Transcripts For CSPAN2 Victor Davis Hanson COVID-19 And The Lessons Of History 20240713

Pressing issues facing the world during this difficult time. As we confront the challenges brought on by covid19, conversations like this have never been more important. Hope you enjoy and find value in these discussions which will now begin. As reminder we will be taking audience questions and when could you just met yours at the button located at the bottom of your screen. Type in your questionable try to get to it toward the end of the broadcast. Todays briefing is from Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow at the hoover institution. Is focus that his focus is been military history. He has written or edited 24 books, the most recent is determined. Hes been awarded both the passion amenities metal and the prize, i would have it hanging around my neck 24 7. How how are you today . Very good. Thank you for having me. An interesting question before get into the policy side of things, a lot of us are watching this from Population Centers around the country, around the globe, cities and suburbs and excerpts. What we know the difference that is occurred in the past couple of weeks. Life is come to a standstill. You are come to us from a family farm, you are fifthgeneration farmer but you right now are about 15 miles outside of fresno i think. Im curious as to what difference you note in the Agriculture Community in this kind of situation . Well, i think there is a sense that life can go on and it will go on because agriculture by definition is, least the production side, is solitary existence. What im looking at her almonds or looking down at a great vineyard or plum orchard icy trucks going by constantly headed toward the coast or even the east coast with chickens and eggs and be, theres a sense that agriculture is really important. People are looking to it to make sure it is delivered to people who are sheltered at home. And that theres not as great a danger because of population density. As i said, Fresno County is a big county. Its got over a Million People, 1. 2 million weve had only a little over 100 cases and two guest. The of the role counties that i live near, kings county, kern county, they are analogous. They have far fewer cases per million residents and far fewer locality. So its not the feeling of being in battle that we had, say at Stanford University for the shutdown. Victor, here we are in the year 2020. Over half of the americans have been told to stay at home. Business and then told by government whose essential to his doctor people been told to keep their distance from each other and is no siebel into this. Maybe the end of april, maybe the end of may, june, july, wo knows when . If you go back and look at a virus that struck the United States in 1957, the hong kong flu, we could use a politically incorrect term back then called the hong kong flu, but the economy did not shut down in 1957 when we went through that string. If you go back to 1918, president Woodrow Wilson did not hold a daily press comforters to talk about the influenza epidemic. Congress did not do massive spending bills and response and economy did not come to a halt. Why are we doing things differently in 2020 . Theres a variety of reasons. One, is where much more technologically sophisticated interconnected population so we do it because we can do it. We had television and the way we are communicating over the internet right now. People want instant information. We are much more affluent population where we all do with dying in late 70s. That was a much more tragic society, the case of the socalled spanish flu during the war which would kill about 50 Million People, 60 million. Where people were used to a more physical existence and im speaking in this house thats been in my family for 145 years and they have kind of a history and i grew up hearing my grandparents talk about the 1918 flu and they quarantined themselves out here but they were completely selfsufficient. They had their own water, their own sewage, their own food and they just didnt go many places and there were many places to go. I remember the stories of my aunt who went out to swim once in 1922 at seven. She got polio and ended up over here in the corner crippled for the rest of her life. She stayed in the south until she died in the 1980s and i can remember the 1957 flu. I was four or five years old, thats one of my first memories that we had a tent in the house and a humidifier and were all sort of told to breathe this air so we wouldnt die and i remembered everybody but penicillin was a miracle drug so we had doctor mills and who would go out in a car and then we went out and roll up our sleeves and he gave us a shot and i dont know whether it helped for the virus. I know it didnt help the virus but we thought penicillin was still a magic drug. Today just come one after another in this situation and i get up in the morning and i have breakfast, i want to honor cuomo give his breathing. I watched gavin newsom if his breathing, i wantpresident trump to his breathing, each day seems to be a continuation of the past. You looked at societies and you times are looking at the question of discipline in the society, is there any model we should be looking at and for how long a country , especially a country that values civil liberty and freedom,how long can a society go on like this . When we been in similar situations, world war ii, if you remember the japanese internment and paranoia and came from sober and judicious and liberal minded leaders earl warren and fdr. They later regretted it but at the time there was a panic that gripped the nation. We look back fondly at the productive history of world war two, but that