George Santayana meet Milan Kundera. Santayana (1863-1952) was the Spanish-born American philosopher most famous for saying: those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Kundera (1929-) is a Czech-born French writer whose best-known work, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” holds that individual experience is “light” because it is not repeated. So its capacity to teach is limited. Which thinker, I wonder, is the best guide to the COVID economy?
The economists Robert Hall of Stanford University and Marianna Kudlyak of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank have recently discovered a remarkable regularity about the 11 postwar U.S. recessions: however high the unemployment rate rises it pretty much always declines at the rate of 0.85 percentage points per year.
In 2020, that is terrible news. As they write, with the unemployment rate about “nine percentage points above normal … it would take 11 years (nine divided by 0.85) to work off the pandemic’s bulge of unemployment as it currently stands.” (Granted, that was before the rate fell 2.2 points from May to June alone.)
The saving grace is that the current recession is like no other in American — or Canadian — history
We only just completed a long labour market recovery from the crash of 2008 (though we did complete it, with unemployment rates hitting long-term lows). No one wants another 10-year slog back to full employment. As three economists from the C.D. Howe Institute show elsewhere on this page, if the recovery does turn out to be slow, then in terms of accumulated lost output the current downturn will at least rival and may even “blow past” the other big recessions of recent memory (1982 and 1990).
The saving grace is that the current recession is like no other in American — or Canadian — history. (Take that, Santayana!) In fact it’s not so much a recession, with economic activity ebbing for reasons that often seem mysterious, as it is a compression. The Great Compression, you might call it. For reasons everyone understands though not everyone agrees with, the government hammered the economy shut for a couple of months by either literally outlawing many normal economic interactions or at least strongly discouraging them.
Will the recovery from such an unprecedented shutdown follow the pattern of previous recoveries (i.e., slow but inevitable) or will it go more quickly? My hunch is that when the compression does end the economy will bounce back relatively quickly. Hall and Kudlyak at least hold out that possibility, pointing to data showing that the overwhelming majority of today’s unemployed “anticipate being recalled to jobs from which they have been temporarily laid off, within the coming six months.” In the best-case scenario, these workers “return to their existing jobs rapidly without sacrificing their job-specific human capital” or going through the normal try-it-and-quit, try-it-and-quit search for a job that finally fits.
The last few data points from the U.S. are encouraging in this regard, with unemployment claims falling and employment and growth expectations rising faster than forecast.
What could go wrong? A second wave of the virus, obviously — though future lockdowns will be more targeted and therefore less costly economically.
Beyond that, there are three main problems.
First, the lucky among us have been working and earning as usual but spending less, either because things we like to spend on simply haven’t been available or because we fear our jobs are at risk, too. That creates a classic Keynesian problem of underconsumption. But figuring ways to encourage consumption shouldn’t be a problem for our tax policy people. Over the years they’ve devised all sorts of gimmicks to encourage this or that. Egging on ordinary consumption would be a novel challenge for them but one they can overcome. And it doesn’t require building new transportation systems or massive new solar arrays.
Second, we’ve got a structural problem: no one wants to fly, stay at hotels, ride the subway, dine out or go to movies or shows until doing so is safe again. There’s no Keynesian solution for that. The people in the affected industries either have to figure out ways to make it safe or find something else to do, whether for a time or for good. Travel agents, good with phones, could become contact-tracers. Pilots could operate heavy equipment. Chefs, projectionists, actors, salespeople and countless others? Jobs building infrastructure likely won’t help.
Our third big problem is government getting in the way. Relief money phases out too slowly. Infrastructure programs — probably the wrong answer anyway — take too long to come on line (they always do!). “Stimulus packages” get devoured by rent-seekers and the government’s pet projects.
With a leadership vacuum at the top the U.S. seems likely to have a ramshackle, unplanned recovery. But its first shoots are bright green and very promising. My bet is we in Canada take a much more scientific, planned and deliberate approach and, as a result, recovery takes a lot longer — especially if, looking down our noses at southern-state infection rates, we keep the border closed into the fall.
