I think some people think excessive caution about masking is going to gone down in history as being as important of a story about this period as the virus. They’re super excited they get to be on the right side of a mistake, and have lost all perspective
People are so thirsty to be able to both-sides again you can almost see the drool on their tweets
People who have been operating under the delusion that masks are such a costly inconvenience are not going to be viewed by history as making a symmetric error as the excessively cautious, I promise.
Excessive caution is going to be a story, and rightly so, but try to have an ounce of perspective
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The biggest change facing much of the country is rapid prime age population loss. If Tucker has a plan to “take that slowly”, let’s hear it. Reducing immigration won’t help
“Slow down, I like my community the way it is” is simply not the status quo when population is falling, vacancies are rising, the tax base is collapsing, and schools & local govt are forced to cut back
There is no policy that attacks Tucker’s main villains -globalization, big tech, and immigration- that will do anything about this trend. His indignation and outrage will simply not help these places even, and indeed especially, if policymakers listen.
Okay some last thoughts on this... The disconnect between academic macro and econ twitter is not really a criticism of econ twitter. In fact, I have been complaining about it for years. Some tweets.
I think full employment will boost real wages, but it may not. But it will certainly mean higher employment, and thus higher personal income and household income, and lower poverty. Seems good! marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolu…
That said, I 100% agree with @tylercowen that macroeconomists should try to grapple with how labor market slack has changed in recent decades. They are behind on this
This doesn’t mean if it was good then it must be good now. But it does imply the risk of runaway inflation from getting to 3% or 4% for a few years even was not seen as significant by the like of Cowen, Mankiw, and Woodford back then.
And here is Larry in 2018. Does he sound that worried about the risk of a wage price spiral from going above target? brookings.edu/wp-content/upl… I think there is a weird new assumption of fragility we are seeing
People sometimes say the Great Recession recovery is consistent with a lot of different theories, and so we can't really update that much. But however these people thought the macroeconomy worked is wrong. economics21.org/html/open-lett…
There is simply no rescuing whatever macro worldview they had. It should be dead and buried.
Here is another example of an extremely prominent view that is now clearly and simply false. Alan Krueger in 2015 that the labor market was tight and non-participation didn't matter. econstor.eu/bitstream/1041…