It’s not popular right now to question conventional wisdom on sheltering in place, but Dr. Bhattacharya makes a strong case for challenging it, based in economics and science.
The Human Prosperity Project at the Hoover Institution analyzes free-market capitalism and socialism to assess how each system affects human flourishing.
by David Brady, L. Sandy Maisel, Brett Parkervia Real Clear Politics
Tuesday, March 31, 2020
On March 25 we wrote that both partisan affiliation and intra-party ideology affected the public’s reaction to the coronavirus pandemic. We were not surprised by the partisan differences, given polarization, but we were surprised by the extent of intra-party differences. In the YouGov survey taken March 15-17, we found that the president had near-universal support from very conservative Republicans, but support lessened among those who say they are conservative or more moderate.
A Hoover Virtual Policy Briefing with Niall Ferguson: COVID-19 in the Light of History and Network Science. Tuesday, March 31, 2020 at 11AM PT/ 2PM ET.
From Torsten Slok's excellent email links: Jonathan Dingel and Brent Neiman: The places hardest hit by the virus are also the places where most jobs can be done at home.
Most of East Asia and Europe have taken much more drastic steps to contain COVID-19 than the US has yet taken. And Trump wants to see even those restrictions lifted in a month.
The Republican support for emergency cash payments as a central part of CARES Act, the recently passed coronavirus relief package, surprised many. What could possibly be conservative about free money? In fact, the idea of direct government cash payments to the needy — even on a non-emergency basis — has a long lineage among conservative thinkers and policymakers. Its reappearance signifies a larger rethinking of economic policy on the right.
by David Altig, Jose Maria Barrero, Nick Bloom, Steven J. Davis, Brent Meyer, Emil Mihaylov, Nick Parkervia Chicago Booth Review
Thursday, March 26, 2020
The rapid unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic has created grave concerns for the health and welfare of the US population and the economy. The economic worries are very apparent in financial markets. From the closing bell on February 21 through March 20, US equities fell more than 30 percent, and stock market volatility skyrocketed.
Sequestered as he is in his Wilmington, Delaware, basement, maybe Joe Biden dreams of a cinematic break-out once the COVID-19 outbreak subsides – a sweeping helicopter shot, perhaps, of the Democratic nominee-in-waiting basking in the great outdoors, like Julie Andrews in the opening scene of The Sound of Music.
China’s growing self-confidence should worry America. The country just celebrated another day without community spread of the Wuhan flu. Its government also announced plans to lift the two-and-a-half-month quarantine restrictions on the city at the crisis epicenter on April 8th.
by Scott R. Baker, Nicholas Bloom, Steven J. Davis, Kyle Kost, Marco Sammon, Tasaneeya Viratyosinvia University of Chicago
Tuesday, March 31, 2020
No previous infectious disease outbreak, including the Spanish Flu, has impacted the stock market as powerfully as the COVID-19 pandemic. We use text-based methods to develop this point with respect to large daily stock market moves back to 1900 and with respect to overall stock market volatility back to 1985. We also argue that policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic provide the most compelling explanation for its unprecedented stock market impact.
The director of the Sinquefield Center for Applied Economic Research at Saint Louis University, Michael Podgursky, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss what long-term economic effects are likely to result from the Covid-19 pandemic.
A commentator recently complained that President Trump does not have a “Syria strategy” and therefore awful Assad is winning. Countless Op-Ed writers before him likewise commented that President X “did not have a [insert the name of any country from Morocco to India] strategy,” and therefore awful Z was winning.
The newly-formed C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute has an open call for proposals to mitigate the COVID-19 epidemic using artificial intelligence and machine learning.
The COVID-19 outbreak and financial crises, though different in their specifics, both demand preventative measures by government that are consistent with libertarian thought.
After we've decided how many people get to live or die through our quarantines, ventilator supplies, and pharmaceutical experiments, we've then got to ponder how many businesses get to come out on the other side of the coronavirus’s economic fallout intact. That is, who should the government subsidize or bailout? Which companies are worthy of societal support to get through this, and which are not?
Until now, the voices warning against prematurely lifting stringent social regulations to combat the novel coronavirus have been those of doctors and epidemiologists.
As of yesterday (EST 22:00), over 700,000 cases of COVID-19 have been reported by the World Health Organization (WHO), with a total of 33,567 deaths. More than 140,000 cases have been confirmed in the United States, the highest in the world.
A former education commissioner of Tennessee said in an op-ed published Friday that children who are away from their public schools during the coronavirus crisis will suffer “damaging” effects with “iPads and parents” serving as their new teachers.
President Trump has an opportunity both to defeat the novel coronavirus and to gain advantage for the United States in the competition with China for global influence, which predates both the coronavirus crisis and the Trump administration. It flared earlier in this presidency during trade negotiations. It resurfaced with Mr. Trump describing Covid-19 as the “Chinese virus.”
