too big, too small or just the right size? i'll talk to two of the world's foremost economists, larry summers and paul krugman. then, what is the quad? president biden met with the leader of japan, india and australia, a new block focused on deterring china. will it work? i'll talk to an expert. and the biotech revolution brought us to the covid 19 vaccines more swiftly than anyone imagined possible. it is given us the ability to edit genes to cure diseases and the innovations on the horizon are even more extraordinary. i will ask walter isaacson to describe what is next. but first, here is my take. within hours of being inaugurated, president biden began to roll back donald trump's most egregious immigration policies including the so-called muslim ban which biden called a stain on our national conscience. he signed six actions geared toward a more humane and generous policy and outlined a proposal for comprehensive immigration reform including a path to citizenship for more than 10 million undocumented migrants living and working in america. the biden administration has begun the work of reversing literally hundreds of other rules, regulation and fees put in place by trump all designed to make it harder for foreigners at every stage of the process, from tourists to immigrants, to enter or stay in the united states. unfortunately, all these vital efforts could be undermined by decisions that are producing a new immigration crisis on america's southern border. in recent years, hundreds of thousands of central americans have tried to enter the united states to ask for asylum. the trump administration initially used cruel tactics including separating children from parents and putting them in cages. but eventually arrived at a practical policy. it stopped taking in asylum-seekers at the so southern border, forcing them to wait in mexico for cases to be resolved and negotiated agreements to send people back to central america to seek asylum in a neighboring country rather than in the united states. now biden has overturned those policies and that combined with expectations of a more generous approach to immigration have contributed to the surge of migrants. nearly 180,000 people have arrived at the southern border or tried to cross illegally in 2021. more than double as many as in the first two months of 2020. these numbers will increase as it gets warmer. officials at the border are already overwhelmed. there has been a mueller reportly large surge of unaccompanied children, probably the result of a biden decision to create an exception to them to a trump rule barring migrants on health grounds. as of friday, they were scrambling to find places to house some 4,000 children languishing at border patrol stations anlds looking at an airfield and an army base, the truth is the asylum system is out of control. the concept of asylum dates to the years after world war ii when the united states created a separate path to legal status for those who feared religious, ethnic or political persecution. a noble idea born in the shadow of america's refusal to take in the jews in the 1930s. it was used sparing. applying to cases of extreme discrimination. but the vast majority of people entering the southern border are traditional immigrants fleeing poverty and violence. this is a sad situation, but it does not justify giving them special consideration above others around the world who seek to come to the united states for similar reasons but go through the normal process. trump already smells blood. having been elected in 2016 in some large measure because of fears about the illegal immigration, he's already attacking biden on this issue. it dominated his speech at cpac last month, where he said with his usual hyperbole -- >> joe biden has triggered a mass of flood of illegal immigration into our country the likes of which we have never seen before. >> last week he claimed many people were criminals and covid carriers. the tragedy is that is this border crisis and trump's demagoguery around it could hinder biden's efforts to achieve reform of the whole system. asylum-seekers make up a small minority of immigrants. there is a much larger group that -- those that want to reunite with families. these immigrants and would-be immigrants now face a hostile environment than at any point since the united states ended quotas in 1965. you could see it in the numbers with pandemic restrictions on top of everything else, immigration to the united states has plunged to levels not seen in four decades. some of the world's best and brightest are now choosing to good to more hospitalal countries, from canada to britain to australia. without immigration, the united states fey faces a dire demographic future. it means fewer people and fewer young people which would mean less growth, less dynamism and less opportunity everyone. that is the real immigration crisis, not the one at the southern border. go to cnn.com/fareed for a link to my column this week. and let's get started. ♪ >> i believe and i believe most people do as well, this historic legislation is about rebuilding the backbone of this country and giving