Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now we continue our election series 30 Issues in 30 Days. We're in a run of eight consecutive days on pandemic-related issues facing Trump and Biden. Today, one of the most sweeping pandemic policy questions of all, how much had government closed businesses and schools to stop the spread? Here's president Trump. At last week's debate.

Donald Trump: We have to open our country. We're not going to have a country. You can't do this. We can't keep this country closed. This is a massive country with a massive economy. People are losing their jobs, they're committing suicide, there's depression, alcohol, drugs at a level that nobody's ever seen before, there's abuse, tremendous abuse. We have to open our country. I've said it often, the cure cannot be worse than the problem itself.

Brian: That was Trump in the debate. Here's Biden the next day.

Joe Biden: Once we get our federal state and local governments working together, once there's universal masking, enough PPE and testing to go around, science-backed guidance to help us make the right decision, then we can get our kids back to school safely, our businesses growing, and our economy running again without wasting another minute. As I said last night, I'm not going to shut down the economy. I'm not going to shut down the country. I'm going to shut down the virus.

Brian: How different are they? Pretty different on what would make the cure worse than the disease, so to speak. Back in March with seniors being the Americans most at risk of death from the virus or among the Americans most at risk, the Republican Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick put it even more starkly.

Dan Patrick: No one reached out to me and said, "As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?" If that's the exchange, I'm all in.

Brian: Keep the economy open even if it means more seniors like him have to die. The Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick on Fox. We have a moral economic and public health question for the ages. How much COVID risk reduction for how much economic pian or conversely as the lieutenant governor had it there, how many people should we allow to die to preserve the old normal for everyone else?

With me now New York Times economics correspondent, Jim Tankersley. He has reported extensively over the last decade for various news organizations on the stagnation of the American middle class, including in his new book, The Riches of This Land: The Untold True Story of America's Middle Class. He also had a Times article on Friday called Iowa Never Locked Down. Its Economy Is Struggling Anyway. Jim, thanks for doing this. Welcome to WNYC.

Jim Tankersley: Thank you so much for having me. It's a real honor and privilege.

Brian: Let's start with your article about Iowa. How little did it lockdown? How quickly did it reopen?

Jim: Iowa is one of those States that never really had a lockdown. They have not had the widespread economic restrictions. They didn't have a full stay-at-home order. They allowed restaurants, movie theaters, hair salons, and bars to reopen starting in May which was earlier than most other states. They were at the forefront of this idea that fewer restrictions is what we need for a faster economic rebound.

Brian: You write that Iowa did see an initial pop in employment and sales when it reopened from even the minimal lockdown that it had imposed, but more cautious states, you write, have seen faster economic rebounds by many measures. What are you comparing?

Jim: What we're doing is we're looking at a variety of employment measures in comparable industries. The industries that have been really affected by lockdowns are, for example, hospitality, restaurants, and just service-based things, anywhere where you have to go outside your home and in-person show up and put yourself at risk of contracting the virus to spend money and do business.

When you compare on those measures, other states have come back faster than Iowa, including some states with very strict lockdowns early on. There's a reason behind all this. The reason is it doesn't look like people are only limited from doing that sort of business by what the government is telling them. They are limited by their own tolerance of risk for whether it's safe to go and shop.

Brian: I want to emphasize that because the research you say leans toward a conclusion that most of the economic pain the country is feeling is not from the government's ordering closures, but from Americans voluntarily pulling back on things like flying and dining as individual decisions to protect themselves from the virus. How much is their data to tease apart the voluntary from that mandated by government?

Jim: There was a variety of studies that have started to look at this. It's tricky. I think we should be honest about the fact that we don't know for sure exactly what all these things look like yet in the data. It's going to take a while to get the comprehensive desegregation of activity, but some of the early research, for example, from the University of Chicago suggested that only a very small fraction of when you looked at comparable counties across state lines, some which were under restrictions and some which warrant, very few of the differences appear to be related to the restrictions and that really what you see is that people's tolerance for risks.

I think that the early evidence so far has been suggestive of the idea that government can send a signal to people about whether people should think it's safer or not to go outside and they can force certain businesses to close or to stay closed, but when the government lifts those restrictions, it is not just a green light that sends everybody back at least in a long-term basis to just their old habits.