was not a sustainable situation to have that much of your gdpdevoted to military production. And i can tell you that if this thing continues, the way it charted by some of our modelers, the price will not just be economic, it will be in human lives because youre already starting to see even out here social breakdown. I can tell you within my circumference, there are people who are opening illegal barbershops out in the barn and of course, theres an illegal Daycare Center right down the street. Are canteens that are supposed to have takeout food and are serving food people sitting down. And i talk to a lot of people from a lot of different varieties of life and their attitude is like the 1950s. That life was okay. It wasnt great but im not going to destroy my childrens livelihood on the basis of some edictand im going to try to navigate around it. There are people who when you go to the store here and a person is told one paper towel or one toilet paper, and they walk out with you, the clerk is in a dilemma because she says if i dont, if i allow them to do it, they at least let me charge them and i can get the money from them but if i say only one, they will walk out with you and its my inner misdemeanor thats not going to be prosecuted so theres a frame of society and i think that because were such a diverse country and we have the same diversity as europe does, south dakota is not louisiana, Central Valley is not san francisco. New york is not north dakota or south dakota and we need to be more flexible and while the state allow the county to be more liberal in the way they adjudicate the perceived danger to their subset population. Victor, you mentioned models, university of washington has been doing a marble on this and revises numbers today. It now suggesting going to hit 80 mortality number this sunday which is good news, that means were coming to the pub in this thing and you are going to go downhill after that. Heres my question, there are one of two ways to look at that, either can you look at the glass halffull thing we made, we kept our distance and we are keeping this thing under control and conversely, people could look at this and say heres another example of if you want to use the phrase the news, lack of institutional confidence, scientists told us this is what happened and it didnt. Which of the studio think thats going to prevail, the half full or the half empty arguments. I hope is the halffull because theres a logic to the shutdown. If youre shutdown and youre getting get paid at least some of the population is and you feelthis is a sustainable proposition and youre not aware of the effects on other people and the selfemployed because your closedend , then you think that the numbers have to be ever increasingly more optimistic , you have to get not 2. 5 percent mortality rate but one percent or half a percent or youre not going to go out until its 99. 8 like a flu year, becomes a logic of its own and it drives reality so what im worried about is that we have to realize that is not a dichotomy between the economy and the coronavirus. Its between lives and the lives and were going to lose a lot of lives to suicide, substance abuse, anxiety and stress, neglected doctors appointments, neglected surgeries if we dont allow collectibility in people to go out and as far as the modeling goes, this is the first epidemic as a historian that i can think of when the modelers had no Accurate Information whatsoever about the denominator, the number of people who actually had it. And only based on those who are ill or feel exposed and took the effort to go get tested and most people believe and not a model in itself thats attentive the actual case numbers. Its important because then that adjudicate the lethality rate for caseloads and then people say well, it started out one percent, now its 2. 5. Oh my gosh. Its bound to go down when we have more data of people who have antibodies or inactive cases and even the numerator of the number of people dying is object to interpretation because a lot of people with physical issues and challenges are being listed as dying from the virus rather than with it so theres so much uncertainty and thats reflected in the inability of the modelers to be correct. Were not going to have to. 2 Million People die of Imperial College and meal service instead, i dont think the washington modelers would want to go back to their initial data. I dont think the modelers who convinced gavin newsom three weeks ago to say that by the end of this month 25 million californians will have a case of covid19 and given the lethality rate that would imply 1 million are going to die and i dont think mike inohio should have said on march 12 , that he thought hundred thousand people had an active case when in fact there were about 100 who had tested positive, maybe 500 that might have had. We said it was definitely every six days based on his commissioner or Health Directors modeling and that would give us today when he four days later 1. 6 million ohioans and probably 40,000 dead and as i look atthe statistics yesterday , they have a little over 100 dead and about 5000 cases so there is a downside to modeling. A modeling that we have to be careful that when you make a model is not going to say construct. It has consequences and so far im afraid the media as suggested the consequences are always good as the pessimist serves two purposes. The pessimist warns us what could happen and therefore we get a little hysterical and take the necessary measures and he said if i hadnt have done it you wouldnt have taken these measures and if hes right hes served a grim person who is accurate. The optimist suffers a lose lose situation, if he says modeler is exaggerating, the data is incomplete, when you found to be correct everybody says yes, but it was only because of the pessimist and people change their behavior at major investment possible and if hes wrong, given life and that they say the optimist will hear a murder because you said it wouldnt be as many dead and because of you, people were not cautious so we got to keep in mind the cited psychological landscape that these models are given. There are consequences when somebody tells western governments at 2. 