You might want to take a look at Scott Sumner’s most recent offering at Econlog:

The second quarter of this year saw what is probably the biggest fiscal stimulus in American history, in terms of increase in the budget deficit. And today we see the results: nominal GDP fell by 34.3% at an annual rate. That means the fiscal stimulus prevented a much bigger fall in GDP—right?

Well, that might be true, but how would we know? We have models, but these models certainly don’t predict that NGDP would fall at a 34.3% rate in a quarter where disposable income is actually rising. And not just rising, but (according to the BEA) rising at an almost insane annual rate of 42.1%. In real terms it was even higher, due to deflation:

Real disposable personal income (DPI)—personal income adjusted for taxes and inflation—increased 44.9 percent in the second quarter after increasing 2.6 percent in the first quarter.

Why do I mention disposable income? Because the models that predict fiscal stimulus will boost the economy are based on a transmission mechanism that runs from more fiscal stimulus to more disposable income to more spending. Thus our (Keynesian) models don’t really explain why NGDP fell so sharply in Q2. Indeed, if anything these models predict an extraordinary boom.

You might respond that our common sense does provide an answer—people were afraid to go out shopping due to the virus. I accept that theory. But as far as I know there are no models that predict fiscal stimulus will be effective when people are afraid to go out shopping. And with the new Q2 GDP data there is also no empirical evidence that fiscal stimulus boosted GDP.

Read the whole thing.

It seems to me that the conclusion to draw from the facts he submits is that the measures most needed, whether from the federal, state, or local governments, are measures to increase confidence. That is not exactly in President Trump’s wheelhouse and, maybe it’s just Illinois, but I haven’t seen state and local officials doing much in that regard, either.

Vaccine researcher and scholar Michael S. Kinch expresses worry about a premature vaccine at STAT:

Hey, Food and Drug Administration: Don’t be rash! Premature approval of a sub-standard Covid-19 vaccine could have dire implications, and not just for this pandemic. It could harm public health for years, if not generations, to come.

Unfortunately, elements now in place make such a disastrous outcome not only possible but in fact quite likely. Specifically, the FDA and its staff of chronically overworked and underappreciated regulators will face enormous public and political pressure to approve a vaccine. Whether or not one worries about an “October surprise” aimed at the upcoming election, regulators will be pressed hard. Some will stand firm. Some may resign in protest. But others could break and allow a bad vaccine to be released.

What makes a “bad vaccine”? Insufficient protection against the disease it is designed for, unwanted side effects, or some combination of the two. If an approved Covid-19 vaccine turns out to be ineffective, this could unintentionally promote wider spread of the disease by individuals who presume they were protected from it. Likewise, a negative experience with one vaccine might discourage the use of other vaccines that are far more safe and effective, whether they are for Covid-19 or other vaccine-preventable diseases.

Some things take time. Under normal circumstances, ensuring that a vaccine’s effects are safe and durable requires years of study and monitoring. And there is some evidence that natural immune responses to SARS-CoV-2 infection could be transient, making sustained investigation all the more necessary. A merely short-term effect could encourage vaccinated individuals to resume risky behaviors, which would all but guarantee that the epidemic endures. And if unintended side effects turn out to include, for instance, chronic inflammatory or autoimmune disease, a bad vaccine could impart lifelong damage.

But wait, there’s worse! A bad Covid-19 vaccine could further undermine confidence in the many safe, reliable vaccines already in our public health arsenal. Vaccine skepticism and anti-science bias, propagated by B-list celebrities and Russian troll farms, have been gaining strength all year. Combined with disappointing Covid-19 outcomes, such malign forces could facilitate the reemergence of once-vanquished foes — polio, measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, whooping cough, and tetanus — that once killed multitudes of children each year.

These are enormous risks. Placing all of our bets on a small set of untried vaccine technologies would be gobsmackingly foolish. Yet this is exactly what we are now doing. Most of the high-profile names capturing headlines are pursuing comparatively minor variations on a theme of genetic vaccines (those delivered via DNA or RNA). If one approach happens to work, the odds are higher the others will work as well. Disappointing results from one candidate, though, might presage failure across the board.

