Over the past two months, the public has become familiar with the term “flatten the curve,” used as a shorthand for the goal of slowing the coronavirus infection rate. The idea has been to prevent the healthcare system from being overwhelmed by too great of a number of patients at the same time. With huge national sacrifices unparalleled since World War II, new cases have plateaued but not declined.
But there is a yet more alarming curve, the upward curve of joblessness, that now needs to be flattened and reversed. In February, the unemployment rate was 3.5%, the lowest for 50 years. In April, it shot up to 14.7%, the worst since monthly records began being kept in 1948. The Bureau of Labor Statistics also reported that 20.5 million people lost their jobs, a record by many orders of magnitude. The worst month of the Great Recession, March 2009, saw 800,000 people lose their jobs.
Even these dire numbers understate the economic carnage. They account only for unemployment through mid-April. They are certainly worse already. And if people listed as employed but who were absent from work for “other reasons” are taken into account, the number would have been 5 percentage points higher. As American Enterprise Institute economist Michael Strain noted, “A broader measure of unemployment includes people who are currently neither working nor looking for work but who want and are available for a job, along with people who are employed part-time for economic reasons. By this measure, the unemployment rate is 22.8%.”
The only parallel for this level of misery is the Great Depression, which makes it imperative that policymakers reopen the economy without further delay.
The usual methods of stimulating growth (government spending, if you’re a Democrat; tax cuts, if you’re a Republican) don’t apply, for people have money and want to consume goods and services. It is only by government order that they are prevented from doing so. Economic revival is being thwarted by lockdown orders and by a widespread fear of becoming ill or infecting others.
A strategy for reopening must include measures to make people feel safe to participate in commerce again. Safe practices, protective equipment, sensible but not extreme distancing in workplaces, widespread testing for the virus, isolation of people who are infected — these would allow people to believe, rightly, that they can return to work without grave danger.
In parallel, government, media, and all well-meaning people should foster a more sensible perspective about the huge damage that will be done — is already being done — by not returning to work. The economy is crumbling.
Enormous wealth has already been destroyed. But we will discover painfully that the worst is not behind us if we continue to do nothing. Polls show that most people out of work expect to return to their old jobs. This might happen, but only if it does so very soon. If millions stay out of work much longer, furloughs will become indefinite unemployment. Businesses that shut temporarily will go bust and never open again.
It would help if both the Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, and the news media yearning to see President Trump defeated were to stop treating expressions of concern about the economy as evidence of an evil willingness to allow mass death to save the riches of the powerful.
The market is not simply a financial mechanism; it is our free society. Its functions are the ways we live. It is free people doing what they wish to do — earning income, paying for what we need or desire, and keeping others employed by buying the goods and services that are the product of their labors. America must be open not simplistically “for business” but for everyone.
