Coronavirus: The economics of contagious disease | Jeffrey Sachs | Big Think Edge

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Today's topic is the economics of contagious disease: systems thinking for a sustainable future. I am Peter Hawkins, the president and co-founder of Big Think, and I will be moderating today's discussion. Our guest today is the esteemed economist and UN adviser, Professor Jeffrey Sachs. He is University Professor and director of the Centre for Sustainable Development at Columbia. He is also a director of United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, and he has had been an advisor to three UN secretaries general. He's also a New York Times bestselling author, and his books include The Age of Sustainable Development, Building the New American Economy, and A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism. The most recent book published earlier this year is The Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, and Institutions.

Welcome, Dr. Sachs. Pleasure to be with you. Thank you very much.

Now first off, a little housekeeping: if you are new to Big Think Live, today's webinar will last for about 45 minutes. We'll start with a discussion with Professor Sachs first, followed by audience Q&A, so please ask your questions in the comments section of whatever platform you are watching on. You can start sending questions right away, and we will get to them during the Q&A session. Our goals for today's session will really be to harness Professor Sachs' expertise both as an economist and global policy expert, but also as an educator, and we're going to look at topics like systems thinking and the models and the modes and the ways the people at the front lines of trying to solve this challenge, whether it's a public health standpoint or a policy standpoint, how they are thinking about and understanding the challenges.

So, without any further ado, let's get started. FSO Sachs, you have had a front-row seat in our global battles against most of the scourges of modern times: AIDS, malaria, TB. How does the COVID-19 response compare to the others that you've witnessed?

I think this is absolutely extraordinary in the scale of this crisis. The other diseases you mentioned are huge burdens on health, deaths, and the global population, but COVID-19 is really something that we haven't experienced since the influenza epidemic a century ago. This is a new disease, a new virus to human beings. It's highly contagious; there is no existing immunity, as far as we know, in the human population, and that means that the susceptibility to this virus is essentially universal.

As far as we know biologically, anyone can contract the illness. It's also a very serious illness with all of the dimensions of the pathology and its lethality. But it seems that around one pertinent point is that those who were infected can die from this virus. There are debates technically about exactly that number, but it's high. Maybe 10 times higher than a bad flu season. This means that the whole world is disrupted by this virus since it can spread everywhere. There was no vaccine, there was no effective treatment. It is something we don't want to get.

The result is that within just a few months, there has been a dramatic change of life across the world. People are in lockdowns, sheltering at home, not going to work. Economies have plummeted in the short term. In other words, the scale of disruption is simply something we'd not seen in peacetime, at least since the influenza epidemic of 1918-1919, and that was a devastating epidemic.

And here we are again. Now from an economic perspective, how do we think about the possible outcomes for this pandemic? You've sort of touched on a couple of them. You know, if we find a cure, if we find a vaccine, or if we find ourselves in a situation where it's just long-term control and management. How do those different outcomes inform the way we should think about the economics and how to account for them?

Well, I think the most important thing to do is to consider different possible outcomes or different scenarios. One scenario is that the epidemic goes through the population relatively uncontrolled—that there is just not an effective policy response to it or behavioral response to it. What we know in that case, from the characteristics of this virus, is that well over half the population would be infected, and upwards of 80% or even 90% of the population would contract the disease, perhaps over a period of a couple of years in two or three waves. And of those, around 1% would die.

If you do the math, that's just devastating. In the United States, for there 327 million people, one could imagine more than 250 million people becoming infected. One could imagine therefore more than a couple of million people dying of this disease. We are right now at 85,000 as of mid-May, but the numbers could obviously soar if this continues in an unabated way.

The other scenario is a scenario of suppressing the epidemic, really stopping the spread of the epidemic. This is both feasible, and it's easy to understand that from a thought experiment. The thought experiment is as follows: people are infectious with this virus when they contract it, generally for one to two weeks. Do the thought experiment that everyone who is infected today is isolated—maybe in a quarantine facility, maybe safely in their own home. They get the food they need, but they don't infect other people. In principle, if this were done merely for a couple of weeks, you would not only stop the spread, but the individuals who are infectious would ultimately, perhaps after a time in the hospital, die.

However, they would not infect the next wave of people because they've been successfully isolated, and the jargon is that the epidemic would be suppressed. So in that case, within just a few weeks, we'd be over with this. If the world behaved orderly, public health completely effective, it would be past the epidemic phase in just a short period of time.

