Your microphone is still muted, you know.

You know, microphone.

Let's try that again. Greetings. Thank you, Martina. There we go.

You'd think with all the Zoom that we'd have it all figured out by now.

As it turns out, we don't. Am I good now? Thank you.

Geez. Well, thank you again for the kind introduction and thank you for inviting me

to this wonderful lecture series. I was able to watch a few of them and

know that you guys are, these lectures or seminars or whatever you want to call them,

come from all over the map. I know this is going to be fairly economic centric, but I think that

obviously some of the results are fairly easy to understand. It's just a matter of how do economics

think about these kinds of things and what are the policy implications and do they actually work.

That's the focus of this. What really fostered this whole line of research was just the

availability of this really interesting data sets that are coming out as a result of COVID.

We can never really observe people's behavior in a really big way and nor could we really observe

very idiosyncratic types of policies that were being created, but new data has just been made

available to do all of these kinds of things. It's usually data, so you can observe data and

we'll show some pictures a little bit later about daily movements in people and policies.

That's kind of the idea of what's going on. Again, I'm an economist, so I know people are

all over the map, so I've tried to keep it as non-economics as possible, but I do know that you

did have a previous lecture on rational choice theory. I think though that professor was in a

philosophy department, it's certainly she has a strong economics background as well. Hopefully,

it won't be too onerous. Now, just there we go. I guess I got to use my mouse. Here's just,

I'm going to talk about what's going on. Obviously, everybody's very familiar with COVID.

Everybody has to live with it on a daily basis. Just when we think we're going to get free of it,

we are not. We have a new strain that's come out, a new variant that looks like it's going to be

very, very powerful, so hopefully it's not. We have a mix of people who are vaccinated,

people who are not. There's obviously regional differences, national differences, and these

kinds of things. It's a lot going on. There's a lot of uncertainty going in what's right now.

This is a really good way to understand how people react and move and think and behave in these types

of strange times. Under rational preferences, people are generally have a pretty good idea,

straightforward idea of what's going to happen from day to day, but now we're in a completely

brave new world, if you will. It's probably going to last a couple more years.

Then a couple of that with all the economic stuff going on with supply chain issues and inflation

starting to build and what have you, we have a lot of disparate shocks which are occurring

currently. We're going to look at this. We're going to look at, a brief reminder of what these

rational preferences are. We'll look at a little bit of decision making under uncertainty, which

kind of begs now for a discussion of what is known as behavioral economics. Then we'll also look at

potentially why people aren't behaving from a time perspective. Even though they have perfect,

there is no uncertainty. They still have this time element that they have to think,

which is influencing their decisions today. Then we'll look at whether or not during the

pandemic, we'll look at some data. We'll actually try to see if policymakers, and I'm calling them

residents, whatever you want to call them, citizens or whatever, but residents of a given country.

The data I'm going to show you is at the United States state level, but just to give you some

insight as to what's going on. I'd also like to say that this is very, very early stages kind of

stuff. There's still a lot of questions that I have that Martina and I have that we're trying

to work through. This is kind of an inchoate kind of introduction to what's going on. I can't use my

thing. First and foremost, I just want to say that it does kind of complement a previous discussion

that Catherine Herfield gave a few weeks ago. She'd looked at it from a philosophical viewpoint,

but now I'm trying to say take some of those same ideas and now with this new data that's being

made available, is try to really understand how people are reacting in this type of environment