people in this nation, working people, middle class folks, people of both of the country a fighting chance. >> reporter: that was prieb on thursday just before signing the $1.9 trillion covid relief bill into law. it was passed, it should be noted, without a single republican vote despite shows polls that it had support of around two-thirds of all americans. to make sense of it all are two of the world's mest distinguished economist, paul krugman is now a columnist for "the new york times," larry summers was treasury secretary under president clinton and director of national economic council under president obama. paul, let me ask you, what is the headline here of how we would describe this bill? how do you think it will go down in history? what i'm struck about it i think in my adult lifetime this is the first major fiscal policy where the benefits go primarily to the poor. >> yeah. this is definitely -- i can't think of anything like this. maybe if you have to go back to the new deal to see anything like this. you certainly don't see -- we don't have a fiscal expansion on this scale, a spending expansion on this scale, you have to go back to the korean war to find anything about that magnitude and that was during a war and this is concentrated into the bottom half and the bottom 20% of the income distribution. >> larry, you have dealt with the politics of this kind of thing, both under the obama and the clinton years and i'm thinking the obama stimulus which got not a single republican vote. what do you think the calculus of republicans is here? two-thirds of the country seems to approve it. what is going on? >> i'm not going to try to speak for republicans, fareed. look, there is a historic achievement in reducing child poverty in this fiscal stimulus. it is cost is about 7% of the total. i think the concern about this bill is that its sheer scale, the economy needs a lot of energy but if you put too much water in the bathtub, it starts to overflow. as i look at this bill, we're just trying to pour too much water in and i wish it were actually true that even a third of the money was going to people who were in poverty. most of it is not. most of it is going to the middle of the population and it is going in one shot transfers, not in things that are ultimately going to build and strengthen the economy. and that is why as much as i admire the effort and as i much as i admire the progress against poverty, i am worried that the sheer scale is going to crowd out our doing what we need to do to compete with china, to build back better the president's principal aspiration and i'm worried this will lead us to difficulty down the road as inflation picks up and the fed has to respond. >> paul, you you've described this as a different from a stimulus, more like war-time spending. and i was wondering how you would respond to that, which is that it was the war-time spending of the vietnam war that conventional wisdom holds that led to the runaway inflation of the 1970s. >> yeah. first of all, there were a lot of other things that happened in -- to lead to that inflation. and it also took many years of sustained irresponsible policy to get us to the stagnation of the '70s which we think we remember but more is a myth than analogy. a korean war was a brief huge expansion of spending. which did lead to a fair bit of inflation for one year. and but not to sustained inflation. so it wasn't actually, it turned out to not to be a big problem and it is not nearly on that scale. so far what it is worth, there is a lot of other people who are actually in the business of making forecasts who think that this is a -- this is a big bill. and there is a lot of stim us. even if it is mostly about stimulus but it will not cause a massive overheating. i could be wrong and larry could be right but the consensus view is not one that is raising alarm bells about the scale of this bill. >> and larry -- >> i'm not so sure, paul. first of all, interest rates in the first quarter of this year current trends continue will have risen by more than the first quarter of any year in the last century except for 1980. so markets are sending a pretty clear signal of concern. second, you cut things off in the fourth quarter. if we have an economy that is rapidly growing and is above potential, the inflation could well materialize in 2022. third, look at the -- look carefully at the magnitude of this stimulus. we're talking about something that is on the order of 14% of gdp, and people like you, people like me, most economists until very recently thought that when you have a dollar of stimulus, it added about a dollar or more to gdp, and if that works out, any time in the next two or three years, we're going to have a problem which is what markets are recognizing. >> so paul, let me ask you just about the size. because it is not just this -- this bill, right? if you add the two previous bills passed under the trump administration we're at 30% of gdp. is there some point at which you would get worried? >> i'm not going say -- look, if this is designed as a stimulus, designed to get maximum bang for buck then we would be getting