The Economic Recovery is Faltering, Say C.E.O.s [feedly]

The Economic Recovery is Faltering, Say C.E.O.s
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/20/business/dealbook/coronavirus-economy-recovery-companies.html

Hong Kong, considered an exemplar of coronavirus containment, is seeing a surge in infections — a warning for the rest of the world. And a new study in South Korea suggests that children older than 10 can spread the virus as readily as adults, which could complicate school reopenings. More on that below. (Want this delievered to your inbox each day? Sign up here.)

C.E.O.s are worried

America's corporate chiefs are steeling themselves for prolonged economic disruption and the prospect of a slow, halting recovery, The Times's David Gelles writes. Several C.E.O.s he spoke with were in a gloomy mood about the road ahead.

Fear of illness, arguments over masks and an uncertain future is taking its toll. "It's a grind on the organization's psyche," Brian Niccol of Chipotle told David. He and other leaders also bemoaned a lack of consistent communication from the government. Julia Hartz of Eventbrite said, "The uncertainty and the wildly varying mandates are not helping anybody."

C.E.O.s are losing confidence in the recovery. "I'm less optimistic today than I was 30 days ago," Arne Sorenson of Marriott International said. "I have a more cautious view than I did four weeks ago," Ed Bastian of Delta Air Lines noted.



Now what? "Getting this wrong — overreacting or acting irresponsibly — could be far more devastating to the global economy and the health of Americans," Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan said. "Open intelligently. Treat your fellow Americans respectfully. Start slow."

• Rich Lesser of Boston Consulting Group has perhaps the most eye-catching proposal: The federal government should distribute masks, increase testing and distribute food to vulnerable populations at a cost of up to $100 billion a month. That's a lot of money, but it could reduce hospitalizations by as much as 70 percent, he said, while costing less than the $1 trillion a month that the government spent on relief efforts from March through May.


 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Covid-19 Economic Realities Sinking in as Denialism Wanes, Desperation Rises [feedly]

from Yves Smith, my favorite quasi-Trotskyite economist -- a compelling and dismal summary of the combined COVID and economic bad news.

Covid-19 Economic Realities Sinking in as Denialism Wanes, Desperation Rises
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/07/covid-19-economic-realities-sinking-in-as-denialism-wanes-desperation-rises.html

Perhaps it was last week's continuation of bad unemployment figures combined with the recognition that PPP employment-maintenance requires were rolling off and more layoffs are likely. Maybe it was Delta saying it was cancelling half the flights it had planned to add in August. Maybe it's the severity of the coronavirus surges. Who knows what the trigger was, or whether it's just the accumulation of evidence, but big businessmen, who are required to project optimism, are more and more sending downbeat messages about where the economy is going.

It's becoming clear that understanding where the economy is going now depends on understanding where Covid-19 is going. The evidence from the lockdowns was that activity and spending fell before governments intervened. And the contraction was most pronounced in wealthy neighborhoods, even though the blow fell on the less-well-off who commuted in to work there. Those who have the luxury of being able to curtail their activities are largely doing so. Look at big cities. Large companies are overwhelmingly continuing work at home where they can. Business travel is dead; business hotels in NYC like the Four Seasons, the Grand Hyatt, and the Hilton on 6th Avenues are closed.

We though the initial recovery would peter out and turn into at best stagnation and more likely further decay, on the assumption of entire sectors not participating much if at all in a rebound (live entertainment, business travel, tourism, elective surgeries, restaurants) plus Covid-19 being likely to rebound in the fall. With Covid-19 infections rising in nearly all states, the situation is even worse than we'd anticipated.

Most of the issues we'll discuss below are familiar to reader, but there's value in putting them together and seeing where they lead. First to the disease, then to the economic implications.

Disease Progress

It's not news that the infection is spiraling out of control over much of the US. From the Washington Post:

Sunday marked the 41st straight day that the seven-day average for new daily coronavirus infections in the United States trended upward….

Here are some significant developments:

• Kentucky, Louisiana, Oregon and South Carolina all set new single-day records on Sunday, contributing to a nationwide tally of 64,650 new known cases. Idaho, Nebraska, Iowa and five other states have seen their seven-day average for daily new fatalities rise by more than 40 percent in the past week.
• More than 100 Florida hospitals have run out of ICU beds for adults.

More color from Gavyn Davies at the Financial Times:

Fulcrum economists have developed a new model which tracks the epidemic on a state-by-state basis, based on the now-familiar SIRD model used by the Imperial College Covid-19 response team and other researchers.

It suggests that the virus's effective reproduction number, known as R, is now above the critical level of 1 in all but five of the US's 50 states. Weighted by gross domestic product, this means that 95 per cent of the US economy is affected by a viral reproduction rate high enough to cause an exponential rise in the number of cases — unless something intervenes to prevent this. Other researchers have found similar results.

