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Feb 14 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
So I'm thrilled to see the Biden administration begin explicitly talking about a new supply-side economics.

But I don't want to see that just become a rhetorical frame for Build Back Better.

They need to go a lot further, and they can. nytimes.com/2022/02/12/opi…
Part of it is I think even Democrats aren't used to thinking about how government can really change the supply side anymore.

They think about it in terms of social insurance, and labor supply, and basic infrastructure, but that's really it.
This reflects some atrophy and some fear.

Most liberals can list the programs they want the government to create or expand.

Fewer can name the five technologies they want the government to finance or the five scientific challenges they want to see it mobilize to solve.
But even in reporting this piece, I was struck by how thick the fear remains that in trying to organize towards a particular future, government will "pick winners and losers," or simply pick wrong. Image
But technology is central to how we make the future look different from the past.

To leave that entirely to the market, or to think it apolitical, is abdication.

And it's wrong in any respect. Government shapes markets, whether it means to or not.
So I'll pose the question of the column here: What are 5 scientific or technological challenges the Biden admin should prioritize solving?

Or: What are 5 challenges they should be organizing our technological and political resources to solve?

I'll post the best in this thread.
One answer:
And perhaps I'm underselling Western Europe in the column?
Strongly endorse this one:

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More from @ezraklein

Ezra Klein Profile picture
Feb 11
Pfizer's submitted data says 2 doses works for very young kids.

FDA pushing Pfizer to test three doses to get a stronger response for older kids suggest safety isn't the issue.

So why not let parents who want to vaccinate their children, start vaccinating their children?
This is what an emergency authorization is supposed to be, as I understand it.

It's not full authorization.

But because there's no alternative treatment, and the safety data is sound and efficacy data promising, you can get one, if you want one.
Who's the "we" here? It's not that FDA can't proceed forward with its process. They are!

It's that parents can't proceed forward. And what's maddening is 2 doses work for very young kids, and they clearly think 3 will work for older kids!

statnews.com/2022/02/11/pfi…
Read 7 tweets
Ezra Klein Profile picture
Feb 10
3 is particularly important here.

Assuming those pushing the corporate greed story also believe corporations were greedy in 2017, is the idea that something about the pandemic gave corporations way more pricing power with which to deploy their greed?
Or if it's that corporations got more greedy post-pandemic, why are they also raising wages?
And why would automobile companies have become so particularly greedy?
Read 4 tweets
Ezra Klein Profile picture
Feb 10
One problem that feels irresolvable to me is that we need to talk about the groups doing things but those groups are rarely well coordinated, and often not even groups.
I feel like the best retort now to anything I write is: Who do you mean by Democrats/Republican/the left/the right/the media/the public health community/VCs etc
Parties and traditional media are a lot weaker than they once were. A lot of narrativizing comes from scans of social media sentiment, where you can identify the faction pushing a view, but that faction may not represent the broader group, or be internally organized
Read 5 tweets
Ezra Klein Profile picture
Feb 8
So a lot of mainstream economists want to defend their honor on coming to a different view of deficits without MMT, and I don't disagree!

But what I said was MMTers focused attention on real resource constraints, which is different.
We just had decades of arguments over sustainable debt-to-GDP levels. They were thought to be lower in the Aughts.

Then, as Jason is saying, there was a move towards thinking they could be higher. But the spending constraint was always some debt-to-GDP ratio.
A lot of the folks associated with MMT made the argument, loudly, that the constraint is real resources: We can afford to do what we can actually do.

I now hear a lot of Keynesians say that's true. What I'm saying is they didn't talk as if it was true till pressed.
Read 7 tweets
Ezra Klein Profile picture
Feb 7
So I'm not enough of a macroeconomist to know if it's true that what MMT says that's new isn't true, and what it says that's true isn't new.

But I'll say that MMT has absolutely changed the things that MMT's critics will say are true.
I'll give an example: MMTers really like the Keynes quote "anything we can actually do, we can afford."

Their critics say: It's a Keynes quote! So it's something the Keynesians knew.

But in years of reporting with Keynesian economists, it is definitely not how they talked.
There was *far* more discussion in the 2010s of debt-to-GDP ratios and Reinhart/Rogoff than of the real productive limits of the economy, and where we were in relation to them.
Read 11 tweets
Ezra Klein Profile picture
Feb 7
I’m going to back a few days in Discourse Time, and say something I think has been missed the Joe Rogan/Covid mess (I realize there are now other messes).

Once you’re here, all the answers are bad. They’re all bad because they all harm the thing you’re trying to protect: Trust.
Having one of the most popular podcasters in the world become a platform for vaccine misinformation?

That’s bad, for obvious reasons.
But bringing more attention to that misinformation, and making those sympathetic to him feel persecuted and censored?

Also bad! You’re alienating and angering the exact people you need to reach.

It’s a Kobayashi Maru.
Read 22 tweets

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