I am going to attempt a briefer clearer version of this post I am interested in critiquing (and mostly praising) the CARES Act and discussing what still needs to be done. I think my points (if any) are that an extraordinary unforseen crisis simplifies some issues and relaxes some constraints. I will now go by […]
In the last two weeks of March and the first week of April, 2020 16.5 million new claims for unemployment were filed in the U.S. After the novel coronavirus is successfully contained some but not all of those jobs will return. The post-pandemic economy will not be the same as the economy before and to […]
Trump All Over The Place On Oil Prices Indeed, are we surprised? But POTUS has reached a new level of hypocrisy on all this. So a while ago when oil prices began falling sharply, Trump bragged about how much this was going to help consumers, and he should get credit for it, of course. More […]
I have had this re-posted today because I believe it is as relevant today as when I wrote it in May, 2009. My hope is that this event we are living moves enough new people to realize the society we built is not sustainable. My hope is that one of the basic questions I was […]
Thinking about the coronavirus is bleak, so let’s do some political philosophy to cheer ourselves up. Libertarian philosopher Jason Brennan has a new post up claiming that our obligations to help strangers are much weaker than we might think they are, and may not exist at all, because most people are “morally very bad”. Brennan […]
Consumer prices sharply decline in March: keep your eye on wages This morning we got some monthly economic data that will be actually valuable to watch throughout this Coronavirus Recession: consumer prices. That’s because during recessions, consumer price growth decelerates, as does wage growth, which continues to decelerate well after the recession bottoms out. […]
Remdesivir and Transfer Pricing III Robert Waldmann posted his Remdesivir III: I do not understand the need for “evidence-based medicine” or rather I do not understand how the phrase is used by doctors. There is no evidence that Covid 19 patients (without heart disease) do better without Chloroquine. I learn that “evidence based medicine” does not […]
“High Contagiousness and Rapid Spread of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2,” CDC, Emerging Infectious Diseases Doing my usual morning reading, I ran across a comment concerning an early release article by the CDC which as the CDC points out is not considered to be a final versions. I believe what is important about the […]
Alan Collinge of the Student Loan Justice Org. has a petition promoting the cancellation of Student Loan Debt. When Angry Bear ran (April 1) his commentary on Student Loan Debt asking for signatures, there were 161,000 signatures on the petition. A couple of days later, the number of signatures was approaching 200,000 Today, I was […]
A broad topic (at least it is close to the field in which I am most nearly expert). I am going to write about policy to deal with the economic effects of the Covid 19 epidemic. There has already been an amazingly quick and huge policy response, which generally seems fairly well designed (with different […]