Brian: Conversely, how much extra disease, if any, in places that haven't locked down or reopened quickly?

Jim: You expect it to go hand in hand. When people are taking more risks, you would think that there is a greater chance of the virus spreading. We saw that, in particular, in the spring when some States like South Carolina and Texas opened faster, and then saw this what I guess we now think of as the second wave particularly as tourist spot there and then people adjust their behaviors. Now, what we see is a big surge in the virus spreading across all sorts of states, whether there's lockdowns or not. Really only a few places up in the Northeast, in Maine and Vermont, New Hampshire that appear to be not experiencing the same surge as everywhere else.

We're learning that it is difficult to control this virus, but that right now, it is having both profound economic consequences still and no matter what the restrictions are, a state like South Dakota is still experiencing both a surge in the virus and depressed economic activity, even though it doesn't really have the kind of restrictions those states have. We can see that it is really hand in hand as one economist told me in the spring, the virus is the boss in the economy right now.

Brian: Listeners, if you're just joining us, we're in issue 27 down the home stretch here in our 30 Issues in 30 Days, pre-election series. Today on the question, that's one of the most sweeping pandemic policy questions of them all, "How much should government close businesses and schools to stop the spread?" We dealt with school separately yesterday. We're talking now about businesses, economic activity, in particular. Listeners will ask question of you as we continue with New York Times correspondent, Jim Tankersley.

How much locking down are you in favor of right now as the virus surges again? 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280. When it's government-mandated economic closure justified in your opinion? When, if ever is the cure worse than the disease, in your opinion, in terms of public health, or poverty, or anything else? What's the moral equation as you see it between life as normal for most people and more deaths of seniors and other vulnerable Americans as the Lieutenant Governor of Texas said in that clip he's willing to take the risk of as a senior himself to volunteer for that heightened risk in exchange for more normal lives for younger Americans or is it a false choice?

Can the vulnerable be protected through policy while reopening more broadly for everyone else? Or any questions you have for New York Times economics correspondent, Jim Tankersley. 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280. Jim, I know you were an economics correspondent not a public health one per se, but we should point out that while most epidemiologists think the cure is not worse than the disease, there is a group of dissenters that issued what they called the Great Barrington Declaration led by some public health professors who were also, I gather seen as serious people, including epidemiologists, such as Martin Colder from Harvard and Sunetra Gupta from Oxford.

Part of what they write is that the results of lockdowns "Include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings, and deteriorating mental health leading to greater excess mortality in years to come with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest injustice." Again, we say this is a much smaller group of public health experts than those who feel the other way, but have you reported on the great Barrington group or the evidence for the competing claims, especially as it pertains to working-class Americans being more at risk?

Jim: Well, I think that the most important corner where you hear that argument right now is actually coming from inside the White House. I had an interview a couple of weeks ago for a big story I did on the White House's view on testing and whether we should be expanding testing which is something that a lot of economists have called for as a tool to get the economy back on its feet faster. The theory being, if you test more then people will know where it's safe and where it's not safe to go, and we can get more economic activity more quickly, but the White House opposes that idea.

Scott Atlas, who was one of the president's big healthcare advisers, Stanford University, Hoover institution doctor. I had an interview with him and he told me, first off we should not be testing more people and taking what he says are people who are at low risk of dying from the disease out of the labor force if they test positive, but that secondly, that it's just going to lead to more lockdowns which he says-- He told me to "History would record this area very harshly as a massive egregious failure of experts which has particularly harmed middle-class or low-income people."

The argument there that Dr. Atlas and others in the White House have really latched on to is that it is government and the fear of the government has instilled in people to the virus that has chilled the economy both through formal lockdowns and by warning people about the dangers and that actually, the argument that the White House is making is it's pretty safe for most people, Dr. Atlas, to me cited this statistic of a very low mortality rate for people under the age of 70.

The idea is people should just be going about their daily life as if this is nothing different than the flu. I think that is a very sharp contrast with the surge that we're seeing and concerned among epidemiologists over the rising case numbers and hospitalizations in the country right now from the virus.

