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Jason Furman Profile picture
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2 Mar, 8 tweets, 2 min read
If I had a choice btwn J&J & Moderna/Pfizer, I would take Moderna/Pfizer.

If I had a choice btwn J&J now and Moderna/Pfizer thirty minutes from now I would wait 30 minutes to take Moderna/Pfizer.

If the choice was J&J now vs. Moderna/Pfizer a year from now I would take J&J now.
What I don’t know is the T for which I’m indifferent between J&J now and Moderna/Pfizer in T days.

I’ve read a lot on the comparisons of efficacy being misleading & I’m sure that’s true. But it’s hard not to feel that much of the public health opinion has a thumb on the scale.
Yes, I know J&J is spectacular, essentially eliminates death and hospitalization and much better than flu vaccines.

But Moderna/Pfizer seem spectacularer, if I could get flu shots with higher efficacy I would take them.
I also care about the broader implications of my choice. I don’t want to spread the virus and kill others. And if everyone delayed J&J it would result in worse social outcomes. I would definitely factor this in.
But I also would love a doctor to tell me what is best for me as an input into my decision. Sort of like a fiduciary responsibility to advise me on what is best for my health.
(As an aside, we expect investment advisors to be fiduciaries giving people the best advice for them, not giving them the best advice for the world which would be to donate all their money.)
It seems like we’re all supposed to be saying we would definitely take J&J with no hesitancy or regret. I would be happy to take it but like everyone else I confess to having a mixture of selfish and selfless motives and feel it is hard to get good inputs into balancing these.
(I realize some will probably react negatively to these questions. But ask yourself which vaccine you would choose? Would you wait an extra thirty minutes for it? And do you make all your decisions just based solely on what is best for global welfare?)

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Jason Furman Profile picture
2 Mar
Many comments that I have enough followers that it was irresponsible to tweet this.

I disagree.

I was clear that J&J is "spectacular", it essentially eliminates death/hospitalization.

But I don't think the goals of good outcomes are served by elites perpetuating noble lies.
People can understand and process information and make good decisions for themselves and society. I'm not an expert and might even be wrong on J&J vs. Pfizer/Moderna, but when experts appear to be hiding the ball it is counterproductive.
Think back to the Surgeon General telling us not to use masks because they don't work and because health professionals needed them. Could tell this was illogical. And the damage reverberates to this day.
Read 5 tweets
Jason Furman Profile picture
12 Feb
I've gotten questions about whether to emphasize U-6 as the "true unemployment rate". It is currently 11.1%.

I don't because I think the concept doesn't add much, it misses how unusually bad the labor market is now, is analytically flawed, and can be misleading.

Thread:
The official unemployment rate is 6.3%. It is unemployed (people looking for work) divided by the labor force (working or looking for work).

U-6 is 11.1%, it adds in "marginally attached" (discouraged workers & would take a job if it came along) and involuntary part-time.
DOESN'T ADD MUCH. U-6 is one of several alternative unemployment concepts produced monthly by the BLS. They are all useful to look at. But they also all pretty much up and down together so they rarely tell much of a different story.
Read 9 tweets
Jason Furman Profile picture
11 Feb
The new @USCBO report confirms that we have substantial fiscal space, in fact more than we've generally had in the past. This is even true if the American Rescue Plan passes in full.

Critical to this is low interest rates mean low debt service.
CBO projects higher debt/GDP than it did pre-pandemic. But even this projection is not "spiraling" within the budget window but a relatively gradual increase.

More importantly, debt/GDP is a bad metric to look at as I've explained before.
CBO has lowered its interest rate forecast more than it raised its debt forecast. So real debt service as a share of GDP is lower than what we expected pre-crisis. This is even true with the American Rescue Plan (and assuming it raises interest rates).
Read 5 tweets
Jason Furman Profile picture
11 Feb
I thought I would engage with this criticism of my suggestion that the UI/week bump be phased down to $100 or $200/week by late summer/early fall even if I don't love the way this person phrased their disagreement.
First, this is not a "cut":

--The UI bump is currently slated to be $0 then for late summer/early fall.

--The House Dem proposal calls for reducing the bump to $0 in September.

--IF we had adopted triggers the bump would likely have been well below this by then.
Second, my argument was about supply not demand. To have this much demand and not have overheating we need millions of people getting back into jobs. I believe that can happen. But I also want to give it every chance possible and this policy would be consistent with it.
Read 5 tweets
Jason Furman Profile picture
11 Feb
@chrislhayes raised a question about "overheating" from a thread I did. I want to answer him in a thread with general conceptual points & their current application.

Short version: if there is no risk of overheating we are doing too little.

The chance of overheating with this package is not 0% and not 100%.

Overheating is not costless.

The right sized and designed package should balance the costs/probability of costs against the benefits/probability of benefits.
Framed differently we recognize this when we say "it is better to err on the side of too much instead of too little." That sentence acknowledges the possibility of errors in both directions.

(MMT also says the limiting principle for fiscal policy should be inflation.)
Read 20 tweets
Jason Furman Profile picture
11 Feb
Excellent thread.

Stunning magnitudes: spending by unemployed increased about 25% relative to the consumption of the employed.

If we had a stable program (not the on-off-on one we had) what would we have wanted to target for that?

And how much does 2020 generalize to 2021?
You should never update your beliefs too much based on any one paper. And evidence from 1950-2019 might be more relevant in thinking about July/Aug/Sep 2021 than evidence from 2020 (points @Claudia_Sahm has made in a different context).

If I was updating would say:
Given the excess saving, the larger bank balances that @ProfFionasm and team have documented elsewhere, the $2,000 checks, the unemployed would have pre-pandemic consumption levels even with less than $400/week. jpmorganchase.com/institute/rese…
Read 6 tweets

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