Thread by @patio11

Yesterday’s Money Stuff has an interesting entry on the PPP, which is near and dear to my twin interests of SMB financing and pandemic rapid response software projects.

bloomberg.com/opinion/author…

My view on the program is that the United States in its considerable wisdom realized it could not set up both a) a web page and b) a customer acquisition engine in a year under the traditional RFP process, and instead outsourced it to any private entity that would take it on.

That cost a lot of money, because it was literally designed to cost a lot of money, but it substantially worked, and it may have worked better than any other part of the pandemic response.

At some point it would be cool for the US to have the capability to independently operate a website and ground game for less than $3 billion, but given we manifestly do not have that state capacity, using the thing we have in abundance to avoid a catastrophe seems a good idea.

I often wonder what the world would have looked like if we had done something similar for vaccine administration.

I suspect in a hypothetical world where private agents were getting a performance fee for administering vaccines directly from the government we would have seen far fewer cases of thousands of doses staying in freezers over weekends/etc etc etc.

(Vaccine administrators did get a performance fee ultimately backstopped by government but because allocations were made via a political process it did not move needle at the allocated orgs enough to have them optimize behavior for it.)

(This is why the winner for most of the PPP origination was a company who nobody has ever heard of that looked at every bank in the U.S. and said “I’m going to beat all of them at once by caring more than any of them do about this, by a factor of 1,000+.”)

(We could have done PPP an entirely different way! Say the word "equity" a lot and put non-profits with no marketing capability or budget in charge of learning how to do Internet-scale customer acquisition, then complain about free money hesitancy when they originated no loans.)