If the whole world did that, almost the whole world would achieve effective control. When one looks around at what's actually happening in the world today, you need both of them on display remarkably effectively. The epidemic began in China; it has essentially stopped spreading except for very, very few local outbreaks that then are quickly controlled. Countries that have stopped the spread of the epidemic include China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, Vietnam, Australia, New Zealand, probably Singapore, probably Japan. A large number of countries, and here you see the world.

Europe is not in good shape. The U.S. is not in good shape—or I should be more precise, Western Europe is not in good shape. There has been a mass epidemic in the UK, Spain, France, Belgium, Italy. The U.S. is hard hit. The developing world, in Africa and in much of Asia, still at relatively low levels but very precarious. Will they go the direction of Europe and the U.S. with a full-on epidemic, or will they be able to achieve the suppression of the infection as in the Asia-Pacific region?

So, not only is this a drama with very different possible outcomes, but we're actually seeing right now in real-time different outcomes in the world. Most countries look inward; they just discuss among themselves. But if we look comparatively, then we gain a much better understanding of what's happening. We see that it is possible to control this epidemic, and we have to learn how these successful countries have done it, so that we can apply the best practices to other places.

Among those countries that you've identified as having an effective response, can you illustrate the idea of systems thinking in the context of that response? How did the effective response employ thinking in a more system-oriented way?

Well, public health is a systems science, and the control of the epidemic is a public health challenge and success story in these successful countries. So this is definitely systems thinking. The step you tend to infect more than one other person. We say that those who are vulnerable to infection are susceptible people; they're susceptible to infection.

The general estimate is that at the beginning of the COVID-19 epidemic in China, each infectious individual tended to infect 2.4 individuals on average. And you can see that leads to a chain reaction, because the first person infects more than two; each one of those infects more than two others; each one of those infect more than two others. In fact, every three to four days, the number of infections can explode. In the early days in countries, we observed a production rate, and it's written as R0.

R0 is an important indicator for us because it says that we have the risk of exponential or geometric growth—in other words, a doubling and then a doubling and then a doubling and then a doubling. So even a small number today can be a huge number in six weeks or eight weeks. That's indeed what happened in the United States.

They didn’t understand exponential doubling. Like Donald Trump said, "Well, we just have a few cases. What's the problem? We're a big country." But he didn't understand that if you double the number and double that, double the double, and you do that for a few weeks, every few days, you end up with the first hundreds, then thousands, and tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands of cases—and a lot of dead people in the end.

The government just didn't understand that because they weren't systematic thinkers in the United States. But when you think about that epidemic process, you're led to another concept called the effective reproduction rate. The basic reproduction rate, which I mentioned, is what happens at the start of an epidemic. But once you apply policies and once you help people to behave more safely, then that number goes down. The reproduction number goes down, and the resulting number is not called the basic reproduction rate; it's called the effective reproduction rate.

It tells us each day how many people typically will be infected by an infectious individual. So the name of the game is to reduce the effective reproduction rate to less than one because if each infectious individual infects fewer than one person, or less than one person, the epidemic goes away. If they infect more than one, then the banana grows.

So the way that Public Health looks at this systematically is: what can be done to reduce the effective reproduction number to below one? There are two basic ways to do this—or maybe I should say three basic ways to do this. The very inefficient way is you lock everyone up at home, telling them you can't go out. If that is actually observed, infections don't go on—that's the idea of the lockdown. But boy is that difficult and expensive because everybody's locked down, whether they're infectious or not.

The other way to do this, which is the desirable way if you can do it, is to only isolate those who are actually infected or likely to be infected so they don't infect others while those who are not infected go about their daily lives. You can see that's a much better balance if you can achieve it because then most of society goes about its daily life, whereas it's only those who are unlucky to have been infected and therefore infectious who are isolated and quarantined, but only for a couple of weeks if they're lucky enough to escape the worst outcome.

So that's what public health is all about. It is about isolating the infectious people as early as possible. As soon as the symptoms appear, in principle, you want that person to notify a public health official or log online or make a phone call or connect with an app and get tested. Then, if the test is positive, to be in isolation. If the public health is good, the health official will ask: "Well, who do you live with? Oh, you have a family at home? Do you share a bathroom? Are you in close contact with each other? Oh, that's not good; we're going to move you temporarily to a hospital ward that's been set aside for this, or to a hotel room that has been requisitioned as a quarantine facility, or to a sleeping site in a gymnasium that's been turned into a quarantine facility. You'll be safe, but you'll also not infect other people, including your family members."

