Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on today's show is Allison Schrager. Allison's a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute,

where her research focuses on public finance, pensions, tax policy, labor markets, monetary policy,

all things economic. She's written a number of interesting pieces for a city journal

over the last several months, so we thought it would be a great time to invite her back on the

podcast to talk about what's going on with the economy. As our listeners may recall, Allison is the

author of a fascinating book that we talked about on a podcast a couple of years ago, an economist walks into

a brothel and other unexpected places to understand risk. You can follow her on Twitter at

Allison Schrager. Allison, thanks again for being on the show. Thanks for having me. It's been,

you know, three months now since the U.S. economy hit with this pandemic started going into lockdown.

Over that period, 20 million people at least have lost their jobs.

I'm wondering, you know, where's your assessment?

We're seeing some positive indicators now as the lockdowns have eased. But where do you

think the economy stands right at the moment and what steps have been taken by the government to

respond to the crisis? And what's your view of them? Well, I think we're going to learn a lot in the

next two weeks. And because we're having these spikes in the Sun Belt and in the South.

And this is going to be a big test of can we withstand spikes?

Clearly in New York, it threatened our hospitals overrun.

Tons of people died.

So this is the test of can hospitals handle it?

Will death rates remain relatively low?

And if so, we'll learn, okay, we're going to live with this.

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