?
So the reasons why we don't want that is because we like the freedom to drive more or less as fast as we want, or, you know, it would just be too boring to spend that much time in a car because it takes three times as long to get anywhere.
These are incredibly callous when held up against even a single death in a given year, right?
And we know we reliably have something like 40,000 of them every year.
So when it's spelled out, if you had to opt in rather than Find yourself in this system by default.
But if every time you got in your car, you had to sign a waiver saying, yes, I consent to put the lives of my neighbors at intolerable risk, or at needless risk, by driving this fast, If made explicit, it would be somehow unsustainable, and this just happens everywhere.
I'm not quite sure I know how to think about it beyond just flagging the problem, but if you just had to honestly assess real risk and your choice to embrace it, you know, you can't help but look like a psychopath.
That's right.
Phil Tetlock calls them taboo trade-offs.
The paradox we're in is we have to do this all the time.
We have to have some sort of speed limit, and any speed limit we have, if it were lower, it would save lives.
If you had a speed limit of 10 miles per hour, 40,000 people won't die on the roads.
What would happen is you'd have millions of very pissed off people.
And in our heads, we don't talk about it.
We don't make this policy.
We say, well, that much inconvenience, that much waiting and sitting in your car and getting bored out of your skull and not getting there on time, yeah, it's worth many, many people dying so we don't have to go through that.
And it sounds psychopathic to say this, but if you don't say it, you're stuck with absurdities where you demand a two mile per hour speed limit.
Or you're stuck with absurdities where you say, we will not open up business and restaurants and bars and so on until the coronavirus is entirely gone, entirely eradicated, which would be a ridiculous decision.
Yeah, although it'll be a decision that you can't make for everyone, right?
So, we could decide to open restaurants tomorrow by fiat, but no one would go, you know, or few sane people would go under the current conditions.
That's right.
We know there's no adequate testing, we know there's no contact tracing, we know we're just bailing water as fast as we can and the boat is still filling up, right?
So, if you flip the switch and turn the economy back on, There would still be whole sectors of it where it would be dark, and the only thing that's going to change that is the mass and hopefully veridical perception that the risk has been diminished to a tolerable level.
That's right, but diminished to a tolerable level, not eradicated.
We'll talk later about some predictions we want to make, but the easiest prediction in the world is we will end the lockdown before we end coronavirus.
It'll be a presence, and we'll worry about it, and we'll try to block it, we'll test people, we'll look for people who are immune to it, we'll do all sorts of sensible things.
But if we're honest with ourselves, we will all take some risk.
Yeah.
So what do you think, in terms of the complexion of life changing, what do you anticipate in terms of new norms around greeting people?
Where does the handshake go?
Let's start with the handshake.
So let's look at a few things.
Where would a handshake go?
You know, I could imagine—first thing, the handshake's going to stay.
There's enough people who shake hands, but I could imagine among certain elite groups, people who travel a lot, people who worry a lot, people who are wealthy, maybe Hollywood, which tends to come first, the handshake may drop.
It could be replaced by the fist bump, the bow, other options.
I don't think it's going to entirely go away, but it wouldn't surprise me if five years from now, there are some people who did handshaking, don't do it anymore.
I could see it actually bifurcating along the typical political lines in the United States.
Where as many Democrats give it up and Republicans doggedly hold on to it.
And the fact that each one of them, each group is doing it, makes the other one more extreme.
Where, you know, you and I shaking hands, we saw each other, we were like wearing MAGA hats.
And, you know, while some Trump supporters bowing to each other, that's just getting a fist fight for trying to do that shit.
So real Americans shake hands and the latte-sipping coastal elites namaste each other?
They do exactly namaste.
What could be more of a cosmopolitan tree-hugging bullshit than namaste?
What could be more a feat?
That's right.
So I don't know.
I mean, physical context of human appetite, I think we're learning this.
So I might be too quick to say that the handshake will go away in among any group because people People like touching each other.
Not everybody.
You know, your mileage may vary.
But people like the contact, the hug, the kiss on both cheeks, handshake.
It's a natural human expression of solidarity and friendship and love.
And shutting it down would be hard.
But I don't think things are going to go exactly the same.
And I can imagine some groups moving to other options.
Particularly, particularly if a threat of infection lives on for next year or more than a year.
Yeah, well, I gotta think that once we have a vaccine, you know, assuming we get a vaccine that works like a normal vaccine, that offers a hard reset where we just go back to who we used to be, hopefully with a few durable changes, just in terms of our being poised to respond better next time.