This spread of R levels above 1 is the broadest it has been since the epidemic started. In March, absolute levels of R were higher in the north east, when the reproduction rate exceeded 3 for several weeks and infection numbers doubled every few days.

This is bad enough, but the situation is made much worse with the widespread inability to get Covid-19 test results on a timely basis. The US has a duopoly in medical labs. Quest has said Covid-19 tests will have a reporting delay of 7 days. Labcorp has not been as specific but has 'fessed up to its turnaround time for Covid-19 tests now being 1-2 days longer.

This matters because delays this long neutralize what little disease containment the US had. Early studies found the median time from exposure to showing symptoms is a bit over 5 days. Peak viral shedding appears to occur shortly before or at symptom onset. From what I can tell, people who have tested positive do tell family members and co-workers and others close to them, and those people usually do self-quarantine as best they can. Too late test results means this informal contact tracing is useless.

Some are pointing to the much slower rise in death rates to argue that rising alarm is overdone. The worrywarts have the better case. First, as we saw in the initial surge, deaths are a lagging indicator. As infections continue to rise, the increase in deaths comes 2-4 weeks late. Second, it is true that the infections this time are hitting much younger people, and even though a higher proportion of hospitalizations now are of those under 50 than before, and they aren't requiring ventilators as often, higher survival rates aren't the full story. Covid-19 cases serious enough to require hospitalization regularly produce long-term damage to the lungs, heart, kidneys, and brain.

Even young adults are becoming more vulnerable. From UCSF:

Data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), not included in the UCSF study, indicates that while patients over 65 are significantly more likely to be hospitalized than younger people, the gap is narrowing. For the week ending April 18, there were 8.7 hospitalizations per 100,000 of the population for the 18-to-29 age bracket, compared with 128.3 per 100,000 of the population for patients over 65. By the week ending June 27, the figures were 34.7 and 306.7 respectively, representing a 299 percent increase in hospitalizations for young adults, versus a 139 percent increase in hospitalizations for older adults.

Things are almost certain to get worse on the disease front before they get better. Atlanta's and Houston's mayors are fighting with their state governors to reimpose restrictions. More and more cities and states are implementing mask requirements but enforcement is toothless, plus defiance and poor compliance are high. Even among my mothers' aides who are Certified Nursing Aide, about half wear their masks below their noses and pull them down when talking. If people with basic medical training who are around old people aren't masking up properly, how many are? When I am out, I see 20% to 25% with their masks below their noses or chins.

Even with church attendance down, some have retreated from in-person services due to reports of churches generating infection clusters. But nearly half are still holding services in person. The row over whether to reopen public schools is underway. Given the institutional inability to impose enough safety measures like student mask-wearing, plexiglass barriers around desks and lunchroom seats, and regular cleaning, most teachers and some parents are opposed. But there's enough ideological and business pressure to make it likely that schools will reopen in most jurisdictions, even if not in big cities. This is pretty sure to produce more infections in those ares.

University and college reopenings will provide another Covid-19 boost. Even with schools taking precautions, they have no control over what the kids do when outside class. Think they won't go to bars and coffee houses? Go to gyms? Get laid? So the students will frequent pubs and eateries and their staff, who are separately at risk by working in close quarters, are on the front line.

And some of the ones who are back on campus have returned because they are work-study, which will can put them in different settings than they are as students, again offering another transmission route.

In other words, if we don't see a strong change in sentiment by mid August towards aggressive clampdowns, the uptrend could start accelerating in September and October.

And there's no magic solution in sight. Vaccine? At least a year before one would even start being distributed. Dr. Fauci has been dialing down expectations about vaccine efficacy, saying he'd accept 70% to 75% but a level like that in combination with 1/3 of Americans now saying they won't get a Covid-19 vaccine even if it were cheap means the disease will still be with us for quite a while. And that's before getting to the question of how long vaccine or disease-conferred immunity will last.

Economic Impact

The foundations are rotting despite the stimulus-induced appearance of normalcy.1 Evictions are rising in areas with no freezes, the level isn't yet above the old normal. But more tenants are expected to come up short on payments for August than for July, so the level will continue to rise.

As we alluded to in our intro, the level of joblessness remains high, with hiring close to offset by new job losses. And this is before PPP-induced payroll retention rolls off in a big way. Many small businesses have been hanging on by their fingernails, and the longer Covid-19 is running at high enough levels for many people to curtail their activities, the more will go under.

Another contractionary force that is only staring to kick in are state and local government budget cuts. Absent a change of heart in DC leading to direct grants to states and cities, shortfalls in sales, income, hotel, and gas taxes are already biting. Real estate taxes on commercial properties will follow soon, since large property owners are experienced and aggressive at winning reappraisals when their rent rolls fall.

