The title of this post is the title of a Webinar published on April 23 by the American Institute of Economic Research.
Ed Stringham, president of AIER, was the host and the three guests were Dr. Knut Wittkowski, Senior Research Associate at Rockefeller University, North Carolina businessman Robert Luddy, and I.
READER COMMENTS
Thomas Hutcheson
Apr 30 2020 at 8:09am
Is there a trade-off? Yes. Should the question be framed as one or the other? No.
David Henderson
Apr 30 2020 at 11:17am
Given your comment, I think you’ll appreciate my opening response if you bother to watch it.
Thomas Hutcheson
Apr 30 2020 at 6:13pm
Cursed by the Headline Writer!
Fred_in_PA
Apr 30 2020 at 10:03pm
I enjoyed the hour.
But I wish the title (and the discussion) had more clearly dealt with the three-way trade-off we’re entangled in.
(1) We are concerned to protect people’s physical health.
(2) We are concerned to protect people’s financial health,
and (3) We are concerned to protect people’s citizenship rights.
We must battle against those who are so panicked over the threat to some particular one of these, that they are quite willing to see either or both of the other two destroyed.
I’m afraid our leader’s have opted to protect #1, physical health, with little concern for the damage this does to the economy and even less concern for the threat to our citizenship rights. I fear that the population (and hence the voters) are largely following them.
There might be 30%-40% who have come to see the economy as the greater problem. They will include most of our small business people, and some of the laid-off who have started to think beyond six weeks from now. They may not be sufficiently attentive to issues of the public’s health. And I suspect most of them haven’t given much thought to the citizenship issues.
Lastly, there’s a small fringe of patriot types who think the issues of citizens’ rights must take priority. Unfortunately, they tend to earn the smearing they get from the politicians and the mass media.
I worry about the economy. Our politicians and journalists seem to think this is a mechanistic or engineering problem. I very much fear that our economy is instead an evolved ecology. And we just nuked 10%-20% of it. It will never be the same. And it may take a generation to get back to some kind of banal normalcy.
Thomas Hutcheson
May 1 2020 at 11:42am
The issue still does not seem well joined. What are the trade-offs between a multidimensional range of alternative “social distancing” policies and the economy? And “the economy” is also multidimensonal if we take about of whose incomes are most impacted.
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