2 million americans are likely to die. And that had a lot of ramifications. They didnt do that in larger. 1918, 1957 read a didnt, im not saying they didnt have the statistical knowledge to make these models or the data retrieval abilities but they didnt have confidence that they were all knowing and they didnt have computers and things like that so there were much more humble about their own data and the ramifications for public policy. So lets just tune in on bill weiland and this is over instituting virtual policy briefing Victor Davis Hanson youmentioned western government. Rahm emanuel, former mayor of chicago and before that bill clintons famous chief of staff said never let a serious crisis go to waste. Youve been watching government, watching whats going on in congress and watching what californias been doing a wide and locally. Tell us what you think government has done well in terms of this crisis but also what would alarm you in the way of Civil Liberties. For example, would you be concerned that maybe a state like rhode island which is upset that new yorkers are driving through it on the way to massachusetts, could we see a situation where a state wants to shut down its borders because it wants to keep people that are sent out . How far you think this will push us on Civil Liberties . Were in a flux right now because weve reacted as we did after pearl harbor very rapidly to a difficult situation which the Chinese Communist government lied about the nature of the birth of the virus, the transmission rate of the virus, the infectiousness of the virus. The spread of the virus. And those armed troops were echoed by the World Health Organization when we have a travel ban on january 31, the World Health Organization said it was unnecessary because you couldnt really transmit persontoperson as they said a couple weeks earlier. Given all that given all the acrimony and the cep test kits didnt work. People were told to wear masks, not to wear masks, were getting to a point where they are starting to emerge a consensus that what were doing now has reduced the infectiousness, but where were at a crux is this is not a sustainable situation and were going to have to either have regional choice that people can modify the protocol or we have to realize that if we dont get these antibody tests, we have no idea of the degree of immunity. So we will just go out and then we will start the infectious process again and we will be able to justify this six or 7 trillion kit in the eb economy i guess on the rationale where we gave us reading time, leading hospitals overcrowded and we have the medical system and with the second or third or fourth way but each time we shelter in the face and we dont get out, we dont develop herd mentality and go out again and again, the only rationale i can see being given is that we are buying time, either echoes or vaccinations but not a sustainable situation read cost to the economy and human lives eventually and i think eventually in terms of the days rather than months, persuade people that we dont have a choice to gradually be careful while wear masks, proper hygiene, dont go to a sports event maybe but otherwise youd better get back to work. Im running for the audience questions, youre listening to Victor Davis Hanson a senior of the hoover institute. If you want to learn more about his research please go to our website and that is hoover. Org. Now must take some audience questions, lets begin with kevin m who writes to victor quote, to my knowledge after any significant crisis such as war, the economy sees a postwar boom. In the interpretation that we are ina war with the state historical rule apply now . I think it will. Once youre in 1919 or 1946, or even happened after the war there was research i did earlier on in my career that showed all the pessimistic appraisals that athens was worn out were false, that what there was kind of a boom after the Peloponnesian War and the answer is that people feel they survived something and theyve been starved for social action or travel investments so that they indulge their appetite and even beyond what they did before the crisis, then economists can argue whether that makes up for the law or not but there are also some auxiliary criteria we should examine where we are reaching a point in the summer were going to have record low fuel prices so driving, getting in a plane would be very cheap in a way never been. We have almost 0 Interest Rate and you can argue we are making a fast redistribution of money from passholders used to three or four percent and theyre getting zero and that lost revenue is going to be given to people who borrow money by zero interest but whatever view you take, its going to be an economic stimulus and then you have the government. I guess the logic of the government as been that we lost six or 7 trillion of liquidity through the stock market and gdp and that was real money that disappeared and therefore if i can be so crude, neanderthal like and say they printed money but the infused cash into the system and they claim it will not be in place because this is replacing at least temporarily lost capital but the point of all that wendy to answer is that there are going to be stimuli after