From the Wall Street Journal's downbeat lead story, U.S. Companies Lose Hope for Quick Rebound From Covid-19. Mind you, this is the perspective from large businesses who are in theory best positioned to ride out a severe downturn:

The fierce resurgence of Covid-19 cases and related business shutdowns are dashing hopes of a quick recovery, prompting businesses from airlines to restaurant chains to again shift their strategies and staffing or ramp up previous plans to do so. They are turning furloughs into permanent layoffs, de-emphasizing their core businesses and downsizing production indefinitely….

Executives who were bracing for a monthslong disruption are now thinking in terms of years. Their job has changed from riding it out to reinventing. Roles once thought core are now an extravagance. Strategies set in the spring are obsolete.

"It's going to be a different game," said Bill George, former CEO of medical-device company Medtronic PLC and a senior fellow at Harvard Business School. Mr. George said many companies now need to explore strategies they might have once deemed unthinkable, from hospital chains embracing a long-term shift to telemedicine to apparel makers figuring out how to market and sell their wares in an environment where many stores don't reopen.

The story described how Delta had cut way back on restoring some flights, along with distress at other carriers, with additional retrenchment anecdotes from Chipotle and Vox Media.

Gavyn Davies offered a supposed worst case scenario:

Fulcrum economists have modelled an alternative scenario where full lockdowns are eventually needed in states where the R is currently above 1.5, with partial lockdowns in states where R lies between 1.25 and 1.5, and no lockdowns elsewhere.

This would lead to a large drop in activity — in effect, a double dip — of about 7 percentage points through the whole economy while the lockdowns last. If the situation persisted for three months, it would knock almost 2 percentage points from this year's growth rate, compared to the latest consensus forecasts.

Even if some areas do go back to lockdowns, our pattern has been to quit too soon. Starting from a higher baseline of infection than before implies a longer period of restriction would be needed. So I am not confident that even a second period of lockdowns would get infections low enough that mask-wearing and contact tracing could keep Covid-19 at a sufficiently low level so that most "old normal" activities would resume and the rest of the world would let Americans visit them again.

The other open question is how much will be approved in the second round of stimulus. I'm not following this one closely given the Democratic Party to ask for little and fold easily. However, the extra $600 a week of unemployment benefits ends on July 26. There is a lot of Republican opposition to extending it since 5 out of 6 were making more than when they were employed, which allegedly made it hard for those businesses who wanted to rehire to get people on board.2 And Democrats also seem to accept the idea there should be fewer checks to individuals, say only to lower income households. Thus despite economic prospects worsening before our eyes, Congress seems stuck with the view of a couple of weeks ago, that the damage will continue for perhaps another quarter, and therefore a smaller stimulus is what the doctor ordered.

The problem is stimulus or no stimulus, absent a miracle treatment for Covid-19 very soon, the US is going to lose more productive capacity: restaurants, salons, hotels, theaters, symphonies, businesses near office buildings and commuter hubs, suppliers to airports and airlines. This is not "job loss" in the normal recession sense, where the main source of position and hours cuts is lowering production and reducing shifts, not permanently closures or shuttering locations.

Even though giving individuals subsidies to enable them to pay rent and keep food on the table is a critically important stopgap, it will shortly be nowhere enough. If positions are permanently destroyed, the answer is direct employment by government, either through block grants to cities and states or Federal programs.3 The US has a tremendous amount of deferred infrastructure maintenance and upgrades as a place to start. But the odds of this Congress and Administration going down this path are about zero. And I don't hold much hope for a Biden Administration having the gumption.

_____

1 Fortunately, I don't have to have it, but I still have not gotten my $1200. I really hate having to spend time chasing it down.

2 A testament to how many employers are either nor or barely paying a living wage.

3 Here is where some will start champing for a UBI. Please don't. Even in the old normal, a UBI high enough to provide enough to live on would be massively inflationary. With productive capacity shrinking, it would be even more so. A UBI at less than a living wage level winds up simply being a wage subsidy for big employers like Walmart and Amazon. Silicon Valley squillionaires who have been backing a UBI too often have let the toad hop out of their mouth: a UBI would allow people with jobs to quit them and work in their "incubators" for free, alleviating them of the need to pay a stipend

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Defunding police and challenging militarism, a necessary response to their “battle space” [feedly]

Defunding police and challenging militarism, a necessary response to their "battle space"
https://economicfront.wordpress.com/2020/07/18/defunding-police-and-challenging-militarism-a-necessary-response-to-their-battle-space/

The excessive use of force and killings of unarmed Black Americans by police has fueled a popular movement for slashing police budgets, reimagining policing, and directing freed funds to community-based programs that provide medical and mental health care, housing, and employment support to those in need.  This is a long overdue development.

