Group items tagged

the economists are saying, “the cure” doesn’t come at a cost at all when factoring in the economic value of the lives saved.

What these academics are doing — and what Trump’s tweet is getting at — is measuring how the extreme efforts to avoid covid-19 deaths compare to the devastating economic fallout.

They do this by putting a price tag on the deaths avoided. It’s something the federal government does all the time

Value of a Statistical Life or VSL — is the amount people are willing to spend to cut risk enough to save one life.

The VSL at most federal agencies, developed over several decades, is about $10 million. If a new regulation is estimated to avoid one death a year, it can cost up to $10 million and still make economic sense.

a cost-benefit analysis using VSL, while far from perfect, would force policymakers to confront the reality of their decisions in a much more precise way. Without it, they are left to gut feelings, educated guesses or political arguments.

“It’s missing from the discussion,” said Linda Thunstrom, an economist at the University of Wyoming, “so instead you have such loud voices on both sides — advocating that all lives should be saved or that, no, we need to open the economy. But there are trade-offs. It’s hard. But we should be talking about them.”

The economist’s answer is to ask people and observe their behavior.”

Economists use public opinion surveys on mortality risk. They look at how much more dangerous jobs pay. They study what people are willing to spend for safety devices, such as bike helmets. The information is then used to calculate VSL.

“Now we’re just trying to figure out how to balance two difficult things — lives lost and incomes lost.”

The White House’s Office of Management and Budget said it wasn’t doing a pandemic cost-benefit analysis, either

the CDC is not doing any cost-benefit analysis of the pandemic’s social distancing measures, agency spokesman Tom Skinner said.

The White House Council of Economic Advisers, through spokeswoman Rachael Slobodien, declined to comment on whether it has looked into the issue.

The Wyoming economists sent a copy of their cost-benefit study to the White House

The study estimated the U.S. economy would shrink less from an uncontrolled pandemic (GDP declines by $6.49 trillion) than a pandemic curtailed by social distancing (GDP declines by $13.7 trillion)

But social distancing would slash the peak infection rate in half, resulting in 1.2 million fewer deaths — leading to a VSL of $12 trillion

So the value of social distancing would work out to a net benefit of $5.16 trillion, the study estimated.

So far, the number of deaths has been lower than the study projected, Thunstrom said, “so social distancing has done more than what we assumed.

The Wyoming study also noted potential costs from the lack of cost-benefit analysis: The public health savings might not be well understood, so the public focuses solely on job losses and declining GDP, potentially eroding voluntary compliance with valuable social distancing measures.

It could be the pandemic’s VSL should be even higher than the traditional government number of $10 million — and thus the efforts to avoid covid-19 even more valuable.

The virus is dreaded, and studies have shown people are willing to pay more to avoid the risk of dying from cancer than an auto acciden

And it’s contagious. VSL doesn’t capture what people would pay to avoid a disease that could kill someone else.

The government’s VSL also doesn’t reflect willingness to avoid injury, such as the strokes or breathing problems associated with covid-19 cases.

The Chicago study examined this point, using a VSL that declines with age — finding that even though about 90 percent of the benefit would go to saving the lives of people at least 50 years old, social distancing still makes economic sense for the nation as a whole.

the most controversial aspect is whether older people should be assigned the same VSL as younger people. The Environmental Protection Agency in 2002 suggested a clean air rule would offer less of a benefit to senior citizens. Some academics agreed with the agency’s reasoning. But when critics decried it as a “senior discount,” it proved politically untenable.

vaccine hesitancy is high.

The Economist’s normalcy index finds life in Hong Kong to be more similar to pre-pandemic times than anywhere else in the world. But restrictions are starting to chafe.

The territory reacted quickly to the spread of covid-19. The government closed the border with mainland China in February last year and banned all non-residents from entering. Laws mandate mask-wearing, the use of contact-tracing apps and testing.

Hong Kong has offered free shots for all since April but many people opted to wait and see. Some worry about side effects; others do not trust their government which has pushed a jab produced by Sinovac, a Chinese firm, despite questions over its efficacy (Pfizer’s vaccine is also available for free).

Vaccination rates were boosted somewhat by incentives, including prize draws for flats and Rolex watches, and within younger groups around 70-80% have had a second dose. But among the vulnerable over-80s just 13% have had two shots, leaving them at risk when Delta does arrive.

With the rest of the world slowly opening up, Hong Kong is stuck in isolation. The border with China is still closed, to the frustration of many families and businesses

Since September Hong Kong has allowed 2,000 people from the mainland and Macau (Hong Kong’s tiny neighbour) to enter each day without quarantine. But the offer has not been reciprocated.

Hong Kong must go further: more vaccines, better testing and longer hospital stays for recovering patients.

Giving the government in Beijing access to its data will make many Hong Kongers uncomfortable, but the dismantling of the territory’s political opposition has intimidated many people, forcing them to swallow any such grievances.

The only clear way out is through vaccinations. Hong Kong could do more to encourage its citizens to get jabbed.

Some places offer more freedoms to vaccinated citizens. For example New South Wales, an Australian state, will allow them to use gyms and visit each other’s homes.

monetary incentives have been effective at encouraging vaccination. But spending vouchers distributed to Hong Kongers this year were not linked to vaccine status.

As most of the world accepts that covid-19 will become endemic, Hong Kong will be forced to close itself off even further.

Belarus has dropped by six points since 2020, when a rigged election saw Alexander Lukashenko become president. The killing of human-rights defenders under Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and the strangling of the free press in Nicaragua and Venezuela, contributed to low scores.

Countries usually move by only a point or two from one year to the next, if at all. But regime change can prompt faster improvement: Armenia’s score has risen by 14 points since 2017.

Some countries at least enforce anti-bribery laws. Britain and Switzerland are among the “active” enforcers while Germany, Norway and Sweden are “moderate” ones, according to Transparency International.

from a low level and mostly in the capital, where those with spare cash could enjoy new coffee shops, foreign restaurants and well-stocked supermarkets.

things visibly improved

the boundaries of that “better life” have been gradually curtailed in the more recent years of Mr Kim’s reign.

accompanied by heightened repression inside the country, more control at the borders and the acceleration of the nuclear programme

Aid organisations have not had access for nearly two years, making it especially hard to discern what is going on in the country.

increased penalties for smuggling and for watching foreign entertainment, such as South Korean dramas.

Mr Kim continues to rebuff offers of aid and even covid vaccines. Attempts by South Korea and America to revive a spirit of detente, for instance by negotiating a formal end to the Korean war, have gone unanswered.

