J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 31

Papanikolaou & Schmidt: The Supply-Side Impact of COVID-19���Noted

Dimitris Papanikolaou & Lawrence D.W. Schmidt: The Supply-Side Impact of COVID-19 https://voxeu.org/article/supply-side-impact-covid-19: ���COVID-19 has massively disrupted the supply side of the world economy, shutting down entire industries.... While the major policy interventions in the US have treated all types of business as equivalent, industries which are not able to do their work remotely have been hit much harder than business that can. This cross-sectional dispersion shows up across a variety of measures, including changes in employment, revenue projections, likelihood of default, current liquidity, and stock returns. Going forward, aid that targets disrupted sectors may be a more cost-effective means to alleviate the impacts of COVID-19��� .#noted #2020-07-24

No Senator Doing His or Her Job Would Vote for Judy Shelton For Fed Governor���Hoisted from the Archives

That any Republican senators at all are thinking of voting for Judy Shelton���a woman views whom Milton Friedman dismissed by saying "it would be hard to pack more error into so few words"���for a Fed Governor position reveals an astonishing lack of spine. Yet the Senate Banking Committee chair appears to be attempting to advance her nomination on Tuesday:

Hoisted from the Archives: Shelton the Charlatan https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/03/shelton-the-charlatan-project-syndicate.html: In 1994 Milton Friedman wrote about Judy Shelton: "In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed piece (July 15)... Judy Shelton started her concluding paragraph: ���Until the U.S. begins standing up once more for stable exchange rates as the starting point for free trade...��� It would be hard to pack more error into so few words.... A system of pegged exchange rates, such as the original IMF system or the European Monetary System, is an enemy to free trade. It is no accident that the 1992 collapse of the EMS coincided with the agreement to remove controls on the movement of capital..." https://miltonfriedman.hoover.org/friedman_images/Collections/2016c21/NR_09_12_1994.pdf. To turn monetary policy away from internal balance toward preventing exchange rate movements that market fundamentals wanted to see occur was, in Friedman's view, the road toward disaster. It was simply wrong. And it could be held together only if economies moved from free trade back toward managed trade���and so beggared not just their neighbors but themselves.

Two and a half decades later, today's Judy Shelton seems no freer from error, but to it has added an enormous amount of incoherence. There is no consistent thread of argument in what she says. She is, rather, a weathervane pointing in the direction of whatever political wind she thinks likely to get her her next job. Last year she said that the Federal Reserve should be careful not to do anything to curb stock prices: "More than half of American households are invested through mutual funds or pension funds in this market. I don���t want the Fed to pull the rug out from under them..." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-05/trump-fed-pick-shelton-says-central-bank-should-support-markets. But in 2016���when unemployment was higher and the case for easy money stronger���it was the Fed's "appeasing financial markets" that was the thing to be avoided https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/yes-trumps-latest-fed-pick-is-that-bad-heres-why/2020/02/10/a13fa1ec-4c44-11ea-9b5c-eac5b16dafaa_story.html. Back then under the Obama administration when there were lots of unemployed workers who could be put to work producing exports, policies to produce a weaker dollar to boost exports were to be shunned: "The obvious quick route to export success for any nation is to depreciate its currency. Dollar depreciation is already being pushed by the Obama administration.... Let's not compromise our currency in a misguided attempt to boost U.S. job growth. America's best future is forged through sound finances and sound money..." https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704698004576104260981772424. These days "compromising the currency" is a plus from the interest-rate cuts she wants to see https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trumps-fed-choice-judy-shelton-says-interest-rate-cut-needed-because-europe-is-set-to-devalue-euro-2019-07-05. Today monetary policy should be made looser "as expeditiously as possible" https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/06/19/fed-meets-trumps-potential-next-pick-wants-see-lower-rates-fast-possible. Back then "loose monetary policy... leads to internal bankruptcy... whole nations have foundered on this path..." https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123742149749078635.

Catherine Rampell https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/yes-trumps-latest-fed-pick-is-that-bad-heres-why/2020/02/10/a13fa1ec-4c44-11ea-9b5c-eac5b16dafaa_story.html earlier this month correctly called Judy Shelton "an opportunist and a quack", and reported that Republican senators think she is not qualified.

