I’ve been noticing more discussion recently about recession risks. Here are some disorganized thoughts.
Here’s an article suggesting that the 1949 recession is a good model for what we face.
The similarities that I consider important are:
Continue ReadingBook review: The Resilient Society, by Markus Brunnermeier.
This is a collection of loosely related chapters on current political topics such as pandemic response and macroeconomics. I haven’t read the whole book. But since each chapter is designed to stand alone, I feel comfortable reviewing a subset of the book.
They’re more readable than the comparable Wikipedia pages, but less rigorous.
Continue ReadingBook review: The Money Illusion: Market Monetarism, the Great Recession, and the Future of Monetary Policy, by Scott Sumner.
This is the best book on macroeconomics that I’m aware of, with a focus on the causes of the 2008 recession.
Most of the book’s important points are based on ideas that economists respect in many contexts outside of macroeconomics, but which seem controversial in the context of macroeconomics.
It’s ironic that Sumner finished writing this book during one of the few recessions that could not have been prevented by better monetary policy.
Note that this review is primarily for people who already know something about monetary policy. It’s hard enough to do that well that I don’t want to attempt anything more ambitious.
Continue ReadingMany pundits are arguing that this year’s inflation is due to temporary pandemic-related problems.
I expect that they’re half-right – we’ve got a one-time pandemic-related burst of inflation, but it’s likely to be bigger than pundits imagine, and the price changes are unlikely to be reversed much when the effects of the pandemic fade.
Also, the presence of one-time effects shouldn’t reassure us about the absence of longer-term pressures.
When evaluating inflation, I focus mainly on the supply of and demand for money. Supply chain problems may be important for many purposes, but they don’t explain a general pattern of dollars becoming less valuable.
Continue ReadingBook review: Shut Out: How a Housing Shortage Caused the Great Recession and Crippled Our Economy, by Kevin Erdmann.
Why did the US have an unusually bad recession in 2008, followed by years of disappointing growth?
Many influential people attribute it to the 2004-2006 housing bubble, and the ensuing subprime mortgage crisis, with an implication that people bought too many houses. Erdmann says: no, the main problems were due to obstacles which prevented the building and buying of houses.
He mainly argues against two competing narratives that are popular among economists:
In this post, I’ll try to summarize my guesses as to what are the most controversial parts of Scott Sumner’s monetary policy ideas.
In the process, I’ll try to dress them up to look more like the kind of wisdom that requires years of study to master. After all, I wouldn’t want anyone to get the impression that the Fed’s highly educated experts could be replaced by, say, ordinary bloggers.
In particular, I will attempt to correct the serious shortage of equations and graphs that plagues market monetarist writings.
I’ve attempted to make this fancy enough to belong in a prestigious publication, but I’m little more than an ordinary blogger, and I doubt that I’ve been thorough enough, or have enough experience at creating a prestigious style. Please feel free to write a more sophisticated-looking version of this post, and borrow as much as you like, without any need to credit me.
Long-term investors should stay away from most bonds for the foreseeable future.
Last summer, Colby Davis explained why portfolio managers might want to buy bonds that yield 2%. At the time, I was suspicious, but it felt premature to argue against it.
Since then, yields on 30-year government bonds have dropped to 1.44%. That means bond prices went up. His advice worked well as a hedge against pandemics.
Inflation expectations have dropped along with those yields.
30-year TIPS have an expected yield of -0.045%.
That implies expected CPI inflation of less than 1.5% over the next 30 years, and that, adjusted for inflation as measured by the CPI, investors who buy 30-year government bonds now should expect to lose wealth if they hold to maturity.
So why are investors buying bonds at these prices?
In this post, I make some conjectures about U.S. economic growth over the next year or two.
Many people expect a depression, due to the current high unemployment numbers. But depressions aren’t caused by unemployment – that’s a symptom, with little predictive power.
The main cause of poor economic growth has been an inability to alter wages so that the supply of and demand for labor are in balance. That typically means deflation, or a large, unexpected decline in the inflation rate, combined with sticky wages.
So I’ll mostly focus on guessing whether we’ll have inflation or deflation.
I recently made a bet with Robin Hanson that US COVID-19 deaths will be less than 250,000 by Jan 1, 2022 (details hiding in these Facebook comments).
I gave a few hints here about my reasons for optimism (based on healthweather.us). I’ll add some more thoughts here, but won’t try to fully explain my intuitions. Note that these are more carefully thought out than my reasoning at the time of the bet, and the evidence has been steadily improving between then and now.
First, a quick sanity check. Metaculus has been estimating about 2 million deaths from COVID-19 worldwide this year. It also predicts that diagnosed cases will decline each quarter from this quarter through at least Q4 2020, and stabilize in Q1 2021 at 1/10 the rate of the current quarter, suggesting that most deaths will occur this year.
U.S. population is roughly 4% of the world, suggesting a bit over 80k deaths if the U.S. is fairly average. The U.S. looks about a factor of 5 worse than average as measured by currently confirmed deaths, but a bit of that is due to a few countries doing a poorer job of confirming the deaths that happen (Iran?), and more importantly, the Metaculus forecasts likely anticipate that countries such as India, Brazil, and Indonesia will eventually have a much higher fraction of the world’s deaths than is the case now. So I’m fairly comfortable with betting that the U.S. will end up well within a factor of 3 of the world per capita average.