So that's what quarantine is. The other point of Public Health is that, even as infectious people do come into contact with others—or maybe they don't know that they're infectious yet because they're still pre-symptomatic—people take precautions by wearing face masks, by physical distancing, or the authorities put temperature monitors in big buildings so that any worker that comes into an office building has a temperature taken, and they're told: "Mr. Jones, you actually have a fever. You must go home. You must not come into contact with others, and you will be tested as soon as possible," which, if the system is working well, as it did in Korea, would be very fast indeed.

So the name of the game in public health control is systems thinking: to stop those who are infectious or possibly infectious from infecting others. One more point of systems thinking is that when an individual is found to be infected, the close contacts of those individuals are tracked down to be told: "You have been in close contact at the workplace, at a restaurant, in a nightclub, in the theater, in a train station, in a bus seat, or in your family setting—close to someone who is known now to have COVID-19—so you are also suspect as being quite likely to have the disease or quite possibly having it. You will be monitored for the moment you stay in isolation as well; your temperature will be monitored, and ideally you will be tested as well."

So that's called contact tracing. This is what public health is about. It's not saying, "Oh, we like the economy, so just go about your business," or "We're gonna lock everyone down because we don't want to take risks." It's to be focused, systematic, methodical, very well-organized, and this is what a number of countries accomplished in East Asia—not perfectly, because it's not simple, and you can be infectious without having symptoms.

This makes it very hard to control every outbreak in every case, but most people develop symptoms, and if you catch the symptomatic cases early enough, even though they may have infected somebody before becoming symptomatic, you reduce the effective reproduction rate dramatically, keep it below one, and allow daily life to continue.

You identified as best practices Southeast Asia: Korea, they all have had some experience with respiratory-borne illness before SARS, swine flu, so forth. To what extent are they simply the beneficiaries of having gone through this experience before Western Europe and the United States, and to what extent are we needing to play catch-up and having to do more, given where we started?

There's no doubt that SARS in 2003, which is also a coronavirus, the same family of virus as COVID-19—likely coming from a bat reservoir as the source of the virus—was also a deadly infection. It was a kind of preparation for now. So when countries in East Asia heard about this outbreak of a mysterious pneumonia-like illness in Wuhan, China, as early as December 31, 2019, many went into high alert: "Oh my god, SARS is back!" or "We have a serious problem."

I'm sure that played a role, and there have been several viruses. The Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), which is also a coronavirus, transmitted via camel to the human population, was a warning. H1N1 in 2009, which was a worldwide pandemic, was a warning to everybody. In principle, the Nipa outbreak about five years ago was another warning, and incidentally, in the pandemic literature among some is the contention that there will be coronavirus pandemics—that just epidemics but coronavirus epidemics.

So no doubt the population knew that and the authorities knew that. Some countries were extremely well prepared: Taiwan immediately, Singapore immediate alert, Hong Kong immediate alert, Korea immediate alert. The truth is we all should have been because we have government disease control agencies whose whole job it is to know these things and to keep us safe. In the United States, we have the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which has the responsibility to warn, make aware, and take emergency steps when an outbreak occurs.

We also know that the world went through the terrible cases of Ebola. Though they were very few, that was also an alert that a disease outbreak could spread throughout the world through airplane travel, and we must be alert. What happened in the United States, though, which is still something of a mystery, will generate a lot of close study and a lot of books—and I hope exposes—because there's a tremendous amount of malfeasance and incompetence involved at the national level.

The CDC was weakened by budget cuts and by the lack of attention in the Trump administration. Then we know from one whistleblower—a professional with 25 years of service, exactly in the Department of Health and Human Services, that is charged with coming up with vaccines and therapeutics in response to this kind of novel outbreak—saw the notice from WHO on December 31. In the early days of January, he notified the political superiors: "We have a major crisis on our hands. We need to prepare."

This is, in one sense, what America has skilled, trained, highly professional people who are there exactly for the purpose—to keep us safe. But the political system is broken in the United States. The top cabinet officers, of course, are politically appointed; that's our system. They're not competent for their jobs; that, unfortunately, also became our system. They became more and more, especially in the current administration, lobbyists for corporations rather than professionals protecting us.