Read the whole thing. The pressures—political, economic, and social—to produce a vaccine quickly will be enormous and will increase over the coming months.

Yesterday I mentioned that I didn’t know where the figure of $200 per week that the Republicans have proposed came from. I do have a pretty good idea of where the $600/week in the CARES Act came from: it’s $15/hour for 40 hours a week. Those wanting to “Fight for 15” must be delighted.

There’s a real risk that the HEROES Act, the successor to the CARES Act, will make that permanent. It will create the expectation that that people will be paid whether they work or even looks for jobs or not. The reason it’s a risk is that 40% of American workers earn $15/hour or less. You may find that horrifying but it’s the reality.

You can legislate, as has been done, a benefit of $600 a week without a work requirement. You can’t pay for it without an effective tax rate higher than anything than has been realized in the U. S. in its history or just issuing ourselves credit which, if done without accompanying increases in production, will result in inflation and risks a loss of confidence in the currency. That’s what has been done. As a panic-stricken move during an emergency it can be justified. It’s far harder to justify as a persistent strategy.

You can legislate a minimum wage of $15/hour but you can’t legislate that workers will be worth $15/hour. And if you believe in supply and demand you can’t believe that you can maintain a minimum wage of $15/hour without controlling immigration and, indeed, without reducing legal immigration of low skill workers to a level much lower than it is presently.

If compassion leads you to believe that no one should earn less than $600/week in the U. S. it should be done via wage supplements paid via employers rather than through raising the minimum wage or simply granting a benefit.

The adverse effects of maintaining the $600/week income subsidy will be substantial. Who would look for or take a job at less than $15/hour when they can do nothing and make the same income? Only the very honorable or the very determined, which is not how I’d describe most of the people. Some people will simply sit idle in a stupor. Those are the least of our worries. Many will supplement their weekly stipend with illegal earnings—off the books, dealing in illegal goods and services, theft, and so on.

You might be interested in Kathryn A. Edwards’s analysis at RAND of the $600 weekly unemployment benefit increment:

In the CARES Act, Congress increased unemployment insurance benefits by $600 a week through the end of July. As those extra benefits approach expiration, lawmakers—and many Americans—are at odds about what should happen next.

Tens of millions of Americans are still without work. No one wants to push the unemployed out into the street (literally or proverbially), but some workers are getting bigger unemployment checks than they ever did paychecks. This appears to be a sticking point as Congress has returned from its recess to debate another pandemic relief bill.

Can’t unemployment benefits simply be capped, say at 85 percent of a given worker’s typical wage? That is, can’t the federal government do a replacement-rate top-up, rather than a flat-dollar top-up?

Yes, it’s possible—but not practical or politically palatable.

Her emphasis is on the fixed nature of the increment but it should be obvious that there are problems with the increment itself. The battle right now is apparently between Democrats who, apparently, want to continue the increment indefinitely and Republicans who want to reduce it to $200. How they arrived at that figure is unclear to me but it’s little more sustainable than $600.

The notion that maintaining 15% or 20% of the people on an indefinite basis (if they’re not pledging not to renew the increment, their intent is to continue it on an indefinite basis) simply by extending ourselves credit without consequences is a form of perpetual motion. Disagreeing with it is not cruel. It is simply pointing out the obvious.

A lot of the appropriation is being saved. Trying to inflate it away is cruel, too, and worse yet it’s punishing the prudent.

A sign of how much jeopardy Illinois’s most powerful political figure is in, Gov. J. B. Pritzker is doubling down on his remarks about Illinois House Speaker and state Democratic Party Chairman Mike Madigan. The Chicago Tribune reports:

Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker said Friday that House Speaker Michael Madigan’s declaration that he would not resign after being implicated in ComEd’s federal bribery scandal wasn’t a sufficient response and that he owes the public a full explanation.

“Look, he continues to have unanswered questions hanging out there. He needs to stand up and answer those questions,” said Pritzker, who has called on Madigan to resign if it is proven he played a role ComEd’s efforts to gain political influence with him by offering jobs, contracts and payments to close allies.