I think one thing we might get out of this, there's a phrase that the philosopher Nick Bostrom uses in talking about how we could respond to various existential risks.
And I guess he would apply to the risk of pandemic as well, but we were talking about it in a different context.
But he has this phrase that, you know, one path of mitigating risk is developing something which he calls turnkey totalitarianism.
Or you just know how, on a moment's notice, to turn society into the maximally defensible project.
And that entails mass surveillance and, in this case, impeccable social distancing and the abrogation of all the rights that we have come to expect.
And it's the temporary abrogation of these rights, but it's, you know, we've all signed up to survive for this period of a fortnight or a month or six months or whatever it is where we're going to go into lockdown.
I gotta think this has been a dress rehearsal for something that could be quite a bit more deadly and we can learn something from this and become You're truly adept at pivoting to the everyone get into your spaceship and seal the airlock scenario.
Yeah.
I mean, the idea of the stickiness of this sort of response is interesting.
To some extent, we've seen that with 9-11, where our security theater at airports is right now indistinguishable from that like three months after 9-11, in many regards.
We just stuck with it.
We've shaken the Etch-a-Sketch pretty hard with respect to travel, so who knows what's going to come back.
That's actually interesting.
You can imagine this kind of a restart where maybe TSA isn't going to let me carry my liquids on the plane, because what the hell?
We've gone through a lot.
Yeah.
And I don't know how much it is for habits, and this is, you know, my prediction about handshaking and the like.
You know, if two months from now we're kind of back to normal, I doubt it, but if that were the case, we'd probably go back to our normal habits.
But if we go a long period of time, Then I think our habits might change.
You know, you had somebody on your podcast, a doctor.
I'm trying to think of positive implications of this event.
If it were to turn out that, as you're saying now, that what we've learned from COVID will prepare us for the big one.
The one with 60% of people die and spreads like wildfire and is species-threatening.
Then, as horrible as this is to say, this was a godsend.
This was all for good.
Yeah.
No, it's amazing that once you take consequentialism seriously, you're left… Whatever judgment you have about the negativity of a given experience or a given outcome, it always has to be bracketed by your uncertainty around how things will look once you get further out in time, right?
So this is like, when do you actually do the math on whether something was bad?
You know, Chernobyl.
Is it too early to say that Chernobyl was definitively a bad thing for the world?
Well, if If something about Chernobyl leads us to become truly safe around the next generation of nuclear reactors, which save us from the greater evil of climate change, well then, Chernobyl was, again, another thing that actually we used to our advantage and was a net good.
Or worse, if Chernobyl scared us away from nuclear power, thereby hastening Climate change, because we lost some really important form of energy.
It might have been, you know, a thousand times worse than it looked.
Right.
And for reasons that no one is even thinking about.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's a Taoist parable to this, which I won't repeat because it takes too long, but basically it's about this farmer and something bad happens to him and he says, yeah, but you know, and every so it's too bad.
He says, yeah, we'll see.
And then it turns out the bad thing turns out good thing.
And I think this is the way the world works.
That's why it's so hard to be utilitarian.
I have a fun variant of a more R-rated variant of your question.
I've heard two people, two very smart people argue about this and come to different conclusions.
Pretty soon this is going to release and people are going to be dating and you know, dating or whatever euphemism you'll use.
Tinder will reactivate, people will be hooking up.
Do you imagine a release of pent-up sexuality—I've never said that phrase before—that will immediately throw everybody into the arms of strangers in this explosion of promiscuous sex?
Or do you imagine a period of reticence, where for a little while people are kind of holding back, a little bit more cautious?
I guess this could be very different in different age cohorts, Matt.
I think the, you know, people under 30 probably even now consider themselves more or less immune to this thing, or the consequences of getting it will be trivial, or extremely likely to be trivial.
That's true.
And that still seems to be sort of true, although you can find examples of people in their 20s dying or being brought pretty close to death from this.
So it's not something that really anyone at any age should be eager to get, but I think the perception could be very different there.
That's a good answer.
You know, as you get older, I mean, as you're, you know, you get into your 30s and 40s, I have to think it's going to seem more like the AIDS crisis for people.
I mean, I think you're going to want some testing prior to hooking up.
Otherwise, you know, it just, it's going to seem like Russian roulette.