Police are not the answer

Police budgets rose steadily from the 1990s to the Great Recession and, despite the economic stagnation that followed, have remained have largely unchanged.  This trend is highlighted in the figure below, which shows real median per capita spending on police in the 150 largest U.S. cities.  That spending grew, adjusted for inflation, from $359 in 2007 to $374 in 2017.  The contrast with state and local government spending on social programs is dramatic.  From 2007 to 2017, median per capita spending on housing and community development fell from $217 to $173, while spending on public welfare programs fell from $70 to $47.

Thus, as economic developments over the last three decades left working people confronting weak job growth, growing inequality, stagnant wages, declining real wealth, and rising rates of mortality, funding priorities meant that the resulting social consequences would increasingly be treated as policing problems.  And, in line with other powerful trends that shaped this period–especially globalization, privatization, and militarization–police departments were encouraged to meet their new responsibilities by transforming themselves into small, heavily equiped armies whose purpose was to wage war against those they were supposed to protect and serve. 

The military-to-police pipeline

The massive, unchecked militarization of the country and its associated military-to-police pipeline was one of the more powerful factors promoting this transformation.  The Pentagon, overflowing with military hardware and eager to justify a further modernization of its weaponry, initiated a program in the early 1990s that allowed it to freely provide surplus military equipment to law enforcement agencies, allegedly to support their "war on drugs."  As a Forbes article explains:

Since the early 1990s, more than $7 billion worth of excess U.S. military equipment has been transferred from the Department of Defense to federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, free of charge, as part of its so-called 1033 program. As of June [2020], there are some 8,200 law enforcement agencies from 49 states and four U.S. territories participating. 

The program grew dramatically after September 11, 2001, justified by government claims that the police needed to strengthen their ability to combat domestic terrorism.  As an example of the resulting excesses, the Los Angeles Times reportedin 2014 that the Los Angeles Unified School District and its police officers were in possession of three grenade launchers, 61 automatic military rifles and a Mine Resistant Ambush Protected armored vehicle. Finally, in 2015, President Obama took steps to place limits on the items that could be transferred; tracked armored vehicles, grenade launchers, and bayonets were among the items that were to be returned to the military.

President Trump removed those limits in 2017, and the supplies are again flowing freely, including armored vehicles, riot gear, explosives, battering rams, and yes, once again bayonets.  According to the New York Times, "Trump administration officials said that the police believed bayonets were handy, for instance, in cutting seatbelts in an emergency."

Outfitting police departments for war also encouraged different criteria for recruiting and training. For example, as Forbes notes, "The average police department spends 168 hours training new recruits on firearms, self-defense, and use of force tactics. It spends just nine hours on conflict management and mediation."  Arming and training police for military action leads naturally to the militarization of police relations with community members, especially Black, Indigeous and other people of color, who come to play the role of the enemy that needs to be controlled or, if conditions warrant, destroyed.

In fact, the military has become a major cheerleader for domestic military action.  President Trump, on a call with governors after the start of demonstrations protesting the May 25, 2020 killing of George Floyd while in police custody, exhorted them to "dominate" the street protests.

As the Washington Examiner reports:

"You've got a big National Guard out there that's ready to come and fight like hell," Trump told governors on the Monday call, which was leaked to the press.

[Secretary of Defense] Esper lamented that only two states called up more than 1,000 Guard members of the 23 states that have called up the Guard in response to street protests. The National Guard said Monday that 17,015 Guard members have been activated for civil unrest.

"I agree, we need to dominate the battle space," Esper said after Trump's initial remarks. "We have deep resources in the Guard. I stand ready, the chairman stands ready, the head of the National Guard stands ready to fully support you in terms of helping mobilize the Guard and doing what they need to do."

The militarization of the federal budget

The same squeeze of social spending and support for militarization is being played out at the federal level.  As the National Priorities Project highlights in the followingfigure, the United States has a military budget greater than the next ten countries combined.

Yet, this dominance has done little to slow the military's growing hold over federal discretionary spending.  At $730 billion, military spending accounts for more than 53 percent of the federal discretionary budget.  A slightly broader notion, what the National Priorities Project calls the militarized budget, actually accounts for almost two-thirds of the discretionary budget.  The militarized budget:

includes discretionary spending on the traditional military budget, as well as veterans' affairs, homeland security, and law enforcement and incarceration. In 2019, the militarized budget totaled $887.8 billion – amounting to 64.5 percent of discretionary spending. . . . This count does not include forms of militarized spending allocated outside the discretionary budget, include mandatory spending related to veterans' benefits, intelligence agencies, and interest on militarized spending.