Friedman’s thought, she argues, is more complex and subtle than has been understood: He raised pressing questions about the market, individualism, and the role of the state that will be with us for as long as capitalism endures.

Just as important, his time at Chicago taught Friedman about the intertwining of political, intellectual, and personal loyalties. He became a regular in an informal group of graduate students and junior faculty trying to consolidate the department as a center of free-market thought

by the 1930s, the leading figures at the University of Chicago were deeply committed to what had become known as price theory, which analyzed economic behavior in terms of the incentives and information reflected in prices. The economists who left their mark on Friedman sought to create predictive models of economic decision making, and they were politically invested in the ideal of an unencumbered marketplace.

Friedman was also shaped by older traditions of economic thought, in particular the vision of political economy advanced by thinkers such as Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall. For them, as for him, economics was not a narrow social science, concerned with increasing productivity and efficiency. It was closely linked to a broader set of political ideas and values, and it necessarily dealt with basic questions of justice, freedom, and the best way to organize society.

His libertarian ethos helped seed the far more openly hierarchical social and political conservatism that fuels much of our present-day political dysfunction.

But his fundamental commitments were consistent. In his early work on consumption habits, Friedman sought to puncture the arrogance of the postwar Keynesian economists, who claimed to be able to manipulate the economy from above, using taxes and spending to turn investment, consumption, and demand on and off like so many spigots

Instead, he believed that consumption patterns were dependent on local conditions and on lifetime expectations of income. The federal government, he argued, could do much less to affect economic demand—­and hence to fight recessions—­than the Keynesian consensus suggested.

In 1946, Friedman was hired by the University of Chicago, where he shut down efforts to recruit economists who didn’t subscribe to free-market views.

He was also legendary for his brutal classroom culture. One departmental memo, trying to rectify the situation, went so far as to remind faculty to please not treat a university student “like a dog.” What had started as a freewheeling, rebellious culture among the economists in Room Seven wound up as doctrinal rigidity.

Evidence leads her to argue more pointedly that Rose (credited only with providing “assistance”) essentially co-wrote Capitalism and Freedom (1962).

Burns implicitly exposes some of the limitations of Friedman’s focus on the economic benefits of innate individual talent. He had more than nature to thank for producing associates of such high caliber, ready to benefit him in his career. Culture and institutions clearly played a large role, and sexual discrimination during the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s ensured that professional paths were anything but fair.

The state, he acknowledged, would have to take some responsibility for managing economic life—­and thus economists would be thrust into a public role. The question was what they would do with this new prominence.

Almost as soon as the Second World War ended, Friedman began to stake out a distinctive rhetorical position, arguing that the policy goals of the welfare state could be better accomplished by the free market

in Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman made the case that the real problem lay in the methods liberals employed, which involved interfering with the competitive price mechanism of the free market. Liberals weren’t morally wrong, just foolish, despite the vaunted expertise of their economic advisers.

In a rhetorical move that seemed designed to portray liberal political leaders as incompetent, he emphasized efficiency and the importance of the price system as a tool for social policy

For Friedman, the competitive market was the realm of innovation, creativity, and freedom. In constructing his arguments, he envisioned workers and consumers as individuals in a position to exert decisive economic power, always able to seek a higher wage, a better price, an improved product

The limits of this notion emerged starkly in his contorted attempts to apply economic reasoning to the problem of racism, which he described as merely a matter of taste that should be free from the “coercive power” of the law:

Although he personally rejected racial prejudice, he considered the question of whether Black children could attend good schools—and whether, given the “taste” for prejudice in the South, Black adults could find remunerative jobs—less important than the “right” of white southerners to make economic decisions that reflected their individual preferences. In fact, Friedman compared fair-employment laws to the Nuremberg Race Laws of Nazi Germany. Not only was this tone-deaf in the context of the surging 1960s civil-rights movement; it was a sign of how restricted his idea of freedom really was.

s the conservative movement started to make electoral gains in the ’70s, Friedman emerged as a full-throated challenger of liberal goals, not just methods

He campaigned for “tax limitation” amendments that would have restricted the ability of state governments to tax or spend

n a famous New York Times Magazine essay, he suggested that corporations had no “social responsibility” at all; they were accountable only for increasing their own profit

Friedman’s free-market certainties went on to win over neoliberals. By the time he and Rose published their 1998 memoir, Two Lucky People, their ideas, once on the margin of society, had become the reigning consensus.

That consensus is now in surprising disarray in the Republican Party that was once its stronghold. The startling rise in economic inequality and the continued erosion of middle-class living standards have called into question the idea that downsizing the welfare state, ending regulations, and expanding the reach of the market really do lead to greater economic well-being—let alone freedom.

Friedman—despite being caricatured as a key intellectual architect of anti-government politics—had actually internalized an underlying assumption of the New Deal era: that government policy should be the key focus of political action. Using market theory to reshape state and federal policy was a constant theme of his career.

Still, Friedman—­and the libertarian economic tradition he advanced—­bears more responsibility for the rise of a far right in the United States than Burns’s biography would suggest. His strategy of goading the left, fully on display in the various provocations of Free to Choose and even Capitalism and Freedom, has been a staple for conservatives ever since

He zealously promoted the kind of relentless individualism that undergirds parts of today’s right, most notably the gun lobby. The hostile spirit that he brought to civil-rights laws surfaces now in the idea that reliance on court decisions and legislation to address racial hierarchy itself hems in freedom

The opposition to centralized government that he championed informs a political culture that venerates local authority and private power, even when they are oppressive

his insistence (to quote Capitalism and Freedom) that “any … use of government is fraught with danger” has nurtured a deep pessimism that democratic politics can offer any route to redressing social and economic inequalities.

“People have faced higher prices and that is difficult, but that doesn’t explain why people have not cut back,” she said of a phenomenon known as revealed preference. “They have spent as if they see nothing but good times in front of them. So why are their actions so out of whack with their words?”

Many said their own finances were good enough — they had jobs, owned houses, made ends meet. But they felt as if they were “just getting by,” with “nothing left over.” Many felt angry and anxious over prices and the pandemic and politics.

Also, economists said, wages have increased alongside prices. Real median earnings for full-time workers are slightly higher than at the end of 2019, and for many low earners, their raises have outpaced inflation. But it’s common for people to think about prices at face value, rather than relative to their income, a habit economists call money illusion.

