1. Recommended Reading for the Day: "What is the Tradeoff between COVID-19 and Economic Recovery?" by Peter Orazem of Iowa State. Very interesting reading card.iastate.edu/ag_policy_revi…
2. Begin with why I think this is such an interesting analysis. The reason is that Peter focuses on tradeoffs. Stock in trade of economists. Seems to me that this has been missing from much of the public debate about the societal response to the COVID pandemic.
3. We are used to dealing with cost benefit tradeoffs in virtually all of our existence. For example, we know that lowering the speed limit nationally to 25mph would save tens of thousands of lives every year. Yet we don't do this. Why? We don't think costs worth the benefits
4. For some reason, we have not wanted to face similar tradeoffs squarely in the face with COVID. A psychologist will have to explain why. This is why I think Peter's analysis of COVID and employment tradeoffs are so interesting.
5. Peter sorts COVID cases, size of labor force, and employment based on measure of the restrictiveness of COVID polices state by state over July 2019-July 2021. So, left on x axis is more restrictive COVID policies and right is less restrictive. 
6. Peter found that, yup, states with less restrictive COVID policies had more COVID cases (blue), but employment was also higher in states with less restrictive policies (red). Makes sense to me.
7. In Peter's own words, "The states at the left side of figure 2 have decided to lower the risk of disease spread at the cost of lost jobs, while those at the right side have decided to take on more risk in order to generate more economic activity."
8. From a policy standpoint, should we be surprised that different states have chosen different tradeoffs between the risk of spreading COVID and economic growth? The US is a big country full of different opinions about the tradeoffs.
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