The militarized budget has been larger than the non-militarized budget every year since 1976.  But the gap between the two has grown dramatically over the last two decades. a

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

The Next Disaster Is Just a Few Days Away [feedly]

The Next Disaster Is Just a Few Days Away
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/opinion/coronavirus-economy-unemployment.html

text only

Some of us knew from the beginning that Donald Trump wasn't up to the job of being president, that he wouldn't be able to deal with a crisis that wasn't of his own making. Still, the magnitude of America's coronavirus failure has shocked even the cynics.

At this point Florida alone has an average daily death toll roughly equal to that of the whole European Union, which has 20 times its population.

How did this happen? One key element in our deadly debacle has been extreme shortsightedness: At every stage of the crisis Trump and his allies refused to acknowledge or get ahead of disasters everyone paying attention clearly saw coming.

Blithe denials that Covid-19 posed a threat gave way to blithe denials that rapid reopening would lead to a new surge in infections; now that the surge is upon us, Republican governors are responding sluggishly and grudgingly, while the White House is doing nothing at all.


And now another disaster — this time economic rather than epidemiological — is just days away.

To understand the cliff we're about to plunge over, you need to know that while America's overall handling of Covid-19 was catastrophically bad, one piece — the economic response — was actually better than many of us expected. The CARES Act, largely devised by Democrats but enacted by a bipartisan majority late in March, had flaws in both design and implementation, yet it did a lot both to alleviate hardship and to limit the economic fallout from the pandemic.

In particular, the act provided vastly increased aid to workers idled by lockdowns imposed to curb the spread of the coronavirus. U.S. unemployment insurance is normally a weak protection against adversity: Many workers aren't covered, and even those who are usually receive only a small fraction of their previous wages. But the CARES Act both expanded coverage, for example to gig workers, and sharply increased benefits, adding $600 to every recipient's weekly check.

These enhanced benefits did double duty. They meant that there was far less misery than one might otherwise have expected from a crisis that temporarily eliminated 22 million jobs; by some measures poverty actually declined.

They also helped sustain those parts of the economy that weren't locked down. Without those emergency benefits, laid-off workers would have been forced to slash spending across the board. This would have generated a whole second round of job loss and economic contraction, as well as creating a huge wave of missed rental payments and evictions.


So enhanced unemployment benefits have been a crucial lifeline to tens of millions of Americans. Unfortunately, all of those beneficiaries are now just a few days from being thrown overboard.

For that $600 weekly supplement — which accounts for most of the expansion of benefits — applies only to benefit weeks that end "on or before July 31." July 31 is a Friday. State unemployment benefit weeks typically end on Saturday or Sunday. So the supplement will end, in most places, on July 25 or 26, and millions of workers will see their incomes plunge 60 percent or more just a few days from now.

We want to hear from you
Opinion | The New York Times Opinion
How Will Your Life Change if Congress Cuts Your Jobless Benefits?July 15, 2020

Two months have gone by since the House passed a relief measure that would, among other things, extend enhanced benefits through the rest of the year. But neither Senate Republicans nor the White House has shown any sense of urgency about the looming crisis. Why?

Part of the answer is that Trump and his officials are, as always, far behind the coronavirus curve. They're still talking about a rapid, V-shape recovery that will bring us quickly back to full employment, making special aid to the unemployed unnecessary; they're apparently oblivious to what everyone else sees — an economy that is stumbling again as the coronavirus surges back.

Delusions about the state of the economic recovery, in turn, allow conservatives to indulge in one of their favorite zombie ideas — that helping the unemployed in a depressed economy hurts job creation, by discouraging people from taking jobs.

Worrying about employment incentives in the midst of a pandemic is even crazier than worrying about those incentives in the aftermath of a financial crisis, but it seems to be at the core of White House thinking (or maybe that's "thinking") about economic policy right now.



One last thing: My sense is that Republicans have a delusional view of their own bargaining position. They don't seem to realize that they, not the Democrats, will be blamed if millions are plunged into penury because relief is delayed; to the extent that they're willing to act at all, they still imagine that they can extract concessions like a blanket exemption of businesses from pandemic liability.

Maybe the prospect of catastrophe will concentrate Republican minds, but it seems more likely that we're heading for weeks if not months of extreme financial distress for millions of Americans, distress that will hobble the economy as a whole. This disaster didn't need to happen; but you can say the same thing about most of what has gone wrong in this country lately.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade and economic geography. @PaulKrugman


 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Child care is essential for working parents, but is the industry ready and safe to reopen? [feedly]

Child care is essential for working parents, but is the industry ready and safe to reopen?
https://equitablegrowth.org/child-care-is-essential-for-working-parents-but-is-the-industry-ready-and-safe-to-reopen/

By now, it is no secret that parents across the United States are struggling. Adapting to life during the coronavirus pandemic has been difficult for nearly everyone, but parents—particularly those with young children—are facing day-in, day-out work-life conflicts with no end in sight. Whether they are continuing to work from home, unemployed, or still working outside the house, providing for their children without the support of schools, daycare, camps, or even help from grandparents is taking an emotional and economic toll. Rarely has the role of child care in supporting our economy, by freeing up parents' time and minds to focus on work, been more self-evident.

