Mobilizing the Political Economy for COVID-19

Our third white paper examining wider questions of the pandemic’s impact on policy is “Mobilizing the Political Economy for COVID-19,” by E. Glen Weyl and Rajiv Sethi.

Abstract

COVID-19 threatens every aspect of global society.  Addressing it requires a full mobilization of our political economy.  This contrasts with a typical “endogenous” recession arising from internal failures of the financial and market system.  As such, we must repurpose much of the economy, rather than simply supporting or stimulating it as in a typical downturn.  This paper lays out the fundamentally different policies required for mobilization, with the hope of providing a coordinating framework that can then be modularized to further flesh out strategies across industrial sectors.