numbers that might be a concern. but it wasn't. and my take on it is that biden is going to be in a position to say, hey, look, we got a blooming economy, a bunch of you have gotten checks, government could do lots of good and that he'll be in a strong political position to do what needs to be done to invest in the future. larry's view is it is going to be inflation taking off, oh, my god, big government is a villain, biden is the rein cornation of jimmy carter who is still alive and that is the problem. of course, larry could be right. but that is not what my numbers say is likely to happen. it is not what the private forecasters think are going to happen. and we'll just -- unfortunately, pretty much, this is a done deal. so now we're just going to see what really actually happens. >> next on gps, does this new role represent the most important piece of domestic policy legislation since the new deal? or the war on poverty? the debate continues when we come back. 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>> i don't think -- think we've used up a lot of space and particularly economic space on this bill. it just defied belief that you could commit $2 trillion to a program that contains no public investment and not have less capacity to put -- for public investment than if you have not made a commitment of that magnitude. i just don't find it plausible. and i think we're taking very substantial risks. it would have been much better to have talked about large sums like this, but to have talked about things that would help us compete with the chinese, that would talk about things that would help us prepare children for the 21st century, that would help us save the planet rather than what we've done here which is make transfer payments in virtually every direction. and, yes, when we do that to the poorest people, that is exactly right. but some of the transfer payments we've made i think are quite misguided. for example, i believe strongly in unemployment insurance, but i do not believe in a program where the majority of unemployment insurance recipients are getting considerably more money than they got when they were working. i think full insurance is enough, insurance past that point is too much. and that in a way is emblematic of why i'm concerned about what this program is going to do to the economy. >> paul, i wanted to ask you, there was an interesting column by steve prostein, "the washington post" economic columnist, i think it was his final column and he said that he -- i think he's a pretty straightforward liberal but he said i worry a lot about a new liberal orthodoxy that says deficits don't matter, debt doesn't matter, you can borrow as much as you want, spending always pays for itself and i think he was suggesting it as m mirror image view that you've criticized of republicans, the tax cuts pay for themselves. can one just borrow unendingly, are you not worried? >> no. is it possible to have a spending program that is too big. are the things that larry is worried might happen as a result of this plan, are those things that can happen? definitely. if i'm okay with $1.9 trillion but if someone had come along and said let's do $4 trillion this year, then i would say, oh, that is inflationary. that is too far. but the really important thing i think, if we're trying to think about this future, is that this is a short-term, this is a crisis response. it is a rescue plan. it is very front-loaded. >> larry, you get the final word. >> here is the irony fareed. there is a lot that is good in this program. but i think it is advocates try to have it both ways. on the one hand, when a concern about inflation is raised, it explained that it is emotionally temporary and transient and just a relief program and really just a special one-year thing. on the other hand, most of the time they're explaining how it is the most fundamental revolution in american policy since the new deal and you can't really have it both ways. you can either have long-term transformation, or you could have temporary action. and what i would have liked to see more is a program of this scale or larger that was paid for and was focused on investment and contained the necessary relief. this program goes vastly beyond, as my unemployment insurance example illustrates, what was necessary to provide relief and it doesn't, with the exception of the childcare anti-poverty thing which is very important, it doesn't really do much that either represents a revolution in social investment or in social policy, or revolutionary investment in the future of our country. and i think that is something that we're going to look back on and regret. not that we did something. but that we were more careful and calibrated in the design of what we did. >> we are going to have to leave it at that and obviously we'll watch what happens and perhaps have the two of you back to do a midterm analysis. thank you very much. paul krugman and larry summers. >> thank you. next on "gps", china is worried president biden might be forming a exclusive clique with the leaders of three nations he met with on friday. what is all this about? 