For weeks, experts and parents alike have been warning that child care will be essential in any economic recovery from the coronavirus recession. Without it, many parents, particularly women, will have to weigh dropping out of the labor force or reducing their work hours if their caregiving responsibilities remain incompatible with their work responsibilities. Still, plans to reopen schools and child care facilities remain scattershot, largely driven by uncertainty about how coronavirus infections spread in such environments, how children may contract or spread the virus to adult staff, and how susceptible children themselves are to COVID-19, the disease spread by the coronavirus.

How to provide child care safely is primarily a question for scientists and public health experts, but policymakers and social science researchers have their own role to play in this ongoing crisis. First, the coronavirus pandemic must be treated as the workplace safety issue that it is. This involves developing a national set of safety standards—along with the appropriate education, training, and funding to enact those standards—so that parents and staff can be confident that their care is as safe as it can be. Without such standards, each facility will have to fend for itself with limited knowledge and potentially disastrous consequences.

Also important are policies designed to make child care accessible and affordable even in the midst of a pandemic. Recent research suggests that the child care market will be unprepared to provide care in a post-pandemic environment without significant public investment. If parents are shifting their preferences as a result of the pandemic and ensuing economic crisis—either by desiring smaller providers or working more nonstandard hours—then the policy challenges of providing high-quality and affordable care will only grow.

More research on what child care services families need and what the child care industry is poised to provide will help target the policy response supporting families as they return to work and fuel the economic recovery.

Child care priorities prior to the coronavirus pandemic limit our post-pandemic options

The United States does not have a universal child care system, so many families rely on a patchwork of polices, including tax credits, licensing standards, and subsidy programs, to access high-quality child care. These policies help some families afford much-needed care, but they are largely insufficient in meeting the variety of care options that families need. What's more, these policies underpin a child care system that lacks the flexibility necessary to meet the shifting needs of families in response to the current pandemic. 

As the coronavirus and COVID-19 continue to spread through communities, larger child care centers, where dozens of children are together in one building, may be more prone to spreading both the virus and the disease. Already, some communities are reporting alarming transmission of COVID-19 in child care centers, though some studies suggest the disease is less likely to spread among children.

While wealthy families can hire nannies or babysitters to limit exposure, middle- and lower-incomes parents may be driven to seek in-home care. This type of care, also called home-based care, typically occurs in the provider's home, where only a handful of children are present. It may be reasonable to assume these less-crowded settings are a safer alternative for families concerned about the safety of their kids and themselves. But the number of licensed in-home providers has rapidly declined over the past two decades. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1

As some of these in-home providers exit the market, others may be transitioning to an "underground" market of unlicensed providers. These providers, which may be legally unlicensed depending on state statute, do not necessarily provide lower-quality care. But regulators cannot oversee the quality of care in these settings to the same extent that they can with those that are licensed. Parents who prefer in-home care over child care centers may be left with a difficult trade-off between accessibility of care and their confidence in a provider's quality. Unfortunately, even parents who find an acceptable in-home provider could lose out on the subsidies that made their previous care arrangements affordable.

Child care can be incredibly expensive, even exceeding the cost of college in some states. Many families rely on some combination of tax credits or subsidies to help cover the cost. The Child Care Development Fund is the primary child care subsidy program for low-income families in the United States. When the program was reauthorized in 2014, it included important health and safety requirements for eligible child care providers but did not guarantee sufficient additional funds for states to enact these requirements. Experts say this has inadvertently advantaged child care centers, where states are better positioned to provide oversight and training. 

Centers care for about 40 percent of preschoolers with a regular, nonrelative child care arrangement but serve more than 70 percent to 78 percent of similarly aged children receiving Child Care Development Fund subsidies. Conversely, in-home care serves 34 percent of similar preschoolers but around 18 percent to 25 percent of those receiving subsidies. This disparity in funding has dramatically widened in the previous decade. (See Figure 2.)

Figure 2

Reshifting subsidies toward these in-home providers is not a simple task. States will need to devote significant resources supporting in-home providers, particularly those that are exempt from licensing, to meet quality standards. Experts already worry that quality standards are too geared toward center-based providers and do not reflect the relative strengths and opportunities of in-home care. This could present an opportunity for high-level rethinking of what defines "quality" for these settings—a task for researchers as much as it is for regulators and policymakers.

Information on the spread of the coronavirus and COVID-19 and their effects on the economy changes rapidly. In the coming months, many families will be continuously reassessing their child care needs and what levels of risk are acceptable. The child care system, and the policies that help make it accessible to more families, must be flexible enough to meet parents' needs without sacrificing quality or affordability. Unfortunately, these may be longer-term fixes in a system facing immediate shortfalls.