this crisis that i think will really accelerate and then whats really important is what was the situation before the crisis. World war ii there were a lot of people who said we had a second recession, depression almost in 38 and 39 where we had 16 percent unemployment. We had negative gdp and its going to be like that again and they were very worried but in our case we ran into this creating 7 million jobs so when we lost 7 million jobs where back to the status quote of 2000 16, 17 so we had a Strong Economy and that really was important. Victor, greg and chris have written variations on the same question just what is their relation going to look like with china moving forward, whats it going to looklike a year or two from now . Chinas success was on the following assumptions, that they were going to outsource wrote labor. You can outsource wrote labor to china and they were going to produce polity merchandise in a manner that was consistent with world norms and world mercantile and trade protocol. And when they didnt do that with dog food or drywall or pharmaceuticals and people said well, that was an abuse or that was an aberration didnt endanger the paradigms. And there was a nacvetc that said well, we can outsource our pharmaceutical industry to china because the richer it becomes, its going to become more liberalized. We have 360,000 students. We have 20,000 people flying in four days. They are becoming liberalized and that someday shanghai and taking, beijing are going to look like paris and san francisco, thats inevitable. It will be democratic and liberal minded. Thats not going to happen and the reputation of china was destroyed during this and now i think the general global perception is when is the next coronavirus number, not two but three coming out of wuhan and when will it get nine, 10 hours to san francisco, los angeles, paris . Theyve lost their International Credibility because they lied about every aspect of the virus. They contaminated the World Health Organization, its lost its credibility and i dont think its going to be a sustainable proposition for an American Company to produce ampicillin only in china. I think its going to have connotations that they are not national or nationalistic or patriotic and those wont be dirty words like they were in the past so i think things are going to change and thats why the chinese are so worried, theyre engaged in this Propaganda Campaign that they weathered the virus better than anybody, but there helping other countries because their International Reputations are at rockbottom. Victor edward writes how the effects of the pandemic changed our relationship with our treaties with other nations . Meaningare they redefined with changing partners . Obviously people are starting to look at things in a different way and one of them is taiwan. We always thought lets just not talk about taiwan that we know their democratic and they play by the rules but theyre small and they endanger our relationship with this rich and growing 1. 4 billion person china but now we look at it and we say a play by all the rules. They were transparent. A protective population. They allow people to voice dissension. They are a model of what china should have been and why in the world do we have to feel guilty about our support for taiwan . I think the same is true of japan and south korea so i see a lot of those countries being far more afraid than they were before the crisis of china and far more amenable to a closer relationship with the United States and in terms of your, its a little bit more problematic because we were economical as them under the you e guidelines was a model, almost as it model in the west will be a Transnational Organization that runs on social sort of Solar Wind Power and relies on soft power and has no borders. They shed young agreement and within a nanosecond during this early crisis the borders closed and for a while germany and other countries in the north were not willing to sendmedical supplies to the south. We had this sort of anti eu created a country where people were dying with no money couldnt get money and people who had money whenthey were not dying as much. And you add all of that together with the preexisting fissures in the eu, the north south financial crisis with spain and italy and greece, the eastwest overimmigration with former Eastern Europe countries , brexit and funding of the alliance, i think the eu hastaken a big hit. I dont know you call, you call the president of the eu and does he speak foritaly or greece . Does hespeak for germany . They havent ordered that. And i think theres going to be a lot of pressure on the eu to revert more to a model of the original european common market, to stop trade barriers, encourage free trade within european nations but dont have a eu and strasburg trying to tell a person how many inches a banana has to be to be a banana. That type of open so i think is spread. Victor corey has aquestion for you. You think this will create a generation similar to the golden generation and will this crisis affect the toughness of our current generation . When we talk about the greatest generation, we characterize that by 2 seminal experiences. They went through a depression from 1929 to 1939. That was a decade and they fought a war that cost the world 70 Million People and almost 500 thousand americans. I dont see this crisis lasting as long as those who crisis or taking as much life , its a much smaller population but what i think it will do is give a joyce of reality to the average american in this sense. Theres an existential fact of life that when you get up in the morning, whether youre going to live the next day depends on the food you get, the water you drank. The