Kevin Cramer (R-ND) said: "I wouldn't want five [Fed Board] members like her".

Thom Tillis (R-NC) said that her views on the gold standard do not matter because return to the gold standard is off the table.

Tim Scott (R-SC) agreed with Tillis, stating that "controversial statements" were "not relevant".

Pat Toomey (R-PA) worried about the "very, very dangerous path to go down" she advocated. Richard Shelby (R-AL) was "concerned".

John Kennedy (R-LA) said: "Nobody wants anybody on the Federal Reserve that has a fatal attraction to nutty ideas" https://www.wsj.com/articles/republican-senator-raises-concerns-over-sheltons-fed-candidacy-11581608467?mod=hp_major_pos1.

But the Wall Street Journal editorial board has decided to back Judy Shelton's "more error packed into so so few words" over Milton Friedman by praising her as a believer that "monetary policies that ignore exchange-rate stability wreak political and economic havoc". Trump wants Judy Shelton on the Fed Board so he can threaten to���and possibly actually���replace Jay Powell with her as chair. If we have learned anything over the past three years, it is that furrowed brows of concern from Republican senators are worth precisely nothing. John Kennedy (R-LA) followed his furrowed brow by saying "I���m not saying that���s the case here". Mike Crapo (R-ID) praised her "deep knowledge of democracy, economic theory and monetary policy", and denounced the "war on Judy Shelton".

If Republican senators are going to save the country from yet another Trump misstep that makes America less great, first core Republican supporters have to step up and give their senators 53 spine transplants.

.#highlighted #hoistedfromthearchives #monetarypolicy #orangehairedbaboons #moralresponsibility #2020-07-20


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Patrick Henry: 'Would Any One Believe That I Am Master Of Slaves by My Own Purchase?"���Noted

Via Steve Marglin, Patrick "Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!" Henry: Patrick Henry: To Antislavery Activist Joseph Alsop: 'Is it not amazing that at a time when the rights of humanity are defined and understood with precision, in a country, above all others, fond of liberty���that in such an age and such a country we find men professing a religion the most humane, mild, meek, gentle and generous, adopting a principle [slavery] as repugnant to humanity as it is inconsistent with the Bible and destructive to liberty? Every thinking, honest man rejects it in speculation. How few, in practice, from conscientious motives!... Would any one believe that I am master of slaves by my own purchase? I am drawn along by the general inconvenience of living without them. I will not���I cannot justify it, however culpable my conduct. I will so far pay my devoir to Virtue, as to own the excellence and rectitude of her precepts, and to lament my want of conformity to them. I believe a time will come when an opportunity will be afforded to abolish this lamentable evil. Everything we can do, is to improve it, if It happens in our day; if not, let us transmit to our descendants, together with our slaves, a pity for their unhappy lot, and an abhorrence of Slavery. If we cannot reduce this wished-for reformation to practice, let us treat the unhappy victims with lenity. It is the furthest advancement we can make toward justice. It is a debt we owe to the purity of our religion, to show that it is at variance with that law which warrants Slavery... .#noted #2020-07-19

Gaius Julius Caesar Pleads Against Norm-Breaking���Weekend Reading

Julius Caesar (-63): ���All human beings who debate on matters of uncertainty, conscripted fathers, ought to be free from hatred, enmity, anger, and pity. The mind cannot easily see the truth when those emotions get in 2 the way, and no one has ever been simultaneously governed by the demands of his desire and by practical considerations. Wherever you apply your intelligence, it prevails; but, if passion takes over, it becomes master, and the mind is powerless...

...I can recount many examples, conscripted fathers, of bad decisions made by kings and peoples under the influence of anger or pity. But I prefer to speak of decisions made correctly and orderly by our ancestors when they resisted their hearts��� desires.

In the Macedonian War* which we waged with King Perses, the great and opulent state of Rhodes, which had benefited from Roman wealth, treacherously turned against us. But, after the war was over and we took up the matter of the Rhodians��� actions, our ancestors let them go unpunished, lest anyone say that we had started the war more for money than from injury.

Likewise in all the Punic Wars, though the Carthaginians had often committed many horrible crimes both in peace and under truces, our ancestors never reciprocated when they had the opportunity: they preferred to ask what was worthy of them, not what they could justifiably do.

