Hey, TED Talks Daily listeners, I'm Elise Hugh. Today we have a timely and urgent conversation from our series TED Connects, Community and Hope. It's programming built around the challenges of this coronavirus pandemic. Today, Harvard professor and political theorist Danielle Allen takes questions from head of Ted,

Chris Anderson, about how we're going to get to the other side of this crisis.

She reminds us we're facing two existential threats at the same time.

One, to our health, but also to our economy.

How do we balance our needs at this time?

Danielle pulled together an extraordinary team of economists,

business leaders, and others to work on a tech-based alternative to social distancing.

I learned so much about COVID-19 in this wide-ranging conversation. The most promising part was

learning solutions, which you'll come away with too.

Thank you, Chris. Happy to be here.

This is such a complex problem. What I kind of want to do is just go through it step by step

to see the logic of what it is that your team are putting forward. I mean, first of all,

the problem itself of how we get the economy

going again. Just talk about a bit about what's at stake there, because sometimes this is framed

as the economy, who cares about the economy, people's lives are at stake? I mean, as an ethicist,

what's at stake if we don't restart the economy somehow? Well, we have to recognize that we've actually faced two existential threats simultaneously.

The first was to the public health system.

If the virus had been allowed to unfold unimpeded, our public health systems would have collapsed,

and that would have produced a whole legitimacy crisis for our public institutions.

So, of course, we shut down. We had to do that. It was

the necessary self-defense action that has, however, really devastated the economy. And that is also

an existential threat. We can't actually endure a closed economy over a duration of 12 to 18 months,

...