sewage thats disposed and the fuel that warms your apartment so right now, what is important to you is not Michael Bloomberg financing chinese companies, half of whom were communist to get the western liquidity for them to be viable and to get a big cut out of it and then to lecture us chinas a consensual society or farmers dont have enough lay matter and they dont have the technical skill of people like herself area that is irrelevant larry, in fact its less than irrelevant, its dangerous even the nacvetc of that thinking that empowered the chinese are and what we want our people who know how to drop something in the ground Michael Bloomberg said was easy. It takes a lot of gray matter and where do you eat tomorrow in manhattan depends on somebody over here in hanford getting the crop to market and a trucker from bakersfield driving all night and then a stock boy working at that supermarket so i think theres going to be a much greater respect and honor for muscular labor and for people who we felt were the losers of globalization. They didnt know how to code didnt understand was a global market. Youre going to see if you want a ventilator or you want a pharmaceutical or you want a head of lettuce, youre going to rely on an america that maybe you didnt think was that important to the Global Economy and you thought the Global Economy was everything when it turned out when you look at the Global Economy, whether it was eu model or the World Health Organizations help for you or chinas role in it, it wasnt too good and what was good was the guy driving all night on the interstate and the guy out there working on a potato harvester or the young kid thats willing to go into the Grocery Store and stand there with 1000 customers every day to be exposed and sell you things so i think thats going to be very positive. I like to remind the audience Victor David Hanson has written a lot of remarkable books, one of which was published in 2017 called the Second World War or the first global conflict was fought and won and i mentioned that because it ties into the next question which comes from kevin and he writes and you draw a comparison to the dark days of world war ii in terms of combat deaths and how the leader acted in a better job of communicating with the public about sacrifices required then and now and how we can better carry on today. I think so. What was the secret to roosevelts success is that he had yet that the cities i treated you pericles, they call it foresight though he wakes up on september 8 and he told mister roosevelt, the zero is a much better plane than anything we have, its better than the wine wildcat or the p 40 and our torpedoes are substandard , the long torpedo is deadly and they have more carriers in the pacific that we do and bythe way , they are just about ready to take over all european orphan colonies whether its indonesia, theyve alreadytaken over Southeast Asia , theyre going to take over singapore, you cannot save the philippines and roosevelt was able to say yes but this is what the United States was capable in world war i we took 2 Million People in a year and a half and landed them in france without losing one in the middle of the world epidemic. And we eventually produced more munitions and did our allies put together in france and britain we can do that again this will be an answer for the unused capacity. You knew that and he was able to nurse us along as americans and say this is what were going to do in midway. He never said midway was the end of the war, he said basically is at the end of the beginning and there are going to be more and more facts but as we proceed where on a learning curve and we have more assets. What a strange country that we are fighting in 1939, 1940 whether we can build a two bit carrier like the loss or the hornet thats about 18, 15 to 19,000 tons and suddenly we wake up in 42 and say by the way, were producing 27 fleet carriers, each one 30 percent better than the lost and were going to pay for it and everybody says are you going to pay for it and we say everybody else on home and now theyre working 20 hours a day and creating real wealth and were going to build 1p 24 every hour at willow run and by the way, were going to invent a new b29 and has 50,000 new parts in the cockpit alone and its just a different attitude. The confidence and i think thats what we have to do ever after we get used to this virus and what weve done, it will be time to go out and convert and im amazed at all these people that we thought had lost the american spirit, experimenting with ventilators, experimenting with off label drugs. Theyre in a competition to see which person can get the vaccination first. Its going to happen like that and its Pretty Amazing and i just went down to a market and i was talking to a guy and said how long have you been here and he said, ive been six hours and i said youre going to be done and he says no, i have eight more hours and i said are you going to get the virus . He says i dont know, theyre going to put a plastic barrier tomorrow. This is 90 days into it and rather than downing everybodys looking forward to it so theres a lot of peoplethat still have that. From that generation. We have a question from donna who writes youd fan of vdh, i live in california and considering the homelessness in california why is california not ended up like new york we probably had since the fall based on flulikesymptoms, is this possible . Thats a very goodquestion and here at Stanford University , john and Michael Leavitt and a number of epidemiologists and statisticians are trying to figure that out because it does not makesense. We have half of the nations unless, of 150 280,000 lives. We had one third of all of the nations people in public assistance. One out of every three californians was admitted to hospital as diabetes or prediabetes which is a risk factor of covid19. We have the lowest number of nurses per hundred thousand population, lowest number of doctors. We have the lowest number of almost in the nation for thousand population. With 20 percent of the population below the poverty level, 27 percent were not born in the United States. You put all that together and people look at california and they said its not in a situation to resist an epidemic and more importantly , lax, sfo, san diego, san jose happy direct flights from china ringing in five, six, 7000 today of the 15 to 20,000 in the United States. 