“The pandemic shattered a lot of illusions of control,” Professor Stevenson said. “I wonder how much that has made us more aware of all the places we don’t have control, over prices, over the housing market.”

Inflation weighed heavily on voters — nearly all of them mentioned frustration at the price of something they buy regularly.

Consumer prices were up 3.2 percent in October from the year before, a decline in the year-over-year inflation rate from more than 8 percent in mid-2022. But inflation “casts a long shadow on how people evaluate things,” said Lawrence Katz, an economist at Harvard. Some people may expect prices to return to what they were before — something that rarely happens

Those feelings may be driving attitudes about the economy, economists speculated, sounding more like their colleagues from another branch of social science, psychology.

Younger people — who were a key to President Biden’s win in 2020 but showed less support for him in the new poll — had concerns specific to their phase of life. In the poll, 93 percent of them rated the economy unfavorably, more than any other age group.

“Everyone thinks a wage increase is something they deserve, and a price increase is imposed by the economy on them,” Professor Katz said.

There’s a sense that it’s become harder to achieve the things their parents did, like buying a home. Houses are less affordable than at the height of the 2006 bubble, and less than half of Americans can afford one.

“More than likely, half my income will go toward rent,” he said. “I was really hoping on that student loan forgiveness.”

Yet overall, economists said, data shows that more people are quitting jobs to start better ones, moving to more desirable places because they can work remotely, and starting new businesses.

He said he makes almost $80,000, serving in the military and working as a DoorDash deliverer, yet feels he had more spending money a decade ago, when he was two pay grades lower.

he uncertainty Mr. Blanck and Ms. Linn share about the future ran through many voters’ stories, darkening their economic outlook.

“The degree of volatility that we’ve experienced from different events — from the pandemic, from inflation — leaves them not confident that even if objectively good things are going on, it’s going to persist,”

In response to the pandemic, the United States built an extensive welfare state, and it has since been dismantled. While wealth has increased for families across the income spectrum, data shows, and there are indications that inequality could be shrinking, the changes have been small relative to decades of growing inequality, leading to a sense for some that the system is rigged.

“When things are going well, that means rich people are getting richer and all of us are pretty much second,” said Manuel Zimberoff, 26, a manufacturing engineer in Philadelphia. “And if things are going poorly, rich people are still getting richer, and all of us are screwed.”

For roughly two decades, partisanship has increasingly been correlated with views about the economy: Research has shown that people rate the economy more poorly when their party is not in power. Nearly every Republican in the poll rated the economy unfavorably, and 59 percent of Democrats did.

He brought up U.S. funding in Ukraine and the Middle East. He wanted to know: Is that the reason our economy is “slowing down?” He wasn’t sure, but he thought it might be. He plans to vote for “the Republican, any Republican,” he said. “Democrats have disappointed me.”

economic output must flow either to owners of capital, in the form of profits, dividends and rents, or to labour, as wages, salaries and perks. Economists refer to this as the “capital” or “labour” share of GDP. Who has the upper hand in the post-lockdown economy?

First we calculate a high-frequency measure of the capital-labour share across 30 mostly rich countries.

In 2020 the aggregate labour share across this group soared (see chart 1). This was largely because firms continued to pay people’s wages—helped, in large part, by government-stimulus programmes—even as GDP collapsed. Advantage, labour.

More recently, however, the battle seems to have shifted in favour of capital.

most economists anyway argue that labour’s share is not a perfect gauge of economic fairness, since it is so hard to measure.

In the first camp is Britain. There, underlying wage growth is in the region of 5% a year, unusually fast by rich-world standards.

But corporations seem not to have much pricing power, meaning that they are struggling to fully offset higher costs in the form of higher prices.

Labour seems to be winning out at the expense of capital.

The second group consists of most other rich countries outside America.

There, neither labour nor capital seems able to triumph. After correcting for pandemic-related distortions Japan’s pay growth appears to be slowing to below 1% a year

Pay settlements in Italy and Spain are treading water, while wage growth in Australia, France and Germany remains well below where it was before the pandemic. Workers in these places are not really joining in with the inflationary party.

In Europe pre-tax profit margins, as measured in the national accounts, have risen in recent months but remain below where they were just before the pandemic.

In Japan the “recurring” profits before tax of large and medium-sized firms recently returned to pre-pandemic levels. The profits of smaller firms remain well below, however.

A series of unusually large stimulus payments may mean that households are able to absorb the higher prices that companies impose.

Wages are rising, but nonetheless markups are responsible for more than 70% of inflation since late 2019,

In a recent report, analysts at Bank of America argue that greater pricing power helps explain why American equities have a higher price-earnings ratio than European ones.

Some economists wonder if workers will before long demand even higher wages to compensate for higher shop prices.

Small economies dominate the top ten. Half of these are European, but only one, the Netherlands, is from the euro zone. The Nordic countries shine, whereas the crisis-ridden south of Europe (Greece, Portugal and Spain) lags behind despite the advantage of a favourable climate. The largest European economies (Germany, France and Britain) do not do particularly well. America, where babies will inherit the large debts of the boomer generation, languishes back in 16th place.

The standard explanation of this unhinging, repeated in graduate-school classrooms and in advice to politicians, is technological change.

This explanation, known as skill-biased technical change, is so common that economists just call it S.B.T.C. They use it to explain why everyone from the extremely rich to the just-kind-of rich are doing so much better than everyone else.

For all their disagreements, Autor and Mishel are allies of sorts. Both are Democrats who have advised President Barack Obama, and both agree that rampant inequality can undermine democracy and economic growth by fostering despair among workers and corruption among the wealthy

The change came around 1978, Mishel said, when politicians from both parties began to think of America as a nation of consumers, not of workers.

each administration and Congress have made choices — expanding trade, deregulating finance and weakening welfare — that helped the rich and hurt everyone else. Inequality didn’t just happen, Mishel argued. The government created it.

Computers and the Internet, Mishel argued, are just new examples on the continuum and cannot explain a development like extreme inequality, which is so recent. So what happened?

David Autor, one of the country’s most celebrated labor economists, took the stage, fumbled for his own PowerPoint presentation and then explained that there was plenty of evidence showing that technological change explained a great deal about the rise of income inequality. Computers, Autor says, are fundamentally different. Conveyor belts and massive steel furnaces made blue-collar workers comparatively wealthier and hurt more highly skilled crafts­people, like blacksmiths and master carpenters, whose talents were disrupted by mass production. The computer revolution, however, displaced millions of workers from clerical and production occupations, forcing them to compete in lower-paying jobs in the retail, fast-food and home health sectors. Meanwhile, computers and the Internet disproportionately helped people like doctors, engineers and bankers in information-intensive jobs. Inequality was merely a side effect of the digital revolution, Autor said; it didn’t begin and end in Washington.