You, likewise, must use the same prudential wisdom, conscripted fathers. The crime of P. Lentulus and the others should not have more weight with you than your own dignity, and you should not consider your anger more important than your reputation. For, if the penalty can be found that their deeds deserve, I could approve of an unprecedented course. But, if the enormity of their crime exceeds our ingenuity, then I say we must use the penalties already established by law.

Most of those who have given their opinions before me have lamented with great eloquence and grandeur the misfortunes of the Republic. They have listed the savage acts of war, the afflictions of the conquered: the rape of girls and boys; children torn from the arms of their parents; matrons yielding to whatever the conqueror desired; shrines and homes plundered; slaughter, arson; in short, everything filled with weapons, corpses, blood, and grief.

But, by the immortal gods, what is the purpose of those speeches? Is it to make you oppose the conspiracy? Do you suppose that a speech will energize someone who is not moved by the enormity and cruelty of the facts? Not true: no mortal thinks his own injuries are small; for many they seem greater than is fair. But not everyone has the same freedom of action, conscripted fathers. If the humble who have a life in obscurity become enraged and commit an offence, few know; their fame and their wealth are the same. But the actions of those who are endowed with great power and who live exalted lives are known by all mankind. And so, in the greatest good fortune there is the least licence; neither zealous partiality nor hatred is appropriate, but least of all rage. What is called anger in others, is named arrogance and cruelty in the powerful.

And so this is my assessment, conscripted fathers: no torture is equal to the crimes they have committed. But generally men remember the most recent events, and even in the case of execrable men, if the punishment is unusually severe, they forget the crimes and talk about the punishment.

I am quite certain that D. Silanus, a brave and energetic man, said what he said with the state���s interests in mind, and that in a matter of such importance he shows neither favour nor malice: I know his character and his composure. But it seems to me his proposal is not so much cruel���what could be cruel against such men?���as it is alien to our Republic. I am sure that either fear or injustice has forced you, Silanus, a consul designate, to propose an unprecedented punishment.

As for fear, there is not much to say, especially since we have so many guards under arms thanks to the diligence of our consul, a most distinguished man. But concerning the penalty I can speak to the point: in times of grief and affliction death is not a torture but a release from misery. It puts an end to all mortal woes; and beyond that neither anxiety nor joy has any place.

But why, in the name of the immortal gods, didn���t you add to your proposal that they should first be whipped? Is it because the lex Porcia forbids it? But there are other laws that similarly forbid taking the life of a condemned citizen; they allow exile.

Or, is it because flogging is worse than death? But what punishment could be too harsh for men convicted of such a crime?

On the other hand, if flogging is less severe than death, why fear the law that forbids the lesser punishment, when you neglect the law that forbids the harsher punishment?

But, one might say, who will criticize any decree against the assassins of the Republic? I���ll tell you: time, events, fortune, whose pleasure governs the world. Whatever happens to those men, they have earned it; but you, conscripted fathers, think about the example you are setting for others. Every bad precedent arose from a good case. But when power slips into the hands of those who don���t understand it or those less well intentioned, then that new precedent is no longer appropriately applied to those who deserve it but inappropriately to those who don���t.

The Lacedaemonians, after they conquered the Athenians, imposed the rule of thirty men. At first, they began to put to death without trial all the most wicked and those whom everyone hated. The populace was delighted and they said it was the right thing to do. Afterwards, as their licence to act gradually increased, they began to kill at will good and bad men alike; the rest they frightened and terrified. Thus, the citizen body was reduced to slavery and paid a heavy penalty for their foolish delight.

In our own memory, when Sulla ordered the strangulation of Damasippus and others like him who flourished to the detriment of the state, who did not praise his actions? People were saying they deserved it, that he killed criminals and insurgents, men who had threatened the government with seditious revolt. But this action was the beginning of a great slaughter. For whenever someone coveted another man���s home or villa, or eventually even his dishes or clothes, he would try to get the man proscribed. And soon after those who were delighted at the death of Damasippus were themselves being dragged away and there was no end of carnage until Sulla had glutted all his followers with riches.