The supply of child care amid the pandemic is down, but parents are still searching for the care they need

These challenges in the U.S. child care market are longstanding, but they are now exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic and COVID-19. More research is needed to understand how larger structural changes—such as additional subsidies or adjusted licensing standards—can be accomplished. In the meantime, the child care industry also faces an immediate critical shortage of providers who can care for the nation's children once parents return to work.

Like many industries, the coronavirus pandemic and resulting public health measures were shocks to the child care market. An April poll by the Bipartisan Policy Center found 60 percent of licensed providers shut their doors amid lockdowns and stay-at-home orders. More than 330,000 jobs were lost in the child care sector in only a few short weeks. (See Figure 3.)

Figure 3

The U.S. child care system was already in a pre-existing financial crisis, and the fallout from the pandemic could mean millions of child care slots are permanently lost. Affordable and accessible child care will be the foundation of any economic recovery, but right now, that foundation has multiples fractures.

In addition to layoffs, the industry dramatically slowed hiring in recent months. A new working paper by Umair Ali, Chris Herbst, and Christos Makridis, economists at Arizona State University, titled "The Impact of COVID-19 on the U.S. Child Care Market: Evidence from Stay-at-Home Orders," finds that new online postings for early child care and education jobs declined 13 percent per dayfollowing the adoption of states' stay-at-home orders, resulting in approximately 1,000 fewer providers hired per month than if the pandemic had not occurred. Assuming that these postings were to replace providers who exited the field and not providers who may be postponing a retirement or resignation during the pandemic, 1,000 fewer providers could mean as much as 10,000 fewer child care slots each month.

Even as the industry has been rattled by the coronavirus pandemic and recession, there is evidence that families remain interested in—or at least curious about—their child care options. The same working paper by the three researchers finds no statistically significant decline in Google searches for child care-related terms following state lockdowns. Of course, parents searching for online information on child care does not mean that they currently want or need those services. Many parents—63 percent in one survey—are skeptical about sending their children to child care while the coronavirus and COVID-19 are still spreading.

But just because many parents are not sending their children to child care now doesn't mean they will not want to—or need to—soon. Even larger child care centers could face a critical capacity issue as parents return to work. Child care operates with low child-to-caregiver ratios, which means providers may need to hire quickly in order to ensure appropriate staffing for returning children. Encouragingly, child care job postings have rebounded by 23.4 percentage points since their lowest point in May, but they remain more than 39 percent below the postings in July 2019. And these recent gains may be tenuous as states resume partial shutdowns through the summer.

Sooner or later, many parents will have to make difficult decisions on when their children are going back into child care and what type of child care is best for their family. Without significant public investment—more than $9 billion a month, according to some estimates—the industry will be unable to provide the care necessary to help families get back to work.

Conclusion

The struggle facing parents today is not one they face alone—it boasts important implications for everyone affected by the coronavirus recession. Research shows that when child care is not accessible or affordable, it can prevent parents, particularly mothers, from entering the workforce. Policymakers and economists are already seeing signs that the lack of child care is creating a drag on women's employment during the current crisis. Fewer working parents means a smaller tax base, reduced household income, and less money spent on goods and services—all the tools needed to help the economy recover.

As states decide whether to continue to ease their coronavirus restrictions or return to earlier lockdown levels, and as families decide whether to take cautious steps toward resuming their pre-pandemic lives, the demand for child care is only going to rise, particularly as schools and summer camps remain closed and public health experts caution against grandparent care. Policymakers need to take bold action to ensure that child care is accessible and affordable, and high-quality research must help target the policy response.

Most immediately, the industry needs an injection of cash to keep the doors open and caregivers on the payrolls. Many child care advocates have requested $50 billion in flexible funding in the next congressional coronavirus relief aid package. Looking further out, policymakers and researchers will need to turn their attention to the structural challenges discussed above that could limit parents' options as they seek safe and affordable child care for their children. Otherwise, child care could remain out of reach for many families returning to work, and the economic recovery will stall before it even begins.

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Interview with Melissa Dell: Persistence Across History [feedly]

The new John Bates Clark winner -- nearly as prestigious as the Nobel in Economics. The historical data mining technique she discusses is fascinating: its goal is to do textual analysis, yielding semantic, and sentimental context  through recorded history. The potential is huge for many disciplines in the social sciences

Interview with Melissa Dell: Persistence Across History
https://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2020/07/interview-with-melissa-dell-persistence.html

Tyler Cowen inteviews Melissa Dell, the most recent winner of the Clark medal(which "is awarded annually .. to that American economist under the age of forty who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge). Both audio and a transcript of the one-hour conversation are available. From the overview: 

Melissa joined Tyler to discuss what's behind Vietnam's economic performance, why persistence isn't predictive, the benefits and drawbacks of state capacity, the differing economic legacies of forced labor in Indonesia and Peru, whether people like her should still be called a Rhodes scholar, if SATs are useful, the joys of long-distance running, why higher temps are bad for economic growth, how her grandmother cultivated her curiosity, her next project looking to unlock huge historical datasets, and more.