The world after a vaccine and the world after, in nearer terms probably, the world after a truly effective antiviral treatment for COVID, I think those are very different worlds than the one we're in or the one we'll be in when we stumble out of our isolation with a regime of very arduous testing and tracing keeping us safer than we would otherwise be.
Though, this may happen sooner than a vaccine where they could test you.
You could turn out to have the antibodies suggesting that you've had COVID and you'll be immune.
And then, I think they were doing this in China or something, on your smartphone, you can get a little, you know, a little red flower or something, something glowing, a little orange flashing light that you could happily hold up to people saying, I'm clean.
That person would be Axel Rose, wherever he is, in China or elsewhere.
Is that really the sort of avatar of unfettered sexuality?
Probably Axel Rose 20 years ago, 30 years ago, when I'm dating myself and Axel Rose.
He's there listening somewhere saying, whoa.
OK, your listeners will never forgive us if we don't mention Trump.
Is this going to help Trump or hurt Trump come election time?
Well, there are so many things that are conspiring to help and hurt Trump that it's hard to analyze this in isolation, but it should have destroyed his presidency already.
I mean, I just think the level of incompetence and dishonesty on display should be something For those for whom he had a good reputation, his reputation should never recover from what happened in the month of March and what we've since learned about the month of February.
But I mean, so it's just, you know, he missed every opportunity to avoid distinguishing our country as the country in which the contagion did the most damage.
I mean, that's where we are.
We're winning in a very Trumpian sense now, and we should be tired of it.
But he is only going to get stronger as our response to this becomes more effective, right?
So he's now getting credit for, or will get credit if, you know, there's only 60,000 lives lost.
That's right.
Or whatever the number will finally be.
He'll get credit for anything short of an absolute holocaust.
Right?
You know, if there's two million lives lost because we come rushing out of our houses and hit the exponential again in 50 states simultaneously and can't figure out how to get back in in time, and we've got nothing effective in terms of testing, and we tip over into something horrific, well then that could make him unelectable.
But I think anything short of, this is the worst thing that's happened on American soil in a century and a half, I think he looks like the guy who, however ineptly, solved the problem.
He delivered the aid.
It's his name on the checks that are going out to people, however belatedly.
And part of this makes sense in that everyone wants him to succeed on some level.
Everyone wants an effective remedy.
Everyone wants to put politics behind them in an emergency.
So the default is to give him mulligan after mulligan after mulligan just to try to get things in the right place.
And he just, he just benefits from that in a way that, you know, that Biden can't, right?
And so, and any criticism of him, as I've noticed, Sounds to the ears of anyone who supports him like mere partisanship, you know, however, however appropriately targeted it is to his genuine mistakes.
So I do think he's, I'm very depressed by our political prospects.
And this is, couple that with the fact that Biden seems like he's in the twilight of some twilight and can barely complete a sentence without advertising the threat of old age, disease and death to everyone listening.
I just think it's a bad political season if you're hoping Trump is not going to be given four more years to rampage through human history.
Yeah, I have a similar view.
I've been watching his press conferences out of a kind of masochistic delight, and he's endlessly preening, declaring victory, boasting, And I try to see this from somebody who hasn't been otherwise following it.
I think, wow, he's done really well.
And because I think things are going to go well, I'm kind of an optimist.
And I think that the governors and the people in charge and the CDC are doing pretty rational planning for the future.
I think this is going to turn out not as bad as it could have.
And we're going to come out in the fall, and Trump is going to be declaring victory over and over again.
And then people, presumably Biden, will point out, and I'll be exactly right, That he messed it up.
He was far too slow.
It was a disaster.
But they're going to come off as nitpicking, as saying, it's like they'll say, I won the war.
And you're complaining that very early on there were some missteps.
Well, I won the war.
Yeah.
And, and so, so I worry about that.
There's one question that came in from Twitter, which seems appropriately targeted to you.
What do you think about the impact on children of this whole ordeal?
I mean, both the, I guess, you know, most relevantly just the experience of normal life being disrupted.
And what do you think about the impact on education?
Oh, it's a great question.
We'll talk a bit about the first, see if we get to the second, but we have a mutual friend and he sent me some stuff that Freeman Dyson wrote about the Blitz.
So in the Blitz, this 60 day long barrage of bombs over London by Germany.
And the kids, of course, were sent off to the country.
I think about half of them were sent off to the country.
Education was gone.
The kids in the country basically went feral and would just spend each day running around in the woods.