Brian: That conflict, that dispute among different groups of people, the White House on one side, most epidemiologists and other public health experts on the other leads inevitably to the question that I think Helen on Staten Island is calling in with Helen you're on WNYC. Hi there.

Helen: Thank you. I don't feel we should put the whole context of the Coronavirus in this ethical and this unethical context, frankly, Brian, although I'm a favor-- I'm very much a long time fan of your program. In this case, I don't feel that they can make a case. Also, we should use Asia as our paradigm of the way things are run properly. Number one, they accept alternative and complementary medicine as approaches to dealing with COVID, for example, homeopathy, which is less heavy-handed than the vaccine paradigm.

The other issue here are the ethics of allowing older people to be sacrificed in terms-- It's ridiculous because older people offer wisdom and our brain trust in this country is-- Very much comes from the older people and they're experiencing wisdom. That's all I have to say.

Brian: Helen, thank you very much for your call. Besides the anti-vax aspect to that call, which we'll deal with on another day. What she brought up at the end about this idea of potentially sacrificing the lives of older people to keep society otherwise as a whole going forward, that's what the Lieutenant governor of Texas brought up so starkly and I want to focus on how seniors and other high-risk Americans are accounted for in the Trump and Biden approaches. The president brings it up all the time though without many specifics like this at a senior residence in Florida, recently.

Trump: Democrats, we want to open their states, open up your states, and we were very careful with our seniors and that's different, but open up your states, get it back.

Brian: We're very careful with our seniors. That's different, but he didn't say how? Here's what Vice President Pence said in his 60 minutes interview this week.

Mike Pence: One of the things we apprehended early on is that seniors, particularly those with serious underlying health conditions are the most at risk for a serious outcome if they contract the Coronavirus. Families may make a decision that certain elderly family members might take a pass, but the difference between President Trump and me and some of the public voices in this debate over the last year has been-- We trust the American people.

Brian: Jim, they don't get very specific on how they can protect seniors if their policy is to let the virus run through society because they think the cure is worse than the disease. Pence there puts the responsibility on every individual or family to make choices that doesn't seem to me to be a policy response to how much economic closure is required to keep how many more seniors from getting fatal cases. There's no policy in that statement to protect seniors, just individual choice, and what he called trusting the American people. Am I missing something?

Jim: No, I think the one other thing that their advisors have talked about is just doing much more rigorous testing around vulnerable populations particularly nursing homes, but what we've seen in the last month is that doesn't seem to work. We haven't been able to build a firewall around nursing homes. My former colleagues of the Washington post have a great story last week about Lacrosse, Wisconsin where there was a surge in cases related to college students, which now seems to have worked its way into nursing homes.

It has been really difficult. This has been true in a lot of parts of the country and a lot of parts of the world that has been really difficult to isolate elderly populations and it makes sense why. People work in those populations they have caregivers, they have all sorts of ways in which the outside world gets in and out of those bubbles and nursing homes. They are incredibly vulnerable populations.

The other thing is that many senior citizens work and need to work. We do not have a public policy plan right now that provides income support so that seniors don't have to go to work when they are at high risk. If that was going to be your plan there might be different policy ways you could approach it, but I don't think we're seeing that right now across the country.

Brian: The government doesn't seem to require it. For example, in the education workforce, New York City allows any teacher 65 years or older to voluntarily choose remote teaching. I was speaking to a relative of mine on the phone who teaches at a private college. I will keep the name of the college private, but that college does not offer the same benefit to their professors. In other words, the 65-year-old or older college professor at that school does not automatically get the privilege of teaching remotely in order to protect themselves from COVID even in a college environment where students are there, and we know students college students are getting it and passing around a lot.

If the government mandated that as public policy workers over 65 have to be given every possible accommodation to stay home and not lose their jobs, that would be policy. I looked this up on the Biden campaign website. I did find one thing and it's reopened the economy page on it's reopening economy page-- On its reopening economy page it says, "Require companies to make specific arrangements for workers who either face a high risk of health complications themselves or have family members who do or the employees receive unemployment insurance if they cannot work safely. Jim, it seems to me that's a policy proposal and we do not have a policy like that in effect right now, correct?