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>> well, i think this does present a little bit of a problem for the quad members because they want to portray the organization as a grouping, a so-called diamond of democracies as it has been called. but i think that it is not exactly like the cold war. because there are things that the group could do together and part of whole impot us behind the quad frankly has been a effort to get india to be more active in the east asia region, a bigger contributor to global public goods. so i think the quad could work on those issues. of course, india is a democracy, even with problems. i think we can probably allow that a lot of countries have problems, even though they are democracies. so i think these will present some tensions that will need to be worked around. but it shouldn't come into some kind of conflict overall with the efforts of the group to work on the the issues that they spelled out in their meeting on friday which are really about kind of transnational issues. so the public face of the quad wants to be about kind of attacking these transnational issues, climate change, the pandemic, technology issues, the hidden sem bolism of course is against china. i think they'll be able to work that balance going forward. >> and finally, let me ask you, we don't have a lot of time, but have you been struck by the fact that on china, the biden administration's policies seem more continuation of donald trump's than a significant departure from them? >> it's not unexpected, i would say. they're kind of trying to assess where they want to go on china. we have this meeting coming up next week between tony blinken and jake sullivan and their counterparts in china and i think that will be basically an airing of frustrations for sure on both sides. but what we've really got to do is restart diplomatic communication. president biden has talked about coming to china from a position of strength and now that they've met with the quad grouping, and tony blinken is meeting in northeast asia and japan and korea before the meeting with the chinese which is good to come to this meeting and i think although there are some airing of frustrations, what we need to do is sort of look to a future, you know, road map or way of sitting down and looking at sort of the issues of problem areas and the issues of cooperation, and working out how we're going to start up communication and actual practical work with china on some of these irritants that have been plaguing the relationship. and i think that the biden administration is going to be able to make this shift. there is so much issues on the plate and a lot of them are very thorny so it is taking time to iron them out. but of course the relationship with china is going to continue to be quite contested and quite competitive. but i think the biden team is looking to balance that out a bit with constructive cooperation on areas that are really challenging and where we need china to be at least collaborating with the rest of the world. >> susan thornton, pleasure to have you on. thank you. >> thank you. when we come back, walter isaacson on the next great scientific revolution. s routine. centrum helps your immune defenses every day, with vitamin c, d and zinc. season, after season. ace your immune support, with centrum. what happens to your body language when your underarms are cared for? 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a backache. consider pain, delivered. pain says you can't. advil says you can. before we talk about tax-smart investing, what's new? -well, audrey's expecting... -twins! grandparents! we want to put money aside for them, so...change in plans. alright, let's see what we can adjust. ♪ we'd be closer to the twins. change in plans. okay. mom, are you painting again? you could sell these. lemme guess, change in plans? at fidelity, a change in plans is always part of the plan. ♪ for every idea out there, that gets the love it should ♪ ♪ there are 5 more that don't succeed ♪ lemme guess, change in plans? ♪ and so are lost for good ♪ ♪ and some of them are pretty flawed ♪ ♪ and some of them are slightly odd ♪ ♪ but many are small businesses that simply lack the tool ♪ ♪ to find excited people who will stop and say 'that's cool'♪ ♪ and these two, they like this idea ♪ ♪ and those three like that one.♪ ♪ and that's 'cause personalized ads ♪ ♪ find good ideas for everyone ♪ just over a year ago, on march 11th, 2020, the w.h.o. declared covid-19 a pandemic. only nine months later, a british grandmother became the first person to get the pfizer vaccine outside of clinical trials. the biotech revolution is one of the main factors that allowed scientists to move at that kind of warp speed. walter isaacson books focused on steve jobs and albert einstein and now in the code breaker, jennifer dard gnaw and gene editing. welcome, walter. you talk about the three great scientific -- pleasure. you talk about the three great scientific revolutions that have taken place in the last 100 years. the first one, the kwabts um revolution where people help us understand what is underneath the atom. the