Now, I don���t fear these consequences from M. Tullius nor do I fear them at this time, but in a great city there are many different temperaments. It is possible that at some other time, when another man is consul and also has an army at his disposal, a lie will be taken for the truth. When this precedent allows the consul by the decree of the Senate to draw his sword, who will stop or restrain him?

Our ancestors, conscripted fathers, were never lacking in intelligence or daring, but neither did their pride prevent them from adopting foreign institutions, provided that they were good institutions. They took our offensive and defensive military weapons from the Samnites;* most of the symbols of civil authority from the Etruscans. They were very eager, in short, to adopt at home whatever seemed to work among our allies or our enemies: they would rather copy what was good than envy it.

But at the same time they imitated the Greek custom* of flogging citizens and executing condemned men.

After the Republic reached maturity and, because of its size, factions prevailed, innocent men were convicted, and other similar abuses began to happen. Then, the lex Porcia and other laws were passed, laws that allowed exile for the condemned. This, I think, is an especially good reason, conscripted fathers, not to adopt a new policy. I am sure that the virtue and wisdom of those men who created such a great empire from small resources was greater than ours, who have difficulty holding on to what was honourably produced.

And so, is it my opinion that these men should be dismissed and Catiline���s army allowed to increase? Not at all. This is my proposal: their money should be confiscated; they should be held in chains in those towns that have the most resources. Thereafter, there should be no consultation about them before the Senate or referendum presented to the people. If anyone tries to change this arrangement, it is the Senate���s judgement that he will be acting against the interests of the state and against the safety of all...

From Gaius Sallustius Crispus: Cataline's Conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sallust

.#weekendreading #2020-07-17

Martha Wells Is Having too Much Fun Here...

Highly recommended. Martha Wells appears to have had an illegally large amount of fun writing this novel. Here a newly-created instantiation of Murderbot sets out on what is supposed to be a suicide mission: Martha Wells: Network Effect: A Murderbot Novel https://books.google.com/books?id=sBK_yAEACAAJ&dq=isbn:1250229863: 'I initiated a connection and put a freeze on the SecUnit���s governor module so nothing I did would accidentally trigger it. I could tell I had the Unit���s attention, that it knew somebody had initiated contact. I sent it an old company identifier.... After four long seconds, it replied: "System Unit Acknowledge: Identify?"... I said, "I���m a rogue SecUnit, working with the armed transport who is pursuing this ship with the intention of retrieving endangered clients. I am currently present as killware inside the explorer���s SecSystem." It didn���t reply. I can tell you as a SecUnit that under these circumstances this is just about the last thing you expect to hear. Also, SecUnits normally aren���t allowed to communicate with each other so it would be reluctant to drop protocol. I said, "There���s no protocol for any of this. Just talk to me". There was another three second pause. "I don���t know what to say". That was encouraging. (I���m actually not being sarcastic here���the last time I���d tried to talk a SecUnit into helping me, it had just gotten more determined to kill me. But it had been a CombatUnit and they���re a--holes.) I said, "Three of my clients are inside the compartment nearest you. Have you seen these others?"... #books #highlyrecommended #sciencefiction #2020-07-16

JEC: 'This Maxim Is Patently, Grossly Inadequate for Governing a Blog Comment Box... Let Alone... Public Reason & a Public Sphere'���Comment of the Day

Comment of the Day: JEC: 'This Maxim Is Patently, Grossly Inadequate for Governing a Blog Comment Box... Let Alone... Public Reason & a Public Sphere' https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/07/holbo-this-maxim-is-patently-grossly-inadequate-for-governing-a-blog-comment-box-let-alone-public-reason-a-public.html: ���"The question is where do you draw the line..." I agree, which is why it is irksome that the open letter refuses, point-blank, to engage with the nuances of line-drawing. The crucial sentence is this one: "Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal." The "arguments around the particulars" of real-world cases are the whole ballgame. Breezily dismissing mere specificities is gutless sophistry, and I think less of each individual careless enough to sign on to this shoddy piece of argumentation. (I'll note Paul Starr and David Frum, in particular.)... The open letter lacks the courage and intellectual honesty to name a single specific example of this happening. Instead, it treats us to a rather slippery series of hints and allusions which may bring to mind certain recent cases, without committing the signers to saying "This, this specific event, taking into account the totality of facts, was wrong." (And then, of course, it has the gumption to dismiss the relevance of its own pseudo-examples.) The letter is a complaint that a line���which it doesn't even attempt to define���has been crossed, on occasions it flatly refuses to name. It is, in a word, rubbish��� .#comment-of-the-day #2020-07-16

James Buchanan in the Context of Jim Tobin and Herman Wouk...