Jim: We don't. There are definitely enormous differences between the policy proposal that the Biden campaign has put out and what the president is practicing now and what he's talking about continuing to be the policy going forward. I think that you've hit on an important part of it. Testing is another very important part, Biden wants to do several million tests a day nationwide setups for the national test and trace plan, including 100,000 people across the country and a public health jobs corps to be working on these sorts of things, to do contract tracing.

The Trump team just doesn't think that that would be effective and they've resisted it and it's been an issue in stimulus talks with Democrats who want a national testing strategy and found resistance from the White House. These are big policy differences and they really are important to the economy. They are important for public health obviously, but I think that the approach that a lot of economists are taking here is you are not going to be able to have the economic activity, particularly in the service sector, on airplanes, tourism, anything like that until you have people really confident again that they are at low risk of contracting the virus because they know where it is.

Brian: When vice president Pence says in that clip from 60 minutes on Sunday, we trust the American people. Part of that is saying government is not going to mandate these safety standards for the workplace if we stay in power.

Jim: No, that's right. One of the big Republican pushes in the stimulus talks has been for liability protections for companies that have workers come back and have customers in a time of COVID, they want to make it very difficult or haven't set a very high bar for people to sue those companies that are open. There's just, like you said, just two very competing approaches here.

Brian: We have a few more minutes here on issue 27 in our 30 issues in 30 days pre-election series, we are asking one of the most sweeping pandemic policy questions. "How much should government close businesses to stop the spread?" We're getting views on this from the reporting of Jim Tankersley in New York Times, economics correspondent. Lou on Staten Island. You're on WNYC. Hi Lou.

Lou: Good morning, Brian. Thanks for taking my call. Listening to the three politic guess play of the vice president, the former vice president, the vice president, and the president. You cannot solve a problem by denying the existence of the problem in the first place, before the pandemic hit the president was giving intelligence reports as to the severity and rapidity of this virus. He agreed with our journalists how severe the virus could be. Then he comes publicly in front of the American people and he downplays the virus. He lied about it.

When the vice president said, they trust the American people, you cannot trust people when you're hiding the facts from them. That is the whole core of the issue here right now. They had it. They downplayed it, by the time the travel ban was issued to the against the Chinese, more than 10,000 people had passed through JFK bringing the virus with them. That's why the problem has been ever since you cannot downplay it and you say you trust the American people know, give the American people the fact, they're intelligent people.

I agree with the first caller from Staten Island. Our elders, our seniors these people who will bring their experience, you can't sacrifice them. We need them. First and foremost, you have to be honest with the American people. Don't double-talk them so you close them, but then you hiding the truth from them. What the basis of the public policy now? That's what the problem is. I don't know whether it is incompetence or just people don't care or liars, but this is the worst administration in the 40 years I've been in this country, these people are terrible.

Brian: Lou, thank you for your call. Keep calling us. We appreciate your views and Ross in White Plains. You're on WNYC. Hello Ross.

Ross: Hi. I agree with the last caller rich tourists returning from Europe, brought this back to us, but under the fifth amendment to our US constitution, if government action is taken for the common good individuals and businesses are entitled to just compensation if they're damaged, are we to taxpayers on the hook and liable for the damages done by this massive lockdown? I want to make one suggestion, there should be a class-action suit against the college dropout Bill Gates, who considers himself an expert. Thank you very much.

Brian: Ross, how would you do it? I'm going to take you seriously here. If there should be compensation under the takings clause in effect, is the relief bill a robust relief bill-- Actually, Ross hung up, but let's take him seriously, Jim, for you as an economics correspondent, if government is mandating closures, which loses millions and millions of people their jobs or if they're the owners, their businesses in many cases, what responsibility does the government have and how do they approach that?

Jim: I think that it's a very valid point, particularly early in the pandemic. It's a valid point that the government did and particularly state and local governments did force a lot of businesses to shut down. The idea was that they were going to step in with assistance to the businesses that were hurt. For example, through the Paycheck Protection Program in Congress, the reality was it didn't reach everyone who needed it not even close.