So it happens that when this whistleblower tried to make the news known in early January, he faced lobbyists, not public health professionals. The upshot of it is we did not get prepared in the United States. The public, nor the governors and the mayors, were really paying much attention. The president said we were completely safe, even though his intelligence agencies were telling him the contrary. The result is that we had exponential growth of the epidemic from the early introductions in January, basically until lockdown spread across the United States by the end of March. Our effective reproduction number in the United States now is a little less than one, probably because of the lockdown, meaning that we are containing the epidemic.

But many parts of the United States are going to go back to business as usual, or almost business as usual in public policy terms, and it's very likely that the effective reproduction number will go above one sooner rather than later, and the epidemics will return. Many also fear that we'll have a huge wave of COVID-19 epidemic on top of a flu season next fall, which will be a double whammy for the hospitals once again, and the death rates will soar as a result.

Question for you: how much do you blame this particular administration, and how much do you blame the structural paralysis writ large? I mean, it's been said that the modern form of American government may not be up to the task of some of these global challenges. Whether it's Donald Trump or Barack Obama or whoever comes next, no one would be in a position to adequately respond.

Well, I put a lot of direct responsibility on the president. As Harry Truman said when he was president, "The buck stops here." It is literally the case that Trump was briefed and briefed and briefed again, and just ignored all the warnings.

I don't think, as a close observer of governments all over the world for the last 40 years, that our president is actually capable of a systematic response. I'm sorry to say it; it's not a partisan statement; it's just an analytical observation. I've dealt with heads of state all over the world for decades, and this one is not up to the job.

But there's also a more general problem, which is that the U.S. has not been effective at problem-solving for a very long time. So our systems are quite weakened. That's a systemic flaw because our politics really did become overwhelmed by corruption and money in politics, meaning that the idea of professionalism and expert systems took a back seat to political lobbying.

So that's where I would put the structural problem. The structural problem is that when the whistleblower went to give the warning based on professionalism, he faced lobbying instead of professionalism. The result was three months of lost time, which in the normal scheme of things isn't a disaster to lose three months; that's normal life. But when you're facing an exponential growth of an epidemic, it's the difference of stopping the epidemic and disaster, and we hit the disaster side of that balance instead of the end of the epidemic.

Now we're going to move on to audience questions in just a minute or two, but I wanted to hit on the broad topic of cooperation, global cooperation—something that you have been a party to, you have studied, and observed. It is said—and it seems so obvious—that this is a global problem that will need a global solution. Obviously, we're far from it, but if you would, perhaps you could envision for us what types of cooperation, both at a global level and then even in the case of the United States within the federal level and across states, what do you see as needed to set us on a course for control, if not eradication, at some point down the line?

There are many, many dimensions where we need global cooperation. The poorest country, economically as well as facing the risks of rampant epidemics, needs help to stay alive, to import food, and so forth. That is a matter of global cooperation.

When you have an epidemic, that, of course, can cross borders. If the epidemic is raging out of control in any region, people move; the virus moves with the people, and that's exactly what happened in the first weeks of this epidemic. And it will continue to happen—even with borders shut, there is still movement; there's still danger. The borders being shut by itself is a huge cost to society.

So if we want to go back to any semblance of normal life and getting jobs back, and people going back to work, we actually have to have this epidemic controlled to a large extent, all over the world. That requires cooperation. That requires exchange of best practices, that requires financing for the poorest countries, and so on. That requires making systems for safe travel, for notifications, and so forth.

This is what the UN system is designed to do. It's therefore profoundly troubling that in the midst of this, the U.S. government, the Trump administration, suspended funding for the World Health Organization—the very organization that is charged to do this. It did it under the claim that WHO is too close to China because part of controlling the epidemic is to try to put the blame on China. That's a whole long story, but basically I think it's a diversionary tactic of politicians rather than anything that is desirable or serious.

At the moment, this is not the time for blame, period. The specific charges that are being made against China, I believe upon very close study, are false or almost certainly false—or at least very likely to be false. Having this kind of diplomatic war on China, if I could put it that way—maybe that's not the best expression—but these verbal attacks quite incendiary that "China covered up the epidemic," that "this was a release from a laboratory," that "China knew about it but didn't tell the world," charges that I believe are false.