Levy suggested seeing how inequality has played out in other countries

In Germany, the average worker might make less than an American, but the government has established an impressive apprenticeship system to keep blue-collar workers’ skills competitive.

For decades, the Finnish government has offered free education all the way through college. It may have led to high taxes, but many believe it also turned a fairly poor fishing economy into a high-income, technological nation.

On the other hand, Greece, Spain and Portugal have so thoroughly protected their workers that they are increasingly unable to compete

Inequality has risen almost everywhere, which, Levy says, means that Autor is right that inequality is not just a result of American-government decisions. But the fact that inequality has risen unusually quickly in the United States suggests that government does have an impact

Still, economists certainly cannot tell us which policy is the right one. What do we value more: growth or fairness? That’s a value judgment. And for better or worse, it’s up to us.

“This is an invitation. Show us how to balance the budget,” Mr. Ryan said. “If you don’t like the way we’re proposing to balance our budget, how do you propose to balance the budget?”

Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said Tuesday. “It is important to bring our deficits down and to reduce our deficit-to-G.D.P. But they are part of — those goals are part of the broader purpose here, which is to grow the economy and strengthen the middle class.”

Economists offered more nuanced views. Closing the budget gap over the longer term could be vital to sustaining economic health, some stressed, by ensuring that the government did not crowd out private investment and by helping to keep interest rates low. But that does not make it an immediate necessity.

you suffer some short-run pain, and you don’t want to inflict that when the unemployment rate is already high, the economy is still recovering from the legacy of the Great Recession, and the Federal Reserve has used up most of what’s in its quiver.”

Other goals — including stabilizing debt as a proportion of economic output, rationalizing the tax code and tackling the long-term fiscal challenge posed by entitlement programs — might prove more important in the coming years, several experts said.

As sensible as a balanced budget might sound — much like a balanced checkbook for a family — countries are generally able to run modest deficits for years on end while still keeping debt stable as a share of economic output. One year’s deficit is effectively paid off by later economic growth,

The Senate Democratic proposal does not balance the budget, but it does reduce deficits to below 3 percent of economic output — a level that would stabilize the debt, economists said. During the 10-year budget window, the debt would start to shrink as a proportion of the economy.

A broader question, economists said, is the long-term effect the country’s debt load might impose on the economy. In the past few years, a number of broad-based studies have suggested that having government debt equivalent to or greater than about 85 or 90 percent of economic output might eventually cut into growth. Currently, public debt in the United States is about 76 percent of the size of the economy. Including debts the government owes itself, like in the Social Security Trust Fund, the total load is in fact bigger than a whole year’s economic output.

“The people who say the debt is irrelevant — that’s going too far,” said Mr. Rogoff, who along with Carmen Reinhart of Harvard produced a study of the interplay between debt and growth. “It’s a very rarefied air that we’re in already. And it could be a problem. You can’t turn your debt around in a year, and you cannot reduce debt quickly and easily.”

Now, how and whether to get back to a balanced budget seems to be a new fight between Democrats and Republicans. “It will generate a debate over the appropriate goal of long-term fiscal policy,” wrote William A. Galston of the Brookings Institution in an analysis of Mr. Ryan’s budget plan. “Is it to eliminate the deficit and the debt, to ensure that the debt does not rise as a share of G.D.P., or something in between?”

Economies dominated by hedge financing—that is, those with strong cashflows and low debt levels—are the most stable. When speculative and, especially, Ponzi financing come to the fore, financial systems are more vulnerable. If asset values start to fall, either because of monetary tightening or some external shock, the most overstretched firms will be forced to sell their positions. This further undermines asset values, causing pain for even more firms. They could avoid this trouble by restricting themselves to hedge financing. But over time, particularly when the economy is in fine fettle, the temptation to take on debt is irresistible. When growth looks assured, why not borrow more? Banks add to the dynamic, lowering their credit standards the longer booms last. If defaults are minimal, why not lend more? Minsky’s conclusion was unsettling. Economic stability breeds instability. Periods of prosperity give way to financial fragility.

Minsky’s insight might sound obvious. Of course, debt and finance matter. But for decades the study of economics paid little heed to the former and relegated the latter to a sub-discipline, not an essential element in broader theories.

Minsky was a maverick. He challenged both the Keynesian backbone of macroeconomics and a prevailing belief in efficient markets.

t Messrs Hicks and Hansen largely left the financial sector out of the picture, even though Keynes was keenly aware of the importance of markets. To Minsky, this was an “unfair and naive representation of Keynes’s subtle and sophisticated views”. Minsky’s financial-instability hypothesis helped fill in the holes.

His challenge to the prophets of efficient markets was even more acute. Eugene Fama and Robert Lucas, among others, persuaded most of academia and policymaking circles that markets tended towards equilibrium as people digested all available information. The structure of the financial system was treated as almost irrelevant

In recent years, behavioural economists have attacked one plank of efficient-market theory: people, far from being rational actors who maximise their gains, are often clueless about what they want and make the wrong decisions.

But years earlier Minsky had attacked another: deep-seated forces in financial systems propel them towards trouble, he argued, with stability only ever a fleeting illusion.

Investors were faster than professors to latch onto his views. More than anyone else it was Paul McCulley of PIMCO, a fund-management group, who popularised his ideas. He coined the term “Minsky moment” to describe a situation when debt levels reach breaking-point and asset prices across the board start plunging. Mr McCulley initially used the term in explaining the Russian financial crisis of 1998. Since the global turmoil of 2008, it has become ubiquitous. For investment analysts and fund managers, a “Minsky moment” is now virtually synonymous with a financial crisis.

it would be a stretch to expect the financial-instability hypothesis to become a new foundation for economic theory. Minsky’s legacy has more to do with focusing on the right things than correctly structuring quantifiable models. It is enough to observe that debt and financial instability, his main preoccupations, have become some of the principal topics of inquiry for economists today

As Mr Krugman has quipped: “We are all Minskyites now.”