There's a really legitimate argument that those businesses, some of whom went out of the business immediately were harmed by that government action, but what we've seen in the months since is that reopening has not brought back the customers for a lot of these businesses and in fact, it's going to be difficult to prove that in many cases that the government's action did much in terms of stopping people from going to those businesses in other, we can see it in the data.

There are places where people just stopped going to restaurants, even before the government said, you can't go to restaurants anymore. Restaurants can't be open. You can't sue fear. You can't sue under the takings clause to get money from the government because of fear of the virus spreading. I think that any legal case here would have to do what we were talking about at the very beginning and tease out the actual economic damages from government restrictions, as opposed to changes in consumer behavior from fear of the virus.

Brian: Last thing, have you looked at Europe in this respect, if we're talking about how much lockdown saved how many lives, much harder lockdowns than the US, in general, originally, but the virus is roaring back over there now too at similar rates to here.

Jim: Yes, the countries that have done the best on this, for the most part been Asian and Pacific countries. There's a lot of things that run through those, in particular, a country like South Korea had an incredibly robust testing trace program early on, there's a much more prevalent mask-wearing in those countries, but I do think that Europe is a cautionary tale here.

In America right now is a cautionary tale, we have a lot of restrictions of the virus as people have changed their behaviors and in part it's just like naturally human tendencies at play, things don't look so bad, so you start going out and doing things again, but the virus hasn't entirely gone away. As people resume more of their daily, "Normal activity", they are exposing themselves to more risk, and then it starts to spread again.

That's why early on in the pandemic, a lot of experts were telling me, "We expect to see this in waves," and I think that's what's happened. It's in part been the waves that come from people starting to feel like it's less of a risk going back out, finding it still a risk, then contracting their own activity again. I think Europe shows us that as well as the US.

Brian: Your book is called The Riches of This Land: The Untold, True Story of America's Middle Class. I wonder how you see this chapter, which hopefully will be a pretty temporary chapter fitting into the bigger picture. NPR had a story this morning about many Americans withdrawing from the workforce reluctantly, but voluntarily like you've been reporting on because of remote learning, especially women.

Here in New York City, where families have a choice of a hybrid model in-person, some days a week, a large majority have chosen remote learning anyway, and disproportionately it's the lower-income families who are keeping their kids home more the opposite of what one might expect from a purely economic model. Do you have a take on the economic versus safety calculus that middle and working-class people are making here and how does it fit into your untold true story of the American middle class?

Jim: I really appreciate that question my answer is that if you were to design a recession and a health crisis that was like a heat-seeking missile to target the people we most need to rebuild the American middle class, you'd basically design this one. Unfortunately, it's women and it's Hispanic and Black-American and immigrants, who are-- history shows us the crucial drivers of middle-class personality in America. They are the ones disproportionately hurt here. They're disproportionately exposed to the virus. They are disproportionately dying from the virus.

They are disproportionally economically impacted by everything you just mentioned, both kids staying at home, and so having dropped out of the labor force or having frontline jobs that have either exposed them to more risk or have shut down their work or businesses that shut down because their demand has gone away. Those groups are in a crisis. What's happening with women in particular, with the plunge in labor force participation is a short-term and long-run absolute calamity for the economy.

When policy-makers start sorting out the real policies to help us rebound long-term from this, they're going to have to address that because those critical workers are losing wealth. They're losing income. They are exposing themselves to high health risks. Then their kids are suffering in remote learning right now, and they are losing the chance to build the human capital that helps them climb into the middle-class as adults. This is very, very bad for the health of the American middle-class. Actually, I have a little bit about that in the book, which I finished up just as the pandemic was starting.

Brian: Tomorrow, folks, in our 30 Issues in 30 Days pre-election series, it's on issue 28, which is going to be all about how to reduce the disparity in the outcomes of the pandemic for this next wave that is starting to surge. For today, we wrap up issue 27, how much economic lockdown for how much public health gain. We thank New York Times economics correspondent, Jim Tankersley. He is also author of the new book, The Riches of This Land: The Untold, True Story of America's Middle Class. Jim, thank you so much.

Jim: Thank you so much.

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