And Dyson talks about this with great nostalgia.
And points out, hey, we're fine.
There's a lot of evidence suggesting that kids are alarmingly, strikingly, wonderfully resilient.
There's certain things that are really awful for a kid.
I think the worst things turn around, you know, cruelty by parents and stuff like that, indifference.
But when it comes to this sort of thing, kids are great.
And so I have every reason to believe that at the end of all of this, there will be no, you know, we won't have some sort of generation of the Corona traumatized, the Corona kids who, you know, have to be under special medication and so on.
They'll be fine.
Does pulling the brakes at a fourth hour of continuous FaceTiming with one's friends count as cruelty?
Because I'm sure there'll be some debate in my house about that.
Yeah, well, everything people so confidently said about screen time has finally gone out the window.
And I think when it comes to implication, maybe we'll learn that we worried a little bit too much about screen time and other things.
Maybe worried a little bit too much about that extra hour of school and so on.
So I'm really optimistic about the kids.
When it comes to education in general, I'll sort of shift from kids to college kids and university kids.
So every university, every college I know has gone online, and Yale has gone online, and I'm teaching online now.
And if you ask professors about this, what do you think of teaching online?
I've talked to friends and stuff.
We hate it.
How are you actually doing it?
What are the mechanics of it?
So, the mechanics are two-fold, and this is similar to what a lot of people are doing.
For Intro Psych, which is what I teach, the lecture component of the class has been replaced by online lectures.
I already had some up as part of a Coursera online system, so I just tell my students which ones to take, I refer them to some YouTube videos and some other things I've done, and that's the lectures.
They watch the lectures online.
But then we also have sections, and we do that by Zoom, in small groups.
Right, right.
And so, it's not the same.
It's really not the same.
The seminar's not the same.
The lectures are not the same.
And professors will complain about it, justifiably so.
But I can't help but think there are some positive features of this.
It's not that bad.
For one thing, it's very egalitarian.
It's egalitarian at the level that you see everybody's faces at once, exactly the same size.
You're not sort of trapped by the structure of a seminar room or the distance of a lecture hall.
But it's also egalitarian in that you can take a Yale course and you don't have to be in New Haven, Connecticut.
You could be anywhere.
And there was a big push for these MOOCs, these Massive Online Courses, many years ago.
And I don't think that much came of it.
Very few universities shifted to them and so on.
But having tasted this, I wonder whether it's going to change the way universities work.
I think maybe to the better, to some extent, where more stuff will be made online, and more stuff will be available to the 99% of humans who don't get to be, you know, close to a great university or college.
But wasn't the issue with MOOCs — and again, I don't know this firsthand, but my sense was always that the lesson learned was that it's just harder to be motivated in solitude, interacting with screen-based content, and being asked to do a lot of hard work to get through a course.
There's something about physically showing up with other people, even if it's only the ritual of moving your body from one place to another, that makes it easier to just actually get the work done.
I think that's a correct observation.
My office is right next to a large lecture hall on Yale campus, and suppose Salman Rushdie was coming to give a talk.
Oh, hell, I'd go see that.
I'd wait in line for that.
But if somebody told me, what are you doing?
On YouTube, there's the same talk.
Well, who wants to see it on YouTube?
Whatever, I can see anything on YouTube.
Being in person matters a lot.
But in defense of the MOOCs, the experiment has never been properly done, because you're comparing kids who are at a university, say, or a college, and they have to take courses.
They signed up for them, they get grades, their scholarships rest on them, this is their career.
Versus people who are taking MOOCs, Like they're picking up a paperback book they bought, which is, you know, look through it and then toss it aside if it's boring.
Right.
So the proper experiment would have a university course with the same requirements and grades and commitment and exams, but this time it's run long distance.
It's a flip classroom.
And I, and I agree with you that the in-person matters.
And I think we're seeing this more generally.
I've been talking to a lot of friends over Zoom and having occasional drinks, regular drinks with friends.
It's not the same.
Yeah.
You know, you know, I'm not kissing them, but when I'm in person, we're not touching, but it's not the same.
So, I don't think that there'll be a full replacement.
I think something is lost.
But I also think that this might really transform higher education, maybe in a good way.
And I'm thinking about this more generally.
So now, if I want to see my doctor, I'll FaceTime with him.
He sent an email saying, you want to meet with me?
Here's how to do it.
We're doing it through FaceTime.
Here's the procedure.