To be doing this right now is deliberately to undermine global cooperation. Unfortunately, that has been part of our politics for years because the Trump administration has taken the U.S. out of many international agreements in recent years, such as the climate agreement or the agreement with Iran on the nuclear systems and so forth. So this is part of that general strategy, which you could call an "us-versus-them" strategy or an "America first" strategy, but it deeply undermines cooperation and global trust. I fear that it is going to make this epidemic much longer lasting, much more insidious in its impacts, and it's going to hit the United States hard by prolonging the depression level of unemployment that we already have in the United States.

Well, that says a perfect segue to our first audience question, which is quite ominously, are we headed toward, or are we already in, a depression? And how long do you foresee it would take for the economy to recover from where we are currently?

We're in a depression because effectively the unemployment rate has already hit 20%. It's not yet the headline; the headline is 14.7% in April—the most recent reading. But if you read between the lines and look at what's happening to new unemployment claims and to lost jobs and to people who have dropped out of the labor force, we're at about 20% unemployment right now. That is a depression.

And there are two reasons to believe that depression conditions will continue for quite a while. One is that we're not yet controlling the epidemic. Until we do, there will not be any kind of sustained recovery in the United States. The idea that we open up business because it's too costly to lock down, even though we haven't done the public health preparation, is a mistaken idea because life will not go back to normal. People will not go back to shopping; people will be in ill health. The socio-economic and health crisis will continue until we do the public health scale-up.

So this is one reason to believe that the impact will be prolonged. The other reason is that many of the jobs that are being lost right now are unlikely to recover. We're already in a transition for other reasons, but it has now been greatly accelerated from brick-and-mortar retail trade to e-commerce.

So we were already in the shift from our local stores to Amazon and Walmart online. This has been tremendously accelerated; millions of jobs are being lost in the retail sector, and I expect storefronts to be boarded up for years to come. Shopping malls to be more empty than not. Many major retail chains are going bankrupt almost on a daily basis now, and brand names that we know and love will not survive this epidemic.

There are other sectors as well that will not rebound—construction will not come back soon because of all this empty commercial space. Many businesses and professional firms in New York City—my city—are saying, “Well, we're gonna be working from home substantially. We don't have to spend all that expensive money on their office rent in the future, and our workers will come in maybe one or two days a week, but we don't need all this space that we've rented in midtown office buildings.”

And that means that the office buildings are not going to be built in the same amount. So construction jobs are going to be permanent. They'll be lower or at least persistently lower. And so on. All of this is to say we're in now for a pretty long haul of an economic downturn. Our financial markets are pretty frothy; they don't quite understand it. The stock market keeps on wanting to go up because the Fed keeps on putting in liquidity into the money markets, but then every couple of weeks they reassess and say, “God, the news isn't good. How could stocks be so high?” And then they'd retreat.

The Fed Chairman, Mr. Powell, said recently, “There’s so much uncertainty and the situation remains quite dire.” I think he was being accurate. I think, in short, we're in for a long haul. It would be a shorter haul if the president knew what he were doing—it would be a faster recovery. But it's gonna be quite a while to get out of this mess.

Next question touches on a couple of economic concepts that I even recall from my undergraduate days. One is sort of Malthusian: Is overpopulation a factor in this? And the second part of the question is, is there a limit to the number of people in a functional economy?

Well, overpopulation is not really a factor in this pandemic. What is a factor, clearly, is that older people's survival longevity—turns out to create, of course, a group of very vulnerable people. Most of the deaths that are taking place are in older individuals. They’re losing a lot of good, viable, potentially very happy years of well-being.

We shouldn't say, "Well, it's old people." That would be horrific in our morals, ethics, and common sense, but this is a disease that overwhelmingly is putting older people at risk. We should be smart to know that places where older people live, in care centers for example, or in retirement homes, are highly volatile systems. In the United States and in parts of Europe, those systems have been so deficient in this crisis that the virus has swept through hundreds of nursing homes, leading to massive numbers of deaths that were preventable. It's a tragedy.

So this, I think, is the real demographic sense of this virus. But incidentally, let me emphasize, as many people do, enough young people are dying, and the illness itself is very harsh for a lot of people who survive it. It's still a very tough illness, and it probably is going to have many long-term consequences for some people who get infected. They survive, but with the abilities they don't get.

We should be stopping this epidemic. Then, on the question of how many people can the Earth support—or can a society support—there is a reason to hope that through the voluntary smart choices of fertility by people around the world, by households, that we would level off in population—not by a death of famine or disease, by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, or by war—but rather by a voluntary reduction of fertility rates to what’s called replacement levels.