I was about 75% confident in late March that R0 had dropped below 1, and my confidence has been slowly increasing since then.
Note a contrary opinion here. It appears to produce results that are slightly pessimistic, due to assuming that testing effort hasn’t increased.
Yet even if it’s currently a little bit above 1, there’s still a fair amount of reason for hope.
Many people have been talking as if strict shelter-in-place rules (lockdowns) are the main tools for keeping R0 < 1. That’s a misleading half-truth. Something like those rules may have been critical last month for generating quick coordination around some drastic and urgent changes. But the best longer-term strategies are less drastic and more effective.
One obstacle to lowering R0 is that hospitals are a source of infection. I’m pretty sure that will be solved, on a lousy schedule that’s unconnected with the lockdowns.
Within-home transmission likely has a significant effect on R0. Lockdowns didn’t cause any immediate drop in that transmission, but that transmission drops a good deal as the fraction of people who have been staying at home for 2+ weeks rises, so R0 is likely declining now due to that effect.
Most buildings that are open to the public should soon require good masks for anyone to enter. It wasn’t feasible to include such a rule in the initial lockdown orders, but there’s a steady move toward following that rule.
I expect those 3 changes to reduce R0 at least 20%, and probably more, between late March and late April.
Robin is right to be concerned about the competence of institutions that we relied on to prevent the pandemic. Yet I see modest reasons for optimism that the U.S. will mostly use different institutions for test and trace: Google, Apple, LabCorp, etc., and they’re moderately competent. Also, most institutions are more competent at handling problems which they recall vividly than they are at handling problems which have been insignificant in the lifetimes of most executives.
We can be pretty sure based on China’s results that R0 < 1 is not a narrow target. Wuhan got R0 lower than the key threshold by a factor of something like two. They did that in roughly the worst weather conditions – most of the time, warmer (or occasionally colder) weather will modestly reduce R0. So we’ll be able to survive a fair amount of incompetence.
But there’s still plenty of uncertainty about whether next week’s R0 will be just barely acceptable, or comfortably below 1.
The challenges of adapting to the most likely scenarios took nearly all of my attention in March. So I had no remaining slack to adequately prepare for a scenario that looked unlikely to me, but which looked likely to Robin. For one thing, I ought to have evaluated the possibility that money will be significantly more valuable to me if Robin wins the bet than if he loses.
It is certainly possible to imagine circumstances where deliberate coronavirus infection is quite valuable. But it looks rather low value in the scenario I think we’re in.
I don’t have much hope of getting a sensible program of deliberate infection in a society that couldn’t even stockpile facemasks in February.
I also see only a small chance that talking about deliberate infection now will help in a future pandemic. I expect this to be humanity’s last major natural pandemic (note: I’m too lazy today to evaluate the relevance of bioterrorist risks). I don’t know exactly how we’ll deal with future pandemics, but the current crisis is likely to speed up some approaches that could prevent a future virus from becoming a crisis. Some conjectures about what might be possible within a decade:
Still, I do think deliberate infection should be tried in a few places, in case the situation is as desperate as Robin believes. I’ll suggest Australia as a top choice. It has weather-related reasons for worrying that the peak will come in a few months. It has substantial tuberculosis vaccination, which may reduce the death rate among infected people by a large margin (see Correlation between universal BCG vaccination policy and reduced morbidity and mortality for COVID-19: an epidemiological study).
Note that tuberculosis vaccination looks a good deal more promising than deliberate infection, so it should be getting more attention.
Some of the concerns about a lasting economic slowdown are due to expectations that the restaurant industry will be shut down for years. I expect many other businesses to reopen within months with strict requirements that everyone wear masks, but it’s rather hard to eat while wearing a mask. So I see a large uncertainty about which year the restaurant business will return to normal. Yet I also don’t see people who used to rely on restaurants putting up with cooking at home for long. I see plenty of room for improvement in providing restaurant-like food to the home.
Current apps for delivery from restaurants seem like clumsy attempts to tack on a service as an afterthought. There’s plenty of room to redesign food preparation around home delivery, in ways that more efficiently and conveniently handle more of the volume that restaurants were handling before.
We have significant unemployment among restaurant workers, combined with food being hard to acquire for reasons which often boil down to labor shortages (combined with rules against price gouging). That’s not the kind of disruption that causes a lasting depression. The widespread opposition to price gouging is slowing down the adjustments a bit, but even so, it shouldn’t be long before the unemployed food service workers manage to become redeployed in whatever roles are appropriate to this year’s food preparation and delivery needs.
Finally, what should we think about this news: SuperCom Ships Coronavirus Quarantine Compliance Technology for Immediate Pilot?
Book(?) review: The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better, by Tyler Cowen.
Tyler Cowen wrote what looks like a couple of blog posts, and published them in book form.
The problem: US economic growth slowed in the early 1970s, and hasn’t recovered much. Median family income would be 50% higher if the growth of 1945-1970 had continued.