And it occurs to me, for a lot of things, that's actually really efficient.
You know, some things you gotta touch the person and so on.
But if I tell them, you know, look, I'd like a renewal for this prescription.
You know, she's going to talk to me, and that could be done online.
Do you think there are many universities that might not survive a long hiatus here if this drags on into next year?
I mean, I know their major ones have endowments that I would imagine make them bulletproof over a much longer time span, but is there talk about just the failure of colleges in the near term?
There's always been smaller colleges that are on the brink.
And that rely on tuition money and they don't have million or billion dollar endowments.
And we're going to lose a lot of those.
We don't know what's going to happen in the fall.
Enrollments definitely going to go down for many of them.
Whatever endowments these colleges have been damaged by the financial downturn, I think places are going to go broke.
So nobody's going to cry for the Yales or the Princetons and everything, nor should they.
But we have a hiring freeze.
We have a salary freeze.
And I know at Yale School of Management, the tenure faculty are actually devoting some of their salaries and shifting it to help out untenured faculty and staff who might lose their jobs.
So, even at the higher levels, the very, very rich places are hurting.
This is really going to damage the smaller and less financially flexible places.
So, even at a place like Yale, untenured faculty are losing their jobs or at risk of losing their jobs?
No.
They wouldn't be at risk of losing their jobs.
In some way, the School of Management works differently, and I think the money might actually go to staff who may get laid off.
But the untenured faculty here are not going to lose their jobs.
We're not going to tenure fewer people or anything like that.
That never happens.
But I think a lot of people who work for Yale are at risk.
I think the graduate program is going to be maybe taking fewer graduate students.
This has had all sorts of ramifications.
I mean, you know, I feel awkward saying this because, you know, I know people have lost their jobs.
I know people who loved ones have gotten sick.
So, but I have students who have research projects and their research careers have been set back by a year.
Yeah, or if they're lucky a year.
It's just when you think about the economic environment into which people graduating now or soon to graduate will be seeking to start their careers and how long it takes for us to dig out from this.
Strangely, to watch the stock market respond with a rally as it did yesterday, I think it went down again today, but Yeah.
You'd think there's been good news that decides, you know, the winds of the economy have shifted, but, I mean, we're just at the very beginning of understanding how bad this is and will be economically.
Yeah.
And it just seems like, you know, it could be years before people get back to zero.
Certainly in some sectors, it's, I don't see how it could be anything other than years.
Yeah, it could be, it could be devastating for people early in their careers for a lot of different careers.
More generally, I've heard economists talk about it, and nobody's quite clear on what projections to make.
It's not like the Great Depression.
All these people lost their jobs, but in some way, the jobs will be waiting for them, or waiting for somebody, when lockdown ends.
You don't expect this huge leap in unemployment to remain once this is over.
Yeah, except when you picture all of the small or smallish businesses that have failed in the meantime.
Yeah.
You turn the lights back on, but some significant percentage of restaurants no longer exist, right?
You know, there's just space now available for rent as a restaurant.
You know, to reboot that is difficult.
You know, I don't know what the time course of that is, but... Yeah.
And we talked before about, you know, how do you compare death to misery?
And each of these stories of a person losing their job, a business doesn't get started up, is just misery.
You could spend your whole life trying to create something and have it dashed.
I find myself struck by all of the small stories about, you know, women giving birth without their partner being present.
Yeah, somebody's loved one dying and they can't be in a room with them.
Yeah, that one's ubiquitous and that's really brutal.
I don't know if anyone, I'm sure in the context of some other pandemic or epidemic, that's been a common experience but that really is the The experience now of people, anyone who's going into a hospital, whether they're going to be there for weeks recovering or they're going to die, it seems like it's the universal experience that they're waving goodbye to their loved ones and hoping to see them at the end of all this.
I mean, this gets to the bigger question where a lot of my colleagues, a lot of people on social media have been talking about what are the long-term psychological effects of this?
Will this cause a sharp increase into depression and anxiety disorders?
Will it be sort of this collective trauma that a lot of people suffer from?
And I think the answer is yes, but not only yes, it gets complicated.
We also have psychological mechanisms that are protective against these things.
I said kids are resilient, but adults could be resilient too.
But one thing that strikes me, which is kind of, I'm trying to struggle my way home to think about this.
There's literature on how we deal with sort of collective disasters, like Hurricane Katrina, or the September 11 bombing, or the Blitz.