“I believe people who serve the public interest, people who get elected to public office, have a duty to be transparent and to live up to the integrity that’s demanded by the public for their public service,” Pritzker said. “He needs to stand up and answer these questions because people have serious questions about those things and any public servant who isn’t willing to do that. And I’ve made that clear.”

Pritzker’s comments at an unrelated news conference in the Little Village neighborhood came a day after Madigan, long the state’s most powerful politician and the nation’s longest-serving statehouse speaker, vowed he would not step down from his governmental role or from his state Democratic Party chairmanship after polling members of his 73-member House majority by phone.

Basically, Mr. Madigan will need to be carried from his role feet first. He won’t resign. He won’t maintain a low profile. You’ll be able to tell the situation is dire when members of the legislature start turning on him.

That may never happen. He knows where a lot of bodies are buried.

If the predictions in this post by Paul Caron are correct, all of Chicago’s law schools other than the University of Chicago, Northwestern, and John Marshall will perish in the near future. Since both Chicago and Northwestern are ranked in the Top 10 nationally, that suggests that, if you’re black or Hispanic, you probably won’t attend law school in Chicago. That in turn suggests that the pool of minority lawyers in Chicago will dwindle.

I want to thank Derek Thompson for his use of a phrase in his most article in The Atlantic that I feel deserves more currency—”hygiene theater”:

As a covid-19 summer surge sweeps the country, deep cleans are all the rage.

National restaurants such as Applebee’s are deputizing sanitation czars to oversee the constant scrubbing of window ledges, menus, and high chairs. The gym chain Planet Fitness is boasting in ads that “there’s no surface we won’t sanitize, no machine we won’t scrub.” New York City is shutting down its subway system every night, for the first time in its 116-year history, to blast the seats, walls, and poles with a variety of antiseptic weaponry, including electrostatic disinfectant sprays. And in Wauchula, Florida, the local government gave one resident permission to spray the town with hydrogen peroxide as he saw fit. “I think every city in the damn United States needs to be doing it,” he said.

To some American companies and Florida men, COVID-19 is apparently a war that will be won through antimicrobial blasting, to ensure that pathogens are banished from every square inch of America’s surface area.

But what if this is all just a huge waste of time?

In May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its guidelines to clarify that while COVID-19 spreads easily among speakers and sneezers in close encounters, touching a surface “isn’t thought to be the main way the virus spreads.” Other scientists have reached a more forceful conclusion. “Surface transmission of COVID-19 is not justified at all by the science,” Emanuel Goldman, a microbiology professor at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, told me. He also emphasized the primacy of airborne person-to-person transmission.

There is a historical echo here. After 9/11, physical security became a national obsession, especially in airports, where the Transportation Security Administration patted down the crotches of innumerable grandmothers for possible explosives. My colleague Jim Fallows repeatedly referred to this wasteful bonanza as “security theater.”

COVID-19 has reawakened America’s spirit of misdirected anxiety, inspiring businesses and families to obsess over risk-reduction rituals that make us feel safer but don’t actually do much to reduce risk—even as more dangerous activities are still allowed. This is hygiene theater.

I think that is exactly right. In the Aughts we spent trillions of dollars on measures that didn’t actually make us more secure; now we’re doing things that won’t actually make us any safer from disease.

While I think that some of the other measures being prescribed to avoid spreading COVID-19 are also being oversold, none is being oversold as much as the impulse to disinfect everything. The problem with all of the overselling is that there are tradeoffs and all of these measures have the potential to do actual harm. Insisting on two meters of distance makes it hard for sit-down restaurants to turn a profit; facemasks may promote a feeling of invincibility leading to excessive risk-taking; disinfecting surfaces may foster the development of “superbugs”. And then there’s “prevention fatigue”:

Hygiene theater can take limited resources away from more important goals. Goldman shared with me an email he had received from a New Jersey teacher after his Lancet article came out. She said her local schools had considered shutting one day each week for “deep cleaning.” At a time when returning to school will require herculean efforts from teachers and extraordinary ingenuity from administrators to keep kids safely distanced, setting aside entire days to clean surfaces would be a pitiful waste of time and scarce local tax revenue.