That is, if on average households have two children, that means they'd replace themselves. It's almost like that epidemic calculation of getting an effective R equal to one. Well, it's the same principle basically in population growth. If every two people in a couple have an average of two children or statistically slightly more than two to take into account child mortality, it's what's called the replacement rate. The population stabilizes.

That would actually help the Earth itself and help the people living on it because all of the challenges of deforestation, of feeding the planet, of energy—which unfortunately, when it comes in the form of fossil fuel, has created the climate crisis—all of that would be easier to address with fertility rates around replacement level rather than very, very high rates.

This is not the story of this epidemic, but it is a story about sustainable development more generally.

We're coming up on the hour, so we only have time for a couple more questions. So I'm going to sort of shift us in a more positive, hopeful direction as we close out. One audience member wants to know: You've described this robust public health effort that we need to effectively intervene and stop this virus that we're not doing currently. How do we bring that about? What is the role of individuals, citizens—individuals sitting in their houses and apartments, quarantined at the moment? What can they do to bring that reality to bear faster?

Well, as citizens, we should be saying—even yelling—to our mayors, to our governors, and to the President of the United States: public health, public health, public health! That's what we have been missing; that's what we need. We need testing, tracing, quarantine, isolating, face masks, thermal monitoring, protection. This is what we need.

So as citizens, we should be saying this loud and clear. As individuals, we should be taking care both not to become infected—it’s horrible—and also not to infect others. If we are unlucky enough to become infected, we think we have symptoms, we know that we’re living in a house with someone that has been sick, please take care not to be part of that epidemic infection process. Find a safe place to isolate; get the help that you need to isolate safely.

But it is called public health because it’s not something that individuals privately can do by themselves. Public health is a public function of government, and we really need that public function of government to step in the coming weeks so that we can shorten the time of the epidemic, the loss of life, and the economic pain that goes along with it.

It's almost as if the public health system got lost in the debate around public health care writ large. In the face of that battle still raging, we've completely ignored this other component of what keeps us collectively well.

It's very interesting that you say that because there's a lot of confusion of health care, which is mainly facilities and hospitals, and public health services, which is very little to do with hospitals but is out in the community. So there's a big confusion about this. You can't fight an epidemic in the hospitals. You can keep some people alive, but you don’t stop the exponential growth of the infection in a hospital—or in facilities, or by doctors, for that matter.

You do it by health workers who are testing, contact tracing, supporting isolation, supporting services to enable people to self-isolate. And that is a difference of a hospital system and a public health system. Very few people understood that analytical difference at the beginning of this, and I think that is part of the problem, actually.

Hmm. This last question, and then we're going to have to wrap up, addresses the UN Sustainable Development Goals, which you helped to author and bring onto the world stage. The question asks: How will the UN Sustainable Development Goals be impacted by COVID-19, both in terms of achieving them, but also might there be any revisiting of them in light?

Most importantly, the idea of the Sustainable Development Goals is to have a world that is prosperous, inclusive—so everybody gets to share in the prosperity—and environmentally sustainable. In fact, the SDGs will give us a kind of roadmap for building after this epidemic. We're going to have hundreds of millions of unemployed people around the world; they should be putting in the new renewable energy systems, the clean grid, the new universal access to broadband services, the retrofitting of buildings to be safer and more energy-efficient.

There'll be plenty of good jobs to do. The SDGs will point the way and build in a way that's safe for the world—not building in a way that's going to lead to new crises of climate change or loss of biodiversity or new emerging diseases. So the SDGs can be our roadmap.

Well, thank you so much, Professor Sachs, for joining us. It is such an honor to have had this time with you today. More than one occasion, it has occurred to me that our situation will be radically different right now if you were in the White House or anywhere near it.

So I very much appreciate—I’m sure and you thought, “Well, let's hope that someone in the White House is there watching.”

They think that would be good, not likely.

I just want to thank you all for joining. And as a reminder, if you enjoyed this webinar, please join us next Tuesday at 1:30 for a conversation with former Navy SEAL Brent Gleeson on leadership, resilience, and leaning into adversity, moderated by Nathan Rosenberg, founding partner of the consultancy in Sydney, Amman—a former naval officer himself.

Once again, thank you all for joining us, and be well.

All right, take care. Thank you again.