And the answer typically is, Rebecca Solnit has a great book called A Paradise Built in Hell, Where she talks about this is, it brings people together.
It brings people together, they work together, it becomes rich and poor, black and white, everybody works together.
And there's a feeling of joy and bliss and a common purpose and a common goal.
So you read about these cases and people talking back about what it was like to be in a blitz, what it was like in these circumstances, and saying, it was wondrous.
You know, we lost our house, so-and-so died, but it was wondrous.
It was a moment in my life I can't recapture.
And you think, well, there's a bright side.
People will look back on the pandemic this way.
But the cruel thing about the pandemic is, we can't get together.
Yeah.
We get together.
We're getting together now over Skype.
But you look at every other case, and there are people physically together in large groups, helping out, working together.
And the cruelty of this pandemic is it blocks us from, I think, a process that would leave us far more resilient to the suffering, that would make us better.
Yeah, I mean, putting your shoulder to the wheel here is synonymous with social distancing.
That is what you can do.
It is the opposite of bringing people together.
Right, and if what I can do is help pull the rocks from people who have been crushed by an earthquake, and I work on it day and night, it's horrible, but it's also such a thing to do.
But if what I could do is sit at home and bake bread and watch Netflix, it doesn't scratch the same itch.
One thing that's interesting for me is the prospect of having one's perception of the risk of contagion and its consequences permanently reset.
I really don't know if this is going to happen.
I do think that it's possible that once we have a vaccine, well then the world essentially goes back to where it was and you and I never really were worried about Ebola and we're not going to worry about it now.
We're not going to worry about the next pandemic until it's sufficiently well advertised to us that we're convinced we need to get back in our houses and hunker down.
So I could imagine a perfect reset there, but currently, if I'm looking at a video, you know, shot in the distant past of six months ago, and you just see normal social behavior,
You see a crowd of people shoulder-to-shoulder, you see a politician wading into that crowd and shaking hands, and I feel like I now have the agoraphobia module in my brain fully installed, where I think, that just looks fucking crazy.
What are those people thinking?
Don't they know about aerosolized contagion that is Well, the thing that is astonishing about this circumstance is that this was not a maybe.
Something like this was more or less guaranteed to happen, right?
It's like we're open systems with respect to the rest of the world and its novel viruses.
And once we solve this particular problem, we will be absolutely sure that the next one is coming.
Now, whether it's coming in four years or 40 years, we don't know.
This is like the next tornado arriving in Tornado Alley.
You can't pretend you don't know about tornadoes if you live in Kansas.
Yeah, yeah.
And there's two possibilities for what happens when you get hit by a tornado.
One is, it's always the safest bet when somebody says, how will this transform us?
To answer, it won't.
We'll just go back to normal.
And I think this is true for some aspects of this.
I hear people say, this will give us increased respect for the value of science.
No, it won't.
No, it won't.
The people who care about science will care, and then others will forget about it.
Even anti-vaxxers will come back, I bet, after a little while.
You don't think we can quash that one for good?
Well, I was thinking of the one group at risk is probably anti-vaxxers.
It is very hard to be an anti-vaxxer these days.
But wait, I just think the most natural answer is, the safest answer is always, it won't change us.
My predictions about handshakes are fantasies.
You know, people shake hands because they always shake hands.
Why should this make a difference?
It's months, it's a year, it's not enough.
But, but I have some sympathy for your kind of analysis, too.
Take it at an individual level.
You go for a nice walk around a neighborhood, you know, every night, you're all happy and everything, and then one day you take a walk in a neighborhood and a vicious dog bites you.
And you're hospitalized, you come back.
For the rest of your life, walking around neighborhood is different.
Yeah.
It's different.
It's fraught with anxiety.
Maybe, you know, you do therapies, you work on it, but it's always there.
And in fact, the next time the dog bites you, it comes back like wildfire.
And I wonder whether this touch with disease and contagion, I guess I'm saying that there's some chance you're right, this touch with disease and contagion will forever reconfigure us.
Where, you know, right now you're fine and then, you know, a couple years later someone loudly sneezes at a party and everybody flinches.
We find ourselves washing our hands more often.
People with obsessive disorders get worse.
That has to be an irony of anyone who's far along on that spectrum.
I mean, just this, you know, compulsive hand-washing behavior is the order of the day now.
Yeah.
It's like it's the introverts' revenge and also the obsessive washers' revenge.