James Buchanan: https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/05/27/: ���I experienced overt discrimination for being a non-Easterner, a nonestablishmentarian. In the whole group of 600 boys, there were only about twenty who were graduates of Yale, Harvard, Princeton���all Ivy League. By the end of this first boot camp period, they had to select midshipman officers. Out of the 20 boys from the establishment universities, 12 or 13 were picked, against a background of a total of 600. It was overtly discriminatory towards those of us who were not members of the establishment.... From that day forward I have shared in the emotional damage imposed by discrimination, in any form, and "fairness" assumed for me a central normative position decades before I came to discuss principles of justice professionally and philosophically���'

Charles Steindel: 'One interesting thing in this material was Buchanan's groaning about how he was discriminated against in Navy Officer training relative to Yankee Ivy Leaguers. Herman Wouk's recent passing stirred me to reflect on this process. As was mildly fictionalized in the Caine Mutiny, Work was outstripped in his training class by none other than Jim Tobin. Yes, both Wouk and Tobin were northern 'Ivy Leaguers' (Wouk Columbia and Tobin Harvard). But the Jew from New York and the Irish kid from Illinois would surely not have seen themselves as more on the 'inside' than Buchanan who, after all, had the same name as (an admittedly wildly unsuccessful) US President...'

IMHO, what Buchanan is complaining about is this: Harvard and Columbia could and did turn people like Wouk and Tobin into effective WASPs by teaching them to turn down the accent and soft-pedal the Blarney and the Yiddishkeit. Middle Tennessee State Teachers College and the University of Tennessee were not in that business at all. Yet he got another chance in the navy���serving on Admiral Spruance's staff during World War II. But that was a chance he did not want to take.

Now, after spending World War II out in Hawaii on Admiral Spruance's staff and marrying Anne Bakke, a Norwegian-American nurse, and then getting your Ph.D. in 1948 at the University of Chicago���after that you have many options. You don't have to identify as a southerner, a governor's grandson, from a family whose land had been "ruined" by the Civil War. (Actually, land is hard to ruin: livestock, buildings, orchards, and most of all slaves can no longer be yours afterwards, but the land, its nutrients, the sun, and the rain are still there. Tobacco can ruin land. But not Sherman.) You could identify as whitish-bread American meritocrat���like Wouk and Tobin���who happened to have been born in the shallow south.

I don't know whether Buchanan thought that would have been a theft of his identity, or whether he would have taken that road if Buchanan's first jobs had been in Vermont and Wisconsin rather than Florida and Virginia.

Or maybe his complaints about discrimination against him were never reflective of any inner experienced reality: maybe they were just a con, an intellectual judo move���I'm not an oppressive Jim Crow-enforcing white establishment southerner���I'm being oppressed!���because being in the dominant race was a central part of his identity.

When one reads "From that day forward I have shared in the emotional damage imposed by discrimination..." and "'fairness' assumed for me a central normative position...", one does tend to expect it to be followed by "and so I marched with Martin Luther King, Jr.".

One does not expect it to be accompanied by "and so I worked hard to devise plans whereby Virginia's public-school tax collars could be diverted to segregation academies..."

It's hard for me to see and contemplate such a total lack of awareness of self and context.

.#class #ethnicity #equitablegrowth #racism #status #2020-07-16

Note to Self: The Norman Conquest...

Note to Self: English population at conquest 1.5 million. 15000 Normans brought over. 180 Norman barons (and 1800 subinfeudated knights) replace 3000 English landowners... Orderic Vitalis; Domesday Book .#notetoself #2020-07-16

Kaufman: Adorno & Duncan on Aesthetic Illusion and Sociopolitical Delusion���Noted

Robert Kaufman: Poetry's Ethics? Theodor W. Adorno & Robert Duncan on Aesthetic Illusion and Sociopolitical Delusion https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.berkeley.edu/stable/pdf/27669156.pdf: 'Probably the least bearable story my father told me���in June and July 1987, when we recorded almost thirteen hours of oral history during the last months of his life���was not one that I had expected would be the most difficult. But this story turned out to be���for me and, to all appearances, much more so for him���far worse than his recounting of other terrible incidents: beatings; a whipping administered by an SS man (in response to an allegation that my father had engaged in sabotage) that appeared as if it might be continued until death; the loss of a friend and political comrade at the very end of the death march from Auschwitz-Birkenau back to Germany that they had both, until then, somehow survived; and too many more to mention here, though all of the sort very commonly found in survivor narratives...

...As it happened, he began telling me this particular story on an afternoon when the tape recorder was momentarily not at hand, and it immediately became clear that he did not wish to stop and wait for me to retrieve it; nor was he going to want to tell the story again. It went as follows:

My father was in a boxcar filled with male prisoners. (I think I remember that it was the transport on which he came, in September 1944, to Auschwitz Birkenau from Theresienstadt, but I cannot be sure; it is possible that it was a transport traveling between camps inside Germany after the death march, in the winter or spring of 1945.) The car was crowded but not so packed that���as sometimes was the case���the bodies of those who had passed out could hardly fall, in many instances being instead held upright by the press of others around them.

Men who were sick, exhausted, or both dropped to the floor, not rising thereafter; those standing tried to conserve what strength they had to face whatever awaited them after the trip. At one point a man standing just beside my father, a stranger, collapsed onto the floor, where he lay quiet and motionless; like everyone else, my father looked straight ahead or upward. The configuration of those standing shifted, adjusting to the space opened by the man's fall.

After about twenty minutes, my father felt himself being pinched on the shin or calf. I remember my father telling me: It was the guy, he wanted with the pinch to tell me he was still alive. My father steadied himself, leaned down, and, lowering only one arm so he would not fall himself, managed to raise the man, who half leaned against my father and one or two others standing near them. My father remembered no words being exchanged. He said the man stumbled off the boxcar when the train reached its destination. He never saw the man again; he was sure the man did not survive.

I'm well aware, and I believe that my father had reason to be far more aware, of much that might be said for the ethics or humanity of this act in the face of the situation's hopelessness. But that would have been cold comfort for my father; actually, it would have been, and was, less: it was no comfort at all, for there was none to be found, and my father's exhibiting what looked like shame, anger, and disgust during his recounting of the incident was unlike almost anything else I saw in him during the making of the oral history or, for that matter, during the many occasions through the years when he spoke less formally about the war...

.#noted #2020-07-16

Barrero & _al._: COVID-19 & Labour Reallocation: Evidence from the US���Noted

Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, & Steven Davis: COVID-19 & Labour Reallocation: Evidence from the US https://voxeu.org/article/covid-19-and-labour-reallocation-evidence-us: ���there are large benefits to policies (and policy reforms) that facilitate a speedy reallocation of jobs, workers, and capital to newly productive uses in the wake of the pandemic. In contrast, policies that discourage and delay reallocation are likely to slow the recovery from the pandemic and the economic lockdown.... Millions of jobs lost during the pandemic recession are gone for good.... About 23% of layoffs during March-May 2020 were seen as permanent when they happened, with the rest seen as temporary. Historically, a sizeable share of layoffs regarded as temporary when they happen do not result in actual recalls.... We also quantify the reallocative aspects of the COVID-19 shock.... The pandemic caused... 2.5 new jobs created for every ten lost jobs.... To get at medium-term reallocative activity, we draw on firm-level forecasts.... Businesses��� expectations at a one-year forward horizon imply much more anticipated reallocation activity after the pandemic struck.... We find that full workdays performed at home will triple in the post-pandemic economy, rising from 5.5% of all workdays to 16.6%.... The COVID-19 pandemic is a major reallocation shock with persistent aspects. But what does this mean for policy? Historically, job and business creation responses to major reallocation shocks lag the destruction response by a year or more.... Eextending the FPUC in a manner that makes unemployment more remunerative than work will disincentivise job search, discourage a return to work, and slow the recovery. We prefer income-support programmes (including less generous unemployment benefits) that do not destroy the monetary rewards to working��� .#noted #2020-07-16