New York City’s decision to spend lavishly on power scrubbing its subways shows how absurd hygiene theater can be, in practice. As the city’s transit authority considers reduced service and layoffs to offset declines in ticket revenue, it is on pace to spend more than $100 million this year on new cleaning practices and disinfectants. Money that could be spent on distributing masks, or on PSA campaigns about distancing, or actual subway service, is being poured into antiseptic experiments that might be entirely unnecessary. Worst of all, these cleaning sessions shut down trains for hours in the early morning, hurting countless late-night workers and early-morning commuters.

My suggestion? Be prudent. Avoid crowds. Maintain social distancing if only to illustrate the behavior you’d like to see from other people. Wear facemasks as required but don’t fetishize their use or overestimate their effectiveness. They protect other people from you more than they protect you from other people. Take the measures that are best-suited for your particular circumstances. Don’t confuse your living room with a hospital operating room.

Here’s what I do. I avoid going out. I wash my hands after touching surfaces I’m unsure of. I wear a facemask in the store and when walking around the streets of downtown Evanston or around the office. I don’t wear a facemask when driving (that’s dangerous). I maintain more than two meters of social distancing to the greatest degree possible. I obey the rules of the road when walking on the sidewalk or on the trail.

This article by Yinon Weiss at RealClearPolitics catalogs the evidence supporting the safety of reopening schools, concluding:

If children are at minimal risk, transmission to adults is rare, and both can be accommodated with optional distance learning, why are some schools suspending all in-person education? It’s certainly not because of the parents, who would be the last people to send their children into a dangerous situation. The vast majority of parents support reopening schools with modifications, perhaps because they best understand the cost-benefit of depriving their children of a full education.

The reason many schools won’t open, just like why so many places originally locked down, comes back to fear and politics.

I think he’s missing something basic. The teachers’ unions will inevitably be focused on the safety of the oldest and most health-impaired teachers. There are a vast number of such impairments to consider—everything from suppressed immune systems to autoimmune diseases to obesity and COPD.

What disappoints me is the framing of the question. Resuming with whatever form of pedagogy is most effective for individual students should be a constraint rather than a variable. The question should never have been “whether” but “how”.

I think I’ve identified the issue that’s driving public policy with respect to COVID-19, at least in the State of Illinois. It came to me as I was reading this article in the Chicago Tribune:

Gov. J.B. Pritzker took his admonition that parts of Illinois could be headed for a reopening reversal downstate on Thursday, as the state continues to see elevated levels of COVID-19 cases and other key metrics.

State officials on Thursday reported 1,772 newly confirmed cases of the coronavirus over the prior 24 hours. That’s the first time the count has climbed above 1,700 since Memorial Day.

“Every region has increasing positivity rates and increasing cases. This is hugely problematic,” Pritzker said Thursday at a news conference in downstate Ottawa. “It means that we’re going to have to take a hard look at what do we need to do, what mitigations do we need now in order to get us back in line with the direction that we were going, which was reducing those positivity rates.”

I think he’s assuming a fixed relationship between the morbidity and mortality rates for COVID-19. Is there actually any evidence of that? The “morbidity” means the prevalence of a disease. The “mortality” means the death rate due to it. I think we can all agree that if there are no new cases of COVID-19 there won’t be any deaths among those non-existent cases, either.

I think it’s reasonable to assume that as the number of cases increase, the number of deaths will, too, but not necessarily in any fixed relationship. It might actually be true that as the number of cases increase, the proportion of those cases that lead to death will decrease. Go back and take a look at my post of a day or so ago. Isn’t that what the numbers seem to be saying?

Until there’s a safe, effective, affordable vaccine for SARS-CoV-2, we’re not going to reduce the number of new cases to zero. We should be prepared that may never happen. And as long as there are any cases, unless there’s a safe, effective, affordable treatment, there’s a risk that the disease will lead to death. We need to be prepared for that possibility, too.