The Four Rules of Pandemic Economics
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“WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF.”
With this tweet, President Donald Trump summarized a disturbingly common reaction to social-distancing measures. Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick expressed the same sentiment when he told Americans to “get back to work,” even if doing so means more death. Fox News commentators, likewise, have argued that Americans should break free of the shackles of quarantine to reboot the economy.
Call it the gospel of growth: the notion that Americans cannot afford to save tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of lives, if it means sacrificing a quarter or two of gross domestic product.
[Read: Reopening the economy is pointless when cities are under siege]
While this might sound like an economic argument, it enjoys little support among economists. In a recent University of Chicago survey of dozens of prominent economists, almost all of them agreed with the idea that the economy would suffer if the U.S. abandoned “severe lockdowns” while the infection risk remained high.
Still, the growth evangelists are right about one thing. Severe lockdowns produce a parallel human misery—with