Here, I'll just mention a couple of broad points that caught my eye. Dell specializes in looking at how conditions in at one point in time--say, being in an area which for a time has strong centralized tax-collecting government--can have persistent effects on economic outcomes decades or even centuries later. For those skeptical of such effects, Dell argues that explaining, say, 10% of a big difference between two areas is a meaningful feat for social science. She says: 

I was presenting some work that I'd done on Mexico to a group of historians. And I think that historians have a very different approach than economists. They tend to focus in on a very narrow context. They might look at a specific village, and they want to explain a hundred percent of what was going on in that village in that time period. Whereas in this paper, I was looking at the impacts of the Mexican Revolution, which is a historical conflict in economic development. And this historian, who had studied it extensively and knows a ton, was saying, "Well, I kind of see what you're saying, and that holds in this case, but what about this exception? And what about that exception?"

And my response was to say my partial R-squared, which is the percent of the variation that this regression explains, is 0.1, which means it's explaining 10 percent of the variation in the data. And I think, you know, that's pretty good because the world's a complex place, so something that explains 10 percent of the variation is potentially a pretty big deal.

But that means there's still 90 percent of the variation that's explained by other things. And obviously, if you go down to the individual level, there's even more variation there in the data to explain. So I think that in these cases where we see even 10 percent of the variation being explained by a historical variable, that's actually really strong persistence. But there's a huge scope for so many things to matter.

I'll say the same thing when I teach an undergrad class about economic growth in history. We talk about the various explanations you can have: geography, different types of institutions, cultural factors. Well, there's places in sub-Saharan Africa that are 40 times poorer than the US. When you have that kind of income differential, there's just a massive amount of variation to explain.

Nathan Nunn's work on slavery and the role that that plays in explaining Africa's long-run underdevelopment — he gets pretty large coefficients, but they still leave a massive amount of difference to be explained by other things as well, because there's such large income differences between poor places in the world and rich places. I think if persistence explains 10 percent of it, that's a case where we see really strong persistence, and of course, there's other cases where we don't see much. So there's plenty of room for everybody's preferred theory of economic development to be important just because the differences are so huge.

Dell also discusses a project to organize historical data, like old newspapers, in ways that will make them available for empirical analysis.  She says: 

I have a couple of broad projects which are, in substance, both about unlocking data on a massive scale to answer questions that we haven't been able to look at before. If you take historical data, whether it be tables or a compendia of biographies or newspapers, and you go and you put those into Amazon Textract or Google Cloud Vision, it will output complete garbage. It's been very specifically geared towards specific things which are like single-column books and just does not do well with digitizing historical data on a large scale. So we've been really investing in methods in computer vision as well as in natural language processing to process the output so that we can take data, historical data, on a large scale. These datasets would be too large to ever digitize by hand. And we can get them into a format that can be used to analyze and answer lots of questions.

One example is historical newspapers. We have about 25 million-page scans of front pages and editorial pages from newspapers across thousands and thousands of US communities. Newspapers tend to have a complex structure. They might have seven columns, and then there's headlines, and there's pictures, and there's advertisements and captions. If you just put those into Google Cloud Vision, again, it will read it like a single-column book and give you total garbage. That means that the entire large literature using historical newspapers, unless it uses something like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal that has been carefully digitized by a person sitting there and manually drawing boxes around the content, all you have are keywords.

You can see what words appear on the page, but you can't put those words together into sentences or into paragraphs. And that means we can't extract the sentiment. We don't understand how people are talking about things in these communities. We see what they're talking about, what words they use, but not how they're talking about it.

So, by devising methods to automatically extract that data, it gives us a potential to do sentiment analysis, to understand, across different communities in the US, how people are talking about very specific events, whether it be about the Vietnam War, whether it be about the rise of scientific medicine, conspiracy theories — name anything you want, like how are people in local newspapers talking about this? Are they talking about it at all?

We can process the images. What sort of iconic images are appearing? Are they appearing? So I think it can unlock a ton of information about news.

We're also applying these techniques to lots of firm-level and individual-level data from Japan, historically, to understand more about their economic development. We have annual data on like 40,000 Japanese firms and lots of their economic output. This is tables, very different than newspapers, but it's a similar problem of extracting structure from data, working on methods to get all of that out, to look at a variety of questions about long-run development in Japan and how they were able to be so successful. 

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Comments on Weekly Unemployment Claims [feedly]

Comments on Weekly Unemployment Claims
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