Conard said Baker was undercounting the social benefits of investment. He looks, in particular, at agriculture, where, since the 1940s, the cost of food has steadily fallen because of a constant stream of innovations. While the businesses that profit from that innovation — like seed companies and fast-food restaurants — have made their owners rich, the average U.S. consumer has benefited far more. Conard concludes that for every dollar an investor gets, the public reaps up to $20 in value. This is crucial to his argument: he thinks it proves that we should all appreciate the vast wealth of others more, because we’re benefiting, proportionally, from it.

What about investment banks, with their complicated financial derivatives and overleveraged balance sheets? Conard argues that they make the economy more efficient, too. The financial crisis, he writes, was not the result of corrupt bankers selling dodgy financial products. It was a simple, old-fashioned run on the banks, which, he says, were just doing their job

He argues that collateralized-debt obligations, credit-default swaps, mortgage-backed securities and other (now deemed toxic) financial products were fundamentally sound. They were new tools that served a market need for the world’s most sophisticated investors,

“A lot of people don’t realize that what happened in 2008 was nearly identical to what happened in 1929,” he says. “Depositors ran to the bank to withdraw their money only to discover, like the citizens of Bedford Falls” — referring to the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” — “that there was no money in the vault. All that money had been lent.”

In 2008 it was large pension funds, insurance companies and other huge institutional investors that withdrew in panic. Conard argues in retrospect that it was these withdrawals that led to the crisis — not, as so many others have argued, an orgy of irresponsible lending

Conard concedes that the banks made some mistakes, but the important thing now, he says, is to provide them even stronger government support. He advocates creating a new government program that guarantees to bail out the banks if they ever face another run.

the central role of banks, Conard says, is to turn the short-term assets of nervous savers into risky long-term loans that help the economy grow.

A central problem with the U.S. economy, he told me, is finding a way to get more people to look for solutions despite these terrible odds of success. Conard’s solution is simple. Society benefits if the successful risk takers get a lot of money

As Conard told me, one of the crucial lessons he learned at Bain is that it makes no sense to look for easy solutions. In a competitive market, all that’s left are the truly hard puzzles. And they require extraordinary resources. While we often hear about the greatest successes — penicillin, the iPhone — we rarely hear about the countless failures and the people and companies who financed them.

we live longer, healthier and richer lives because of countless microimprovements like that one. The people looking for them, Conard likes to point out, are not only computer programmers, engineers and scientists. They are also wealthy investors like him

He said the only way to persuade these “art-history majors” to join the fiercely competitive economic mechanism is to tempt them with extraordinary payoffs.

When I look around, I see a world of unrealized opportunities for improvements, an abundance of talented people able to take the risks necessary to make improvements but a shortage of people and investors willing to take those risks. That doesn’t indicate to me that risk takers, as a whole, are overpaid. Quite the opposite.” The wealth concentrated at the top should be twice as large, he said. That way, the art-history majors would feel compelled to try to join them.

Rather than simply serving as an invitation for everybody to engage in potentially beneficial risk-taking, inequality can allow those with wealth to crush new ideas.

Unlike Romney, Conard rejects the notion that America has “some monopoly on hard work or entrepreneurship.” “I think it’s simple economics,” he said. “If the payoff for risk-taking is better, people will take more risks

Conard sees the success of the U.S. economy as, in part, the result of a series of historic accidents. Most recently, the coincidence of Roe v. Wade and the late 1970s economic malaise allowed Ronald Reagan to unify social conservatives and free-market advocates and set the country on a pro-investment path for decades. Europeans, he says, made all the wrong decisions. Concern about promoting equality and protecting favored industries have led to onerous work rules, higher taxes and all sorts of social programs that keep them poorer than Americans.

Now we’re at a particularly crucial moment, he writes. Technology and global competition have made it more important than ever that the United States remain the world’s most productive, risk-taking, success-rewarding society. Obama, Conard says, is “going to dampen the incentives.” Even worse, Conard says, “he’s slowing the accumulation of equity” by fighting income inequality.

Conard’s book addresses what is perhaps the most important question in economics, the one Adam Smith set out to answer in “The Wealth of Nations”: Why do some countries grow so rich and others stay poor? Where you come down on the answer has as much to do with your politics as your economic worldview (two things that can often be the same)

Nearly every economist I spoke with said that Conard has too much faith in the market’s ability to reward only those who create real value. Conard, for instance, insists that even the dodgiest financial products must have been beneficial or else nobody would have bought them in the first place. If a Wall Street trader or a corporate chief executive is filthy rich, Conard says that the merciless process of economic selection has assured that they have somehow benefited society. Even pro-market Romney supporters take issue with this. “Ed ought to be more concerned about crony capitalism,” Hubbard told me.

“Unintended Consequences” ignores some of the most important economic work of the past few decades, about how power and politics influence economic growth. In technical language, this field is the study of “rent seeking,” in which people or companies get rich because of their power, not because of their ideas.

wealthy individuals and corporations are able to influence politicians and regulators to make seemingly insignificant changes to regulations that benefit themselves. In other words, to rig the game

Conard’s version of the financial crisis ignores much reporting and analysis — including work I’ve done with NPR’s “Planet Money” team — that shows that some of the nation’s largest banks actively manipulated customers and regulators and, sometimes, their own stockholders to profit from dangerous risk

he expressed anger over the praise that Warren Buffett has received for pledging billions of his fortune to charity. It was no sacrifice, Conard argued; Buffett still has plenty left over to lead his normal quality of life. By taking billions out of productive investment, he was depriving the middle class of the potential of its 20-to-1 benefits. If anyone was sacrificing, it was those people. “Quit taking a victory lap,” he said, referring to Buffett. “That money was for the middle class.”

Perhaps concentrated wealth will inspire a nation of innovative problem-solvers. But if the view of many economists is right — that it sometimes discourages innovation — then we should worry

on this one he resorted to anecdotes and gut feelings. During his work at Bain, he said, he saw that successful companies had to battle against one another. Nobody was just given a free ride because of their power. “Was a person, like me, excluded from opportunity?” he asked rhetorically. “If so, I wasn’t aware!”

both could be true. The rich could earn a great deal of wealth through their own hard work, skill and luck. They could also use their subsequent influence to make themselves even richer

One of the great political and economic challenges of our time is figuring out the balance between wealth that benefits society and wealth that distorts.

Glenn Hubbard said only that at a broad level, Romney and Conard share “beliefs about innovation and growth and responsible risk-taking.”

