This is Planet Money from NPR.

We are living through this moment that is just so big in so many ways.

The human suffering, the change in our daily lives, that economic disaster are all so vast.

And we need to respond with comparably big ideas.

We need to try things that would have seemed completely absurd just a few months ago.

I mean, yes, sure, obviously we need to dramatically increase testing.

We need to hire an army of contact tracers.

But that is not going to be enough.

We need to think bigger than that.

We need to think maybe weirder than that.

Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Jake Goldstein.

Today on the show, we are going to look at three big ideas.

One is an idea to fight the virus itself.

Another is a way that may make the economic consequences of the pandemic less awful.

And the third is an idea that I think perfectly reveals just how strange the world has become.

The first big idea, big idea number one, comes from Susan Athe.

She's a Stanford economist who's been spending a lot of time lately working on pandemic-related problems.

So imagine that your life depended on completing a home construction project on time.

If you didn't have the project completed by December 1st, you would literally die.

I love this metaphor. So let's just let it run for a sec before we get to the idea itself.

And in order to be completed, it has to go through all the inspection processes

and have every aspect be approved by the county boards and the city boards.

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