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We desperately need to increase our capacity to test for COVID-19, to trace contacts, and to produce masks and other forms of personal protective equipment.  This will allow us to keep the virus under control and to cautiously re-start economic activity as we await development of a vaccine.  Unfortunately, President Trump has made it clear that he will not lead a mobilization against the virus.  His goal is simply to avoid blame for failures. Congress...

from Lars Syll The econometrician Henri Theil once said “models are to be used but not to be believed.” I use the rational actor model for thinking about marginal changes but Gary Becker really believed the model. Once, at a dinner with Becker, I remarked that extreme punishment could lead to so much poverty and hatred that it could create blowback. Becker was having none of it. For every example that I raised of blowback, he responded with a demand for yet more punishment … You can see...

from David Ruccio It must be confessed that though the plague was chiefly among the poor, yet were the poor the most venturous and fearless of it, and went about their employment with a sort of brutal courage; I must call it so, for it was founded neither on religion nor prudence; scarce did they use any caution, but ran into any business which they could get employment in, though it was the most hazardous. Such was that of tending the sick, watching houses shut up, carrying infected...

For a long time, I’ve used Twitter to publish links to posts on this blog. But a lot of what I write now is on Twitter first. So, I’ve started using a tool called Spooler to turn Twitter threads into blog posts. Here’s the first one According to Gallup 62 per cent of currently employed US workers have worked from home during the crisis, and 59 per cent of those would prefer to continue doing so “as much as possible” Important qualifications:* not the whole workforce, since so...

from Asad Zaman Economic systems evolve, sometimes under external dynamic and sometimes under internal dynamics. As they evolve, economic theories co-evolve, however their can be (often are) lags in understanding – so theories relevant to one system are applied to another, with disastrous results. Human beings started out with tribal societies, and spent the longest period of history in this form. They societes were egalitarian and communal. They were not market oriented. Production and...

from David Ruccio We already had high food insecurity in this country and now we are putting another layer of need on top of it. — Kevin M. Fitzpatrick One of the many irrational characteristics of capitalism is that billions of tons of food go to waste while hundreds of millions of people struggle with hunger on a daily basis. And like all the other senseless attributes of the way the economy is currently organized, the mismatch between the enormous quantity of food that is available for...

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from Dean Baker The pandemic crisis created a rare economic opportunity. In effect, the whole economy was thrown up for grabs, with the winners and losers determined by who had the political power to get a nice bailout. Needless to say, those who were already rich got the big handouts, those at the bottom got crumbs, if anything at all. Suppose we had let the market work its magic on the airlines, on the hotel chains, the restaurant chains, the aircraft industry (i.e. Boeing), and on the...