23 direct flights in this tranny from sfo alone to and from wuhan and so people thought wow, its going to be terrible. Gavin newsom release go said 25 Million People are going to have the virus. That would mean 1 milliondead. Were a little bit halfway over his predictions. I dont think are going to have 25 million dead, you will have 75,000, really hundred 70,000 so Everyone Wants to know what happened . Was it californias warmer . Not really, the south is warmer at this time of the year and their suffering area and its because were less dense than new york . Maybe why we have twice the population of new york and 1 10 the death toll or 1 20 or 1 30 and a lot of people thought lets look at this a different way. Maybe that flew that he got and the flu that she got and in november and maybe november, december and january and february, they were exposed to the first wave and while we didnt get hurt immunity, we got a lot of people, maybe 10 or 15 percent of the population got that flew that the cdc said was not influenza a, flu shots did not work on it. And it might not have been the flu. We were told we had 16 outbreaks of influenza even though the cdc did not test very many of them. All we were told is those that did get tested, it was not influenza a, it might have been be what im getting at is a desperate explanation of the inexplicable and for those who say we had shelter in place, the day that the governor and about, within two days it was 10 other state and in three days new york did so i dont think, i think it was helpful but i dont think explains california paradox and we dont know what the answer is but hopefully with this new Antibody Testing from the stanford doctors we will know very quickly. Kenneth want you to break out your crystal ball. He says question, what effect will this crisis have on the november elections both president and congress. One angle we can pursue is what the trump now have to calibrate his message but also joe biden because you look at the history of challengers who knock off incumbents, they dont get the job by saying would have, would have. They have to offer agendas of their own so how do you think this affected the election . Whether we like it or not, this virus has been weapon eyes and by that i need every decision is massaged or modulated in the media. Either for or against trump. For the hard left they see it in the manner increasingly that it will do what Robert Mueller and impeachment did not. In other words it will show the world what they had been claiming all along that trump is an act, and the economy , his only signature issue they feel will crash and then they will win. And the right says this was an existential threat but its probably not the existential threat that killed 116 in 1957 or maybe not even in 2017 killed 60,000. We can handle it. Weve got to get back quicker and the economy willrecover in time for the election. Whether they like to admit that with the arithmetic of debt thats what is and that colors almost everything that a person says so i never thought we get to level politicization when a president says the antimalarial blood seems to work and we have anecdotal evidence the cdc is taking this seriously, theyre going to test and then that becomes an either from was inspired and save lives or from was a quack, doctor trump will kill people but thats the level ofpolitical discourse to send it to. And joe biden i think he thought that it seemed logical. He had moments of feebleness on the campaign trail, he did well against Bernie Sanders and that last debate and people thought joe will go back to his home, no rest and then he will do an fdr fireside chat and its antithesis to the daily rambunctious trump and his sobriety will impress. Well he started off, prompting and then ad hoc and and step temporary and then he tried both and neither work. So he didnt provide at least in tempo and comportment and assurance and anecdote trump, but more importantly, he started with a false premise that trump had rejected all this medical advice. Antiscience, just like he doesnt believe in global warming, will do the same thing but trump has accepted almost all the recommendations from science and thats what biden put an untenable situation to disagree with from my extension is disagreeing with science. Trump issues a travel ban on january 31 against all of the suggestions of china, the World Community and World Health Organization and some of his own advisors like Anthony Fauci had switched. Immediately biden feels he did that, i have to be against that so he says that was racist, not what it was referring to but all of a sudden it works. It stops the 20,000 coming and then the next day trump has a ban against africa because they were having connecting flights and 10 days later europe connecting flights, biden mumbles we cant have that either and then hes in a dilemma. How to explain that i criticized something that i now endorsed . Well, he used the word chinese virus, thats what i meant. Now hes saying iwould have had the band , or i would have done earlier what does that mean . If President Biden would have said i dont want to be seen in public and racist so im going to stop all Chinese People coming and i will call them chinese. It gets into the fantastical and the surreal so what he needs to do is just be an miracle. Look at trump and whentrump does something well , or his advisor rejects that advice and he says i would do the same thing and in the long run he would do as well as his attack on every single thing that trump does and the same thing about criticizing biden. Hed lose his train of thought, his sentence structure but sometimes hes very clear. So people cant say well, hes demented. They can say he has bouts of it and they seem to be increasing but you dont want to say hes cant string together a sentence because sometimes it can read youve got to be empirical about all these things if you can. We have one last question and it comes from timothy. He writes doctor hansen, i am reading your book and you how the opinions of treachery and pull back from defending their farmland in response to the spartans. The strategy to ride out the war. At appear to be an unsustainable strategy , how do we convince americans that they cant rely on government handouts longterm, im not trying to restart the economy. Its a good point and i think the questioner is worried that we are creating a culture that we did not intend. At the longer that americans shelter and told and the longer that we havesome compensation , we will lose the cause and effect relationship that you go out and work and then that creates capital and money and when you stay home youre not creating goods and services. You and the country at large are impoverished and you cant just print money so you create a culture of complacency and you get a fear of the virus. What you want is a sense of defiance. Youre going to say as soon as we get these antibodies testing were going to see if this virus does not kill three out of every hundreds, it probably kills one or two and of every thousand and if its like the flu we went through 2009 and 2017 flu, our grandparents and our parents survived in 57 and thats what were going to do and we will just keep this interest, not go back into it. At the attitudeyouve got to have. Im worried the longer we get into this attitude , the more complacent we become and the more timid, more strident we become and you can start to see it when i start to see certain areas that i go out to, people are even though the rates of death have not met the modelers pessimistic expectations people are becoming more pessimistic because the media focuses on the young man was 22 years old and it suddenly died in three days rather than the person that was much more typical, 86 and had congestive Heart Failure and diabetes and thats this terrifying rare exception that you sensationalize in a way that the normal tragic caseload does not. So i think we have to be that way but we have to let counties and states adapt and to be fluid as you mentioned and then that will create conflict in optimism. If we hear a governor or a bold mayor or a bold county board say were going to be hygienic, social distancing, masks but were going to go out and work and others will follow suit and we will have a chain reaction. Ive enjoyed this conversation and im certain the audience has as well. This is your policy briefing though its only fitting that you get the final word. All i can say is that weve all been here before. Weve dealt with it in 57, weve dealt with it in 2009 , 2017 and 18. I know the experts tell us that a coronavirus is different because it has the potential to be much more infectious and much more lethal but were not the same people wewere in 2009 or even 17. We proceed at a geometric rate as well. We are better connected, we have better information, more medical protocols and we have a worldwide nobel prize race to find not just a vaccination but an effective anecdote and i think geometrically were Getting Better than the virus and we should be confident about that. Thanks so much for a great conversation. Hears some of the current bestselling Nonfiction Book according to washington dcs politics and prose bookstore. The list is jill lyons reflection on her legal career in role of the watergate case as an assistant federal prosecutor in the watergate girl. And in counterpoint, pulitzer prizewinning critic Philip Kennicott weighs in on johan box music and after that is Global Optimism cofounders christina figaro and tom karnik spots on Climate Change in the future of humanity in the future we choose. Thats followed by the splendid and the file, eric larsons study of Prime Minister Winston Churchills leadership during the london blitz and wrapping up our look at some of the bestselling Nonfiction Books in politics and prose bookstore is supreme inequality, former New York Times Editorial Board member alan collins analyzation of how the Supreme Court has become more conservative over the last 50 years. Some authors have appeared on book tv and you can watch them online at brexit booktv. Org and starting in just a minute, former reserve chair ben bernanke played a central role in the handling of the 2008 financial crisis and weighs in on actions the fed is taking to mitigate the impact of covid19. After that cspan visits College Station texas to talk with local authors and later Christopher Milton recounts the migration of millions of people to florida in the 1920s. Check your Program Guide for more information. Good morning or afternoon, Glenn Hutchins here, welcome to what i prove will hope will be an insightful session with ben bernanke and david wessel. When the financial crisis hit in 2008 and been bernanke was fed chair,