second the information revolution that helps us organize all information into bits and bytes. the third, the biotech revolution. explain what that means and will it be as far-reaching as the first two? >> i think it le definitely more far reaching than the first two because it means we could code molecules the way we code microchips and code things like telling a molecule, create this spike protein in this human cell so we could have an immunity against a coronavirus. or we could code a molecule to say cut dna at this spot so we could get rid of a genetic disease and down the road we could say, hey, let's edit in some dna we want so we could design our children to have certain traits that might make them safer or healthierar go down a path that we may not want to go down which is enhancing our children in ways that harm the species. so these are going to be moral issues we have to face but it is also a beautiful story of adventure about the wonders of nature. >> at the center of the story, and i know the heroes have been on the show many times, but it is really rna. the somewhat neglected sibling of dna. explain why rna, which is really the way human life began, the replication, why is susan thornton -- why is it so important and explain to viewers. >> yes. when jennifer was a young girl in sixth grade she got the double helix which is the account of dna and she said i'm going to do the same with rna. dna is the famous sibling, the one that gets on the magazine covers. but rna, like sort of the siblings of famous siblings is the one that does the real work. what rna does is it go news the nucleus of the cell and acts as a messenger to bring it to the outer region of a cell where we create proteins or every other cell in our body. and so with that messenger function, it is the one that says, hey, build this hair follicle or this neuron or this hormone. so it does real work. it doesn't sit there in the nucleus curating information and that is how we put it to work to doo the pfizer and the moderna vaccines. we've never seen vaccines like that. but they reprogram the rna and say tell ourselves to build a tiny fragment of the spike protein that the coronavirus has and that makes it really safe and really fast. and here is the really important thing, it means you could recode it. if the coronavirus tries to evade us by mutating or having variants as it is doing and it gets much different, you just type in a new code as if you were cutting and pasting a document or reprogramming a website. >> so in a sense, what it has done is it has taken the making of vaccines which used to be a bespoke process, you have to find the strain of the vaccine or the spike protein and put it in and it is turned it into sending an email into the body and saying, hey, this is what you should be looking for to fight? >> exactly, fareed. that is why we call it messenger rna. instead of having to create weakened forms of a virus and take six or severn or eight years and there is safety issues there, you could do this by typing in a new code. they did it in three or four weeks when bio n tech and pfizer and moderna were working together on it and it shows what jennifer dowden has done throughout her life is to say this miracle molecule of rna could do two of three things. it could act as a messenger, an email telling ourselves to build this protein, it could act as a guide where you could attach it to an enzyme and say cut the dna right here and that is called the crisper system. we borrowed that from bacteria. they've been fighting viruses for more than a billion years. and there is so much more to do to fight cancer and jet genetic diseases and to do detection technology so we'll have these home kits that use this crisper technology to say you don't have coronavirus, you have a strep throat or the cancer cells are resurging or the wrong type of yoga, your giet biome is not doing well and that will bring biology into our homes and jennifer dowden and her companies are working on this, it will bring biology into our homes the way the computer brought miko chip news our homes. >> a chinese doctor tried a very ambitious strategy with gene editing where he decided he was going to take twins and make sure that they never got aids. what was wrong with that idea. >> what he did was he crossed a line that we've been reluctant to cross. because the edits in the human body, like stopping sickle cell anemia, if you do it in sperms, they become inheritable. not only the patients have it but it is passed down and we've tried to draw the line until the chinese doctor did it. so people were appalled. but now that we've been hit with the coronavirus, people are saying, wait a minute, what is wrong with editing our species so we're less susceptible to viruses. it is interesting with tony blinken and jake sullivan meeting with their chinese counterparts on thursday, they have been working on this international group of scientists with the europes and the americans and british and they put that doctor in jail and made it so we don't do inheritable edit and they're working together internationally, the chinese and the united states, on