Paul Krugman
April 7, 2020
Erin Schaff/The New York Times
Author Headshot
By Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist
Many people, predictably, have reacted to the Covid-19 pandemic by insisting that it makes the case for whatever policies they were advocating before. Conservatives who believe in the magical power of tax cuts insist that we should respond to a pandemic by, you guessed it, cutting taxes. Anti-immigrant groups insist that it shows that we must stop immigration. Bernie Sanders supporters insist that for some reason it means that Democrats should turn away from Joe Biden. Advocates of a universal basic income insist that it shows why we need U.B.I.
So it’s kind of impressive, amid this orgy of confirmation bias, to find many mainstream economists — and, with a slight delay, the Democratic leadership in Congress — acknowledging that coronavirus economics really is different, that it calls for policies that are different from the usual recession-fighting playbook.
For the record: even if you believe that cutting taxes would greatly increase Americans’ incentive to work hard (which you shouldn’t), tax cuts aren’t the answer when millions of workers are necessarily idle because of a lockdown meant to limit viral infection.
And the coronavirus slump actually makes the case against universal basic income, even though part of that $2 trillion not-a-stimulus bill did involve sending everyone a check. What’s happening now is that a large number of American workers — maybe as many as one in four — have lost their income because of social distancing. These workers have bills to pay; they need replacement income close to what they were making before. The rest of the work force doesn’t need anything comparable.
And if you just send everyone a check, it will be either grossly inadequate for the newly unemployed, impossibly expensive, or both. Universal income, independent of circumstances, won’t do the job.
So what should our economic policy be? Over the past week or so mainstream economists have largely converged on the view that we should focus not on economic stimulus — we want part of the economy shut down for the time being — but on disaster relief for those losing their incomes.
What’s striking is that this is the answer coming even from Keynesian economists like Larry Summers, Olivier Blanchard, and yours truly, who generally favor fiscal stimulus in the form of spending to fight slumps, and have been urging the U.S. to take advantage of low interest rates to do a lot more public investment. You might have expected this gang of nerds to use the current slump as an excuse to pursue their (our) favorite policy.
But hard thinking about the nature of the current crisis says that infrastructure spending, however desirable it may be, doesn’t address the immediate issues. Enhanced unemployment benefits and aid to small businesses do get at the heart of the current problem. So that’s what serious economists are recommending, and Democrats in Congress have mostly come around to the same view.
Making your policy recommendations contingent on what’s actually happening in the world may not sound like a terribly hard test of intellectual integrity. But given the political world we live in, I’m actually impressed and gratified to see so many economists rising to the challenge.
Quick Hits
Mathematical models of the economy may seem abstruse, but they help clarify our thoughts. Here’s the state of the art on pandemic economics modeling.
My informal take on the issue, done before I saw that lovely model (which, FYI, has a definite Krugman 1998 feel.)
But unemployment insurance is creaking under the strain; in New Jersey it relies on programs nobody knows how to write anymore.
Economists overwhelmingly support the lockdown.
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Paul Krugman
April 7, 2020
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