Shocks expose the strength of a system, or its weaknesses. With the threat of a global pandemic, the fault lines in our health-care system and our broader economy are becoming clearer.

While I was, throughout January and early February, ignoring the coronavirus and telling people not to get panicked, I noticed that Matt Stoller, the author of the recent book Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy, was constantly bringing it up, suggesting that it could upend the world as we know it and that we should stop making political predictions without taking into account the impact of a pandemic.

And so, when the stock market started crashing, I called Stoller. We had a wide-ranging conversation that quickly led to how the Chicago School consumer welfare paradigm — which posits that the only reason a monopoly should ever be considered harmful is if it raises prices and harms consumers — is making all of us less safe this year, and how we should rethink industrial policy around ideas like productive capacity.