Conard and Romney certainly share views on numerous policy matters. Like many Republicans, they promote lower taxes and less regulation for those who achieve financial succes

The economics community just hasn't spent much time over the past couple of decades focusing on the effect that machine intelligence is likely to have on the labor marke

The Digital Revolution is different because computers can perform cognitive tasks too, and that means machines will eventually be able to run themselves. When that happens, they won't just put individuals out of work temporarily. Entire classes of workers will be out of work permanently. In other words, the Luddites weren't wrong. They were just 200 years too early

while it's easy to believe that some jobs can never be done by machines—do the elderly really want to be tended by robots?—that may not be true.

Robotic pets are growing so popular that Sherry Turkle, an MIT professor who studies the way we interact with technology, is uneasy about it: "The idea of some kind of artificial companionship," she says, "is already becoming the new normal."

robots will take over more and more jobs. And guess who will own all these robots? People with money, of course. As this happens, capital will become ever more powerful and labor will become ever more worthless. Those without money—most of us—will live on whatever crumbs the owners of capital allow us.

Economist Paul Krugman recently remarked that our long-standing belief in skills and education as the keys to financial success may well be outdated. In a blog post titled "Rise of the Robots," he reviewed some recent economic data and predicted that we're entering an era where the prime cause of income inequality will be something else entirely: capital vs. labor.

We're already seeing them, and not just because of the crash of 2008. They started showing up in the statistics more than a decade ago. For a while, though, they were masked by the dot-com and housing bubbles, so when the financial crisis hit, years' worth of decline was compressed into 24 months. The trend lines dropped off the cliff.

In the economics literature, the increase in the share of income going to capital owners is known as capital-biased technological change

The question we want to answer is simple: If CBTC is already happening—not a lot, but just a little bit—what trends would we expect to see? What are the signs of a computer-driven economy?

if automation were displacing labor, we'd expect to see a steady decline in the share of the population that's employed.

Second, we'd expect to see fewer job openings than in the past.

Third, as more people compete for fewer jobs, we'd expect to see middle-class incomes flatten in a race to the bottom.

There will be no place to go but the unemployment line.

Fifth, as a result of all this, we'd expect to see labor's share of national income decline and capital's share rise.

Fourth, with consumption stagnant, we'd expect to see corporations stockpile more cash and, fearing weaker sales, invest less in new products and new factories

The next step might be passenger vehicles on fixed routes, like airport shuttles. Then long-haul trucks. Then buses and taxis. There are 2.5 million workers who drive trucks, buses, and taxis for a living, and there's a good chance that, one by one, all of them will be displaced

in another sense, we should be very alarmed. It's one thing to suggest that robots are going to cause mass unemployment starting in 2030 or so. We'd have some time to come to grips with that. But the evidence suggests that—slowly, haltingly—it's happening already, and we're simply not prepared for it.

the first jobs to go will be middle-skill jobs. Despite impressive advances, robots still don't have the dexterity to perform many common kinds of manual labor that are simple for humans—digging ditches, changing bedpans. Nor are they any good at jobs that require a lot of cognitive skill—teaching classes, writing magazine articles

in the middle you have jobs that are both fairly routine and require no manual dexterity. So that may be where the hollowing out starts: with desk jobs in places like accounting or customer support.

In fact, there's even a digital sports writer. It's true that a human being wrote this story—ask my mother if you're not sure—but in a decade or two I might be out of a job too

Doctors should probably be worried as well. Remember Watson, the Jeopardy!-playing computer? It's now being fed millions of pages of medical information so that it can help physicians do a better job of diagnosing diseases. In another decade, there's a good chance that Watson will be able to do this without any human help at all.

Take driverless cars.

Most likely, owners of capital would strongly resist higher taxes, as they always have, while workers would be unhappy with their enforced idleness. Still, the ancient Romans managed to get used to it—with slave labor playing the role of robots—and we might have to, as well.

There will be no place to go but the unemployment lin

we'll need to let go of some familiar convictions. Left-leaning observers may continue to think that stagnating incomes can be improved with better education and equality of opportunity. Conservatives will continue to insist that people without jobs are lazy bums who shouldn't be coddled. They'll both be wrong.

Corporate executives should worry too. For a while, everything will seem great for them: Falling labor costs will produce heftier profits and bigger bonuses. But then it will all come crashing down. After all, robots might be able to produce goods and services, but they can't consume them

we'll probably have only a few options open to us. The simplest, because it's relatively familiar, is to tax capital at high rates and use the money to support displaced workers. In other words, as The Economist's Ryan Avent puts it, "redistribution, and a lot of it."

would we be happy in a society that offers real work to a dwindling few and bread and circuses for the rest?

The modern economy is complex, and most of these trends have multiple causes.

 economist Noah Smith suggests that we might have to fundamentally change the way we think about how we share economic growth. Right now, he points out, everyone is born with an endowment of labor by virtue of having a body and a brain that can be traded for income. But what to do when that endowment is worth a fraction of what it is today? Smith's suggestion: "Why not also an endowment of capital? What if, when each citizen turns 18, the government bought him or her a diversified portfolio of equity?"

In simple terms, if owners of capital are capturing an increasing fraction of national income, then that capital needs to be shared more widely if we want to maintain a middle-class society.

it's time to start thinking about our automated future in earnest. The history of mass economic displacement isn't encouraging—fascists in the '20s, Nazis in the '30s—and recent high levels of unemployment in Greece and Italy have already produced rioting in the streets and larger followings for right-wing populist parties. And that's after only a few years of misery.

When the robot revolution finally starts to happen, it's going to happen fast, and it's going to turn our world upside down. It's easy to joke about our future robot overlords—R2-D2 or the Terminator?—but the challenge that machine intelligence presents really isn't science fiction anymore. Like Lake Michigan with an inch of water in it, it's happening around us right now even if it's hard to see

A robotic paradise of leisure and contemplation eventually awaits us, but we have a long and dimly lit tunnel to navigate before we get there.

The absence of a liberal state has been matched by the absence of a liberal economy. After independence, the prevailing orthodoxy was central planning, often Soviet-inspired. Anti-market, anti-trade, pro-subsidy and pro-regulation, Arab governments strangled their economies.

only the Arabs can reverse their civilisational decline, and right now there is little hope of that happening. The extremists offer none. The mantra of the monarchs and the military men is “stability”. In a time of chaos, its appeal is understandable, but repression and stagnation are not the solution.

ultimately fanatics devour themselves. Meanwhile, wherever possible, the moderate, secular Sunnis who comprise the majority of Arab Muslims need to make their voices heard. And when their moment comes, they need to cast their minds back to the values that once made the Arab world great. Education underpinned its primacy in medicine, mathematics, architecture and astronomy. Trade paid for its fabulous metropolises and their spices and silks. And, at its best, the Arab world was a cosmopolitan haven for Jews, Christians and Muslims of many sects, where tolerance fostered creativity and invention.