rules of the road for jen editing. so when they are there meeting their counterparts, they'll have a whole list of things to fight over. and also, fareed, you have a list of places you could cooperate. that is the way day taunt works during the cold war and gene editing should be on the top of that list. >> we've got 30 seconds. i want to you give the last word to david in your book who had sickle cell anemia was asked would he like his genes to be edited and tell us what he said. >> you know, it is a provoking -- thought provoking thing. he's doubled over with sickle cell. a 17-year-old boy, whenever he plays basketball, they say we could cure it in future generations and he said, that is great but maybe that should be up to the kid. and they say why. it forged me and made more more compassionate and i had empathy for other people because i went through it. so when we fiddle with the human race, we have to make sure we keep those compassion and empathy and that we don't sort of say, all right, we're going to end all diversity in society. i was so touched by that 17-year-old, i think he's the best buyo edgestist in my book. >> always a presidenture to read anything you write. we'll be right back. >> thank you so much. psst! psst! allergies don't have to be scary. spraying flonase daily stops your body from overreacting to allergens all season long. psst! psst! you're good. dave! do you remember when we kicked you out of the band for recommending the general for our car insurance? 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some of the causes may be obvious, according to harvard physician michael barnett, the pandemic was a perfect storm for substance abuse. the laockdowns, increases feelings of isolation and despair. these stressors are some of the key triggers for substance abuse. economic downturn is also also proven to exacerbate mental health crisis and people are using drugs alone, so in the event of an opioid overdose, there is no one to administer the antidote drug nall ax own or to call 911. there are also more structural causes for the spike. it doesn't just trigger substance abuse in individuals, they also restrict the programs designed to help those suffering. across the board states have cut budgets for social services, for treatments and medical training. in a september survey, 52% of community mental health organizations reported that demand for their services has increased but at the same time, 26% have had to lay off staff and 54% have had to shut down programs. now trump's cares act of march 2020 and with this week, they will help with substance abuse programs but experts say they don't begin to fill the gaping hole created by the recession. there are some small measures of hope. first the new covid relief bill incen incentivized further expansion of medicaid which is responsible for 40% of all opioid addiction treatments. further, the medications to treat these addictions have become easier to access thanks to loser restrictions and expanded telehealth. many medical experts hope these changes will last past the pandemic. that even when life returns to normal, drug treatments will have shifted forever. but my worry is that the new normal in america has become an increased use dependence and abuse of these dangerous drugs. this is one more of the deep and long-lasting scars left by the pandemic and the lockdowns. thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. i'll see you next week. plant-based surfactants like the ones in seventh generation detergent trap stains at the molecular level and flush them away. it's just science! just... science. seventh generation tackles stains. woman: i have moderate to severe plaque psoriasis. now, there's skyrizi. ♪ things are getting clearer ♪ ♪ yeah i feel free ♪ ♪ to bare my skin, ♪ ♪ yeah, that's all me ♪ ♪ nothing and me ♪ ♪ go hand in hand ♪ ♪ nothing on my skin, that's my new plan ♪ ♪ nothing is everything ♪ woman: keep your skin clearer with skyrizi. with skyrizi, 3 out of 4 people achieved 90% clearer skin at 4 months. of those, nearly 9 out of 10 sustained it through 1 year. and skyrizi is 4 doses a year, after 2 starter doses. ♪ i see nothing in a different way ♪ ♪ and it's my moment so i just gotta say ♪ ♪ nothing is everything ♪ skyrizi may increase your risk of infections and lower your ability to fight them. before treatment, your doctor should check you for infections and tuberculosis. tell your doctor if you have an infection or symptoms such as fevers, sweats, chills, muscle aches, or coughs or if you plan to, or recently received a vaccine. ♪ nothing is everything ♪ woman: now is the time to ask your dermatologist about skyrizi. ♪ ♪i've got the brains you've got the looks♪ ♪let's make lots of money♪ ♪you've got the brawn♪ ♪i've got the brains♪ ♪let's make lots of♪ ♪uh uh uh♪ ♪oohhh there's a lot of opportunities♪ with allstate, drivers who switched saved over $700. saving is easy when you're in good hands. allstate click or call to switch today. see every delivery... allstate every yikes... and even every awwwwwwww... wait, where was i? 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