The Angry Bear

I missed this when it first came out: We think that the debate regarding extreme social distancing has a clear verdict — it is imperative that we should engage in this social distancing (shelter in place for all but essential workers) at least for the foreseeable short-term, but for reasons that both sides have missed. Our country does not need to decide today whether it is worth shutting down the economy for a prolonged period to protect against...

The House yesterday approved the Payroll Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act.  The PPP part of the law quite literally just increases the amount of money allocated to the program.  That’s it.  The law does almost nothing to fix the serious defects of the program in the original CARES act.  This is remarkable because the initial law was so poorly drafted: The sign-up process was first come, first served, which favored larger businesses with...

Jobless claims still point to over 20,000,000 lost jobs in April, 15%+ unemployment rate As I’ve written in the past few weeks, the number of initial jobless claims correlates roughly with the number of net new jobs added or subtracted in any given month. Normally there is too much noise for it to be of much value, but with the huge spike in the past month, the signal will come through much more strongly. Here’s what the crude correlation looks like...

The actual US coronavirus trajectory: “flattening the curve” at least until 2021 “Flattening the curve” was not such an appetizing option either, because it meant that *everybody* got infected with the disease during the period of flattening, and so the death toll would still be horrifying, perhaps 1% to 3%. It also meant that the period that the infection would curtail society was extended to several years. Shortly a much better alternative, based on...

Matt Yglesias has a good piece up explaining why “opening” the economy now won’t save the economy.  The reason is that people will continue to avoid contact with others until the epidemic is brought under control.  Simply allowing restaurants, theaters, and workplaces to open will not change this basic fact.  Indeed, airlines are still open for business, but the demand for air travel has nosedived as people (understandably) avoid being sealed in a poorly...

Trends in US States compared by coronavirus response I mentioned over the weekend that I wanted to break out and look at some different aspects of the coronavirus pandemic. Here’s the first: how are States at different ends of the restrictions and testing spectrums faring? Seven States have never even mandated lockdowns. Let’s look at these, alphabetically: Arkansas: Iowa: Figure 1 Nebraska: North Dakota South Dakota: Utah: Wyoming: Four of the seven...

Does Google’s Search Algorithm Protect the New York Times? Yesterday morning, after reading the Sunday New York Times, I posted two pieces on EconoSpeak within a few minutes of each other.  One was a short, cute little item (a visual grab from the paper) entitled “The Art of Juxtaposition”; the other was a longer, more substantial takedown of a deficit hysteria “analysis” I called “The Usual Deficit Blather from the New York Times”. As usual, I...

Advocates of quickly ending the shutdowns are in the news. Mostly, because one of them is President. Like most Americans, I think reopening soon would be a mistake (and remember I am in Italy where the shut down is severe compared to any State in the USA). I’m just going to assume that reopening by May 1 is a bad idea and try to understand who advocates it and why they do. First the vast majority of Americans do not support reopening soon. There was the...

Towards a modern “History of Republics”: a consideration of William Everdell’s “The End of Kings: A History of Republics and Republicans” In view of the horrific damage that the Trump Administration has done to the American Republic, during the past year I have done extensive reading of the histories of a number of the most successful or durable Republics over time. The reason has been to try to answer the question of whether there is an overarching...

The Art of Juxtaposition Seen in today’s New York Times in Print: