Dean Baker's Blog, page 36

The Length of the Shutdowns Will be Determined by Donald Trump, not Science

Many people are thinking about policy through this crisis as though the country will be largely shut down for many months. This is not going to happen. The length of this shutdown will be determined by Donald Trump, not science, and he is not going to allow a shutdown of many months regardless of what the science says.

We know that Trump was hugely resistant to the shutdown all along. Just over a week ago he was boasting about how we would have full church pews on Easter. The idea that this...

Why Do Economists Have Such a Hard Time Imagining Open Source Biomedical Research?

It seems more than a bit bizarre, but in a discussion of alternative to patents for financing the development of new drugs and vaccines, publicly funded open-source research is not mentioned.  This is peculiar since so much of the research into treatments and vaccines for the coronavirus are in effect being open-sourced, with researchers posting results as soon as they are available. Advance, open-sourced funding would mean that any new drugs or vaccines that are developed could be sold as...

Basic Economics for Economic Columnists: A Depression is a Process, not an Event

With the economy going into a shutdown mode for at least month, and possibly quite a bit longer, were again hearing the cries from elite economics columnists about a Second Great Depression. These are pernicious, not only because they are wrongheaded, but they can be used to justify bad things, like giving hundreds of billions of dollars to the bankers who wrecked the economy with their recklessness during the housing bubble.

The basic and simple error made by the Second Great Depression gang...

Getting to Medicare for All, Eventually

With Joe Biden now looking like the certain Democratic presidential nominee, it is pretty clear that we will not get to Medicare for All in a single step. Even if Sanders had won it would have been a long shot, but without a president committed to the program, there is not even a possibility.

Still, we can look for ways to get to M4A incrementally, with the idea that we will make progress wherever and whenever we can. In order to do this, we need policies that can be politically feasible even...

Amazing Discovery at the NYT: Drugs and Vaccines Can be Developed Without Patent Monopolies

The paper had a short piece touting the unprecedented level of international cooperation and open sourcing of results surrounding efforts to develop effective vaccines and treatments for the coronavirus. Scientists are quickly posting their findings on the web and not worrying about publications and patent claims.

This is a fantastic development and will almost certainly lead to far more rapid progress in treating and containing the disease. It also should be a lesson for the benefits of open...

It’s Infrastructure Week! A Quick Note on Donald Trump’s Big Stimulus

According to the Washington Post, Donald Trump is calling for a fourth stimulus package, which he wants to be very big and bold, and to focus on infrastructure. He argued that this is a good time to do this, since interest rates are very low.

Its good to see that Donald Trump has discovered infrastructure once again, but there are a few points worth making. First, the prior spending packages are better thought of as disaster relief or economic survival packages.  We are trying to cope with a...

Bailing Out Journalists: Another Problem Too Simple for Policy Types to Understand

Ben Smith had a piece on the collapse of the news industry and makes a case that the government will play a role in rescuing journalists, even if it does not rescue specific news outlets. There is a very good argument for this, except most people across the political spectrum would probably not like the idea of the government deciding which journalists get supported.

As Smith has written previously, the obvious answer to have some sort of individual tax credit, where the government gives...

Money Is Not the Reason the U.S. Is Not Following the Danish Model

The New York Times had a good piece examining how Denmark is coping with the coronavirus crisis. According to the piece, the government is paying companies up 75 to 90 percent of workers salaries, provided they dont lay anyone off. This approach has the great advantage that it keeps workers tied to their employers, so that when the lockdowns end they have a job to go back to. It also means that employers dont have to hire and train a workforce from scratch.

However the piece claims that this...

The Relative Generosity of the Economic Rescue Package: Boeing and Public Broadcasting

The media have been engaged big time in the numbers without context game, throwing out really big numbers faster than anyone can catch them. (For the biggest, the overall size of the stimulus, given the time frame, we are looking at a stimulus that is about five times as large as the Obama stimulus.) While there are many great comparisons to be made on who got what, for tonight I just want to focus on one, the handout to Boeing compared with the money provided to the Corporation for Public...

The Shape of the Recovery: Those Who Tell Don’t Know

There have been a number of pieces in major news outlets telling us what the recovery will look like from this recession. Most have been pretty negative. The important thing to know about these forecasts is that the people making these forecasts dont have a clue what they are talking about.

The shape of recovery will depend first and foremost on the extent to which the coronavirus is contained or is treatable, areas in which most of our prognosticators have zero expertise. I can think of a...