“It’s really important that this not play out in a conflictual way, because that will be destabilizing for the entire global economy,” he said. “It’s going to be important to try to entice China into the global framework that countries agree on…in which China changes some of its trading practices and there’s also accommodation to some of its legitimate economic goals.”

Mr Cowen's view of dispassionate progress in macroeconomics is just not how things usually work. In the 1970s it was not the case, for example, that rival macroeconomic camps settled their differences, then alerted the world of the new consensus so it could be acted upon. Instead you had bitterly divided academics; you had a political ideology which saw some things it liked in one of the camps, which made those things a part of a successful political programme, and which took a policy gamble; and that gamble created new evidence which informed (though by no means settled) the debate over how inflation and monetary policy and expectations all work. The same thing happened in the 1930s. And in the 1980s, when the original voodoo economics had its day in the sun.

Economists might not like it, but this is how the world will find its way out of the current mess. Not by the calm resolution of disagreements between Larry Summers and John Cochrane, but by the increasing politicisation of a set of radical economic ideas, of one sort or another, which eventually find their way into the practical political programme of a party with a mandate to govern.

And then they'll do what they do and we will learn something about who was right and who was wrong, and a few economists will change their minds, but most will find a way to tweak their old models so that the new evidence looks like an affirmation of what they believed all along.

So what does that tell us about how macroeconomists ought to behave? Well, as scientists, they have an obligation to state their hypotheses as clearly as possible, to make testable predictions whenever possible, and to be rigorous and transparent in gathering evidence to support or falsify those predictions

But macroeconomics is also inherently political, and the practitioners who seek to "politicise" their ideas and make them a political reality play as vital a role in the advancement of the field as the scrupulously apolitical academics

Free tutorial videos on platforms like Google-owned YouTube will also mitigate negative effects of the tight labor market,

“We never had a technology before that could educate such a broad group of people any time on an as-needed basis for free,”

Jobs where one person is doing the same, routine task over and over again, in an automobile-manufacturing assembly line, for example, will be the first to be automated, he said. “If you look at environments that don’t have those characteristics, then the possibilities of automation become much more problematic,”

Analysts at Forrester Research Inc. predict that over the next five years, about 4 million jobs will be lost in the U.S. as a result of artificial intelligence and related technology, including software robots.

Gartner Inc. has said that artificial intelligence will create 2.3 million jobs in 2020, while eliminating 1.8 million.

“If you want to see what the future looks like in an extreme case, go to Japan, where there are vending machines that are providing so many things because of the shortage of labor,” he said.

“The line in Silicon Valley is, ‘We always overestimate the amount of change that can occur in a year and we underestimate what can occur in a decade,’” he said. “So I think that’s a very good principle to keep in mind.”

Acemoglu and Robinson outline a theory of how economic and political institutions shape the fate of human societies. They reinterpret the rise and fall of civilizations throughout history, showing how differences in institutions interact with changing circumstances to produce development or stagnation.

It also has implications for the contemporary United States, where increasing inequality and the growing influence of money in politics threaten to reshape our political institutions.

In more fortunate countries, pluralistic political institutions prevent any one group from monopolizing resources for itself, while free markets empower a large class of people with an interest in defending the current system against absolutism. This virtuous circle, which first took form in seventeenth-century England, is the secret to economic growth.

Economic institutions are themselves the products of political processes, which depend on political institutions. These can also be extractive, if they enable an elite to maintain its dominance over society, or inclusive, if many groups have access to the political process. Poverty is not an accident: "[P]oor countries are poor because those who have power make choices that create poverty." Therefore, Acemoglu and Robinson argue, it is ultimately politics that matters.

The logic of extractive and inclusive institutions explains why growth is not foreordained. Where a cohesive elite can use its political dominance to get rich at the expense of ordinary people, it has no need for markets and free enterprise, which can create political competitors. In addition, because control of the state can be highly lucrative, infighting among contenders for power produces instability and violence. This vicious circle keeps societies poor

Countries differ in their economic success because of their different institutions, the rules influencing how the economy works, and the incentives that motivate people," write Acemoglu and Robinson. Extractive institutions, whether feudalism in medieval Europe or the use of schoolchildren to harvest cotton in contemporary Uzbekistan, transfer wealth from the masses to elites. In contrast, inclusive institutions -- based on property rights, the rule of law, equal provision of public services, and free economic choices -- create incentives for citizens to gain skills, make capital investments, and pursue technological innovation, all of which increase productivity and generate wealth.

Acemoglu and Robinson differentiate their account from alternatives that they label the "culture," "geography," and "ignorance" hypotheses.

An example of the first is Max Weber's famous argument that Calvinism lay at the roots of capitalist development

the best-known recent example of the second is Jared Diamond's explanation of the Spanish Conquest as the inevitable outcome of geographic differences between Eurasia and the Americas.

Most economists, Acemoglu and Robinson assert, subscribe to the ignorance hypothesis, according to which "poor countries are poor because they have a lot of market failures and because economists and policymakers do not know how to get rid of them." According to this view, development can be engineered through technocratic policies administered by enlightened experts.

this focus on policy obscures the fundamental importance of politics.

Their perspective is informed by New Institutional Economics, an approach developed in the last quarter of the twentieth century, and associated with prominent economists such as Douglass North and Oliver Williamson, that focuses on how economic forces are mediated by institutions such as political systems and legal codes

A state based on extractive institutions, whether the Kuba Kingdom of seventeenth-century Central Africa or more recently the Soviet Union, can generate growth, especially when starting from low levels of development. But in most of these cases, the ruling elite is unwilling to allow inclusive economic institutions because they would threaten its political supremacy; the inevitable result is economic stagnation.

This leaves open the question of why some societies end up with inclusive rather than extractive institutions -- why some are rich and some are poor. The answer, according to Acemoglu and Robinson, is that institutions evolve -- and that history is messy.

Institutions change in subtle ways over time, allowing societies to drift apart. When major shocks occur, small differences in institutions can send societies down vastly different historical paths.