I know a guy, a friend of mine, and on Twitter he was saying, so this is another take on it, saying that he's normally a very anxious person.
And I know him, and he self-medicates with marijuana, but he's basically an anxious guy.
He says this has been the least anxious period of his life because A, everything he worried about has happened, and B, everyone else is sharing his feelings, his experience too.
The consolations of, I told you so.
That's exactly right.
That's exactly right.
The happiness of the paranoid person who finally sees the black helicopter circling his house and says, see!
And in fact, I mean, that's something which is just amazing.
I don't know if we talked about it last time or this time, but one of the things which is unique about this is how shared it is.
For the first time in my life, and maybe I will never experience this again, I am experiencing something that everyone else in the world is.
In different ways, but pretty much the same.
Yeah, although I keep having to remind myself that on the one hand, we're having a shared experience.
Just take the United States.
Something like, I think it's 97% of us are under something like lockdown orders, but there are very different experiences to be having in that context.
I mean, there are people like me who are extraordinarily fortunate to be One, lockdown in a condition of relative comfort with family, who I'm experiencing the silver lining of, you know, lots of enforced quality time, which we're all enjoying.
You know, there are people who are, even in similar circumstances, but they're not having a happy family life at all, right?
You know, they're figuring out how they can get divorced the moment the quarantine lifts.
But then they're, you know, just add all these other variables.
There are people like me who can continue working, and there are people who have just seen their economic life completely implode because, you know, work is synonymous with not being locked down.
And then there's just every other permutation of this in other contexts, like, you know, what's going to happen in the developing world where you can't even lock down, right?
And there's so much crowding and kind of hand-to-mouth economic necessity where it's just, you know, you just have to try to keep living normally because there's not much of a health system that you're going to crash in the first place, right?
So people are just going to get this virus and you can try to avoid it, but it's more or less hopeless.
So, it's just the range of experiences under this common condition is impressive, and we don't have shared fates here, and that's... No, that's true.
I'm in Toronto now, and there's a lot of controversy about people.
People of wealth in Toronto typically have a summer cottage by the lake.
And so, because the mayors of these cottage communities are saying, don't come.
We don't want you to come.
You risk getting sick.
You risk infecting people.
We don't have the resources and everything like that.
And then, you know, I pay taxes and I bought this place.
So on the one hand, you have that.
On the other hand, you know, I could walk down, you know, Queen Street where I'm at and I see clusters of homeless people.
And they're not obeying social distancing because they're homeless.
They're protecting each other.
But I'd still say, I read something in the New York Times and the headline was something to the effect of, half of the world under lockdown.
And yes, we experience it very differently.
But still, when have you had an experience, when have you thought about something and knew of some certain day that people in Kenya and Tokyo and Saskatoon are thinking about the very same thing?
I can name those occasions.
They're impressively few, but I think the first moment like that that seemed like it was truly a global moment where everyone was paying attention to the same thing, or nearly everyone.
It's strange to say it, that it was the first thing in my lifetime that seemed to rise to that level was Princess Diana dying.
Oh, yeah.
That was just an order of magnitude bigger than anything else that had happened in terms of its media coverage.
And then you had 9-11, and then you had Trump's election, and then you have a fair amount of Trump, and then you have this.
And I don't know what, I'm sure there's something else on that list, but they're pretty few and far between, these events.
But a lot of those things I don't think they compare.
When Trump was elected, there was probably a snapshot where the whole planet was going, oh fuck, just for a moment.
But then two days later, if you're a real estate agent in Beijing, you're probably not thinking about Trump.
And you weren't thinking about 9-11.
People in New York thought about 9-11, but how much did people in Nebraska two months later think about 9-11?
But now we're thinking about this all the time.
Yeah.
And so on the one hand, it's this enormous collective communal thing, but on the other hand, we experience it alone.
And I'm worried that the aloneness is going to block any positivity that you might get from the shared experience.
But you're totally right.
People do, and I don't want to diminish that.
You're very fortunate, I'm fortunate as well, to be stuck with somebody I love.
There's a lot of people, even people who aren't having terrible experiences, are stuck with people they hate.
And imagine being stuck in a place, and imagine it's not a big place, with somebody who hates you and you hate them.
Yeah, or just completely isolated, right?
I mean, the people who are isolated and are not well-designed for isolation.
Okay, so let's go to a few more topics.
We had a bunch of topics from Twitter related to the election, the prospect of Bernie supporters refusing to vote for Biden.
We should touch that.
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