Early modern England, France, and Spain were all feudal societies with power-hungry monarchs. But the English Parliament had slightly more power than its continental relatives; as a result, the crown was unable to monopolize trade with the Americas, which made many merchants rich instead; in turn, this new commercial class became an important part of the coalition that overthrew James II in 1688, successfully fighting off absolutism. In Spain, by contrast, the monarchy controlled overseas trade, quashed internal challenges to its authority, and maintained extractive economic institutions -- and the country went into long-term decline. Crucially, Acemoglu and Robinson remind us that these outcomes were not preordained. James II might have suppressed the Glorious Revolution, or the Spanish Armada might have succeeded a century earlier. History is like that.

In this light, the material prosperity of the modern world, unevenly distributed though it is, is a fortunate historical accident.

But inclusive institutions can also break down. In the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, a small group of families transformed Venice's semi-democratic institutions into a hereditary aristocracy and then monopolized long-distance trade, spelling the end of the city-state's economic expansion

Acemoglu and Robinson, by contrast, examine why nations fail. Societies, in their telling, are like Tolstoy's families: The success stories are similar -- pluralist democracies with regulated capitalist economies -- but failure comes in different forms. There are many ways in which elites can impose extractive institutions that cripple economic development.

The United States is one of the happy families of Why Nations Fail. Although our institutions have often been deeply flawed, Acemoglu and Robinson show how crucial moments in history, from Jamestown to the Progressive Era to the civil-rights movement, have led to the expansion of political democracy and economic opportunity.

Rather than as a series of inevitable triumphs, however, this history can also be seen as a warning -- that our institutions are fragile, always at risk of being subverted by elites seeking to exploit political power for their narrow economic ends. That risk has reappeared today.

The power of the financial sector is only one example of the broader threat to our inclusive political institutions: namely, the ability of the economic elite to translate their enormous fortunes directly into political power. In the wake of the Supreme Court's 2010 decision in Citizens United, super PACs can mobilize unlimited amounts of money--and can accept contributions from 501(c)4 organizations, which do not have to identify their donors.

This may seem like a level playing field. But money is not distributed evenly. American Crossroads, for example, has consistently raised more than 90 percent of its funds from billionaires (with a "b"). The recent, breathtaking rise in inequality has put unprecedented resources at the disposal of the super-rich. With the ability to secretly invest unlimited sums in political activities, they now have the opportunity to swamp all other participants in American politics.

Rising inequality and deregulation of political spending have made possible a new kind of class warfare. The 1 percent can blanket the airwaves, install their chosen representatives, and sway public policy in their favor.

The most direct way to translate political power into cold, hard cash is to advocate for lower taxes. Republican presidential candidates spent the past year competing to offer the most bountiful tax cuts to the super-rich

Showering goodies on the rich would require draconian cuts to Social Security and Medicare -- programs that are popular among the Tea Party rank and file. Republicans' current anti-tax orthodoxy reflects the interests of their wealthy funders rather than their middle-income base.

As Warren Buffett observed, "there's been class warfare going on for the last twenty years, and my class has won." This should be little surprise: "My side has had the nuclear bomb. We've got K Street, we've got lobbyists, we've got money on our side."

Supreme Court justices appointed by Republican presidents were instrumental in unleashing unlimited corporate political spending in Citizens United, accelerating the concentration of political power in the hands of the super-rich.

The most potent bulwark of inclusive institutions is probably the rich variety of influential interest groups that all have the ability to participate in politics. Still, the accumulation of huge fortunes and their deployment for political ends has changed the nature of our political institutions. Funding by the economic elite is a major reason why Republicans advocate transfers from ordinary people to the rich in the form of tax cuts and reductions in government services -- and why Democrats have been dragged to the right along with the GOP

Acemoglu recently said, "We need noisy grassroots movements to deliver a shock to the political system," citing both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street as potentially helpful developments. As he recognized, however, the one with more staying power -- the Tea Party -- has been co-opted by well-funded, elite-dominated groups (including Americans for Prosperity). If a popular movement can be bankrolled as easily as an attack ad, it is hard to see what money can't buy in politics. The next test for America will be whether our political system can fend off the power of money and remain something resembling a real democracy -- or whether it will become a playground where a privileged elite works out its internal squabbles.

The 2019 study warned otherwise — specifically urging Americans not to conflate the risks of a typical flu and a pandemic.

The existence of that warning undermines administration officials’ contentions in recent weeks that no one could have seen the virus damaging the economy as it has.

One of the authors of the study, who has since left the White House, now says it would make sense for the administration to effectively shut down most economic activity for two to eight months to slow the virus.

Government officials estimated Tuesday that the deadly pathogen could kill between 100,000 and 240,000 Americans.

it is unclear how the White House is tallying the potential benefits and costs — in dollar figures and human lives — of competing timetables for action.

The director of the National Economic Council, Larry Kudlow, told ABC News on Sunday that “it could be four weeks, it could be eight weeks” before economic activity resumes. “I say that hopefully,”

seeks to determine the optimal length of a national suppression of economic activity,

“I don’t think corona is as big a threat as people make it out to be,” the acting chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Tomas Philipson, told reporters during a Feb. 18 briefing, on the same day that more than a dozen American cruise ship passengers who had contracted the virus were evacuated home

In a best-case scenario, Ms. Scherbina concludes, a national suppression of economic activity to flatten the infection curve must last at least seven weeks.

In a worst case, where the shutdown proves less effective at slowing the rate of new infections, it would be economically optimal to keep the economy shuttered for nearly eight months.

Suppression efforts inflict considerable damage on the economy, reducing activity by about $36 billion per week, the study estimates. Ms. Scherbina said the optimal durations would remain largely unchanged even if the weekly damage was twice that high.

But the efforts would save nearly two million lives when compared with a scenario in which the government did nothing to suppress the economy and the spread of the virus

doing nothing would impose a $13 trillion cost to the economy — equal to about two-thirds of the amount of economic activity that the United States was projected to generate this year

Ms. Scherbina based her estimates on the models she built when she was a senior economist at the Council of Economic Advisers and the lead author of the September paper, “Mitigating the Impact of Pandemic Influenza Through Vaccine Innovation,

The 2019 White House study called for new federal efforts to speed up the time it takes to develop and deploy new vaccines

At even the highest rates it modeled, the pandemic flu in the exercise was still less contagious and less deadly than epidemiologists now say the coronavirus could be in the United States

It assigned a value of $12.3 million per life for Americans between the ages of 18 and 49, compared with $5.3 million for those 65 and over.

Mr. Philipson, whose academic specialty is health economics, was the acting head of the council when the September report was published