SMALL BUSINESS ALONE NEEDS $1 TRILLION NOW- from Bloomberg Opinion – coauthored by Michael Strain & Glenn Hubbard. The GOP stimulus plan has good ideas for covering service-industry payrolls amid the coronavirus shutdown, but doesn’t set aside enough to pay for it.
On March 19th Glenn Hubbard sat down with the editorial team at Pearson to talk through some of the high-level economic issues involved in the coronavirus pandemic.
In this 10 minute podcast Glenn discusses the nature of the economic shock and what we should expect, based on historical shocks. We explore every day topics students are wondering about like what will the job market look like to the policy ideas of what could help stabilize the US economy.
Give your students the link and ask them any of the following discussion questions to get them thinking about the pandemic in an economic context:
1. Is this kind of economic supply shock a new concept or something that the U.S. has experienced before? Is there any precedent for whether this should be a short or drawn out recession? What factors will contribute to the length of the recession?
2. What economic policies would you prescribe for dealing with this crisis and why? Which policy would be the most beneficial for families given the current state of the economy? Which policies would be the most beneficial for businesses and long-term economic growth?
3. What current mandates as a result of the pandemic could translate into longer-term modifications to how we learn and work? Discuss the possible structural changes to the economy.
4. What are the trade-offs involved in controlling the pandemic? Assuming there will be a significant impact on the economy, what macroeconomic policies would you implement to soften the shock to allow people to more easily follow the guidelines to reduce the pandemic without suffering severe economic consequences? Will your policies help restart the economy once the pandemic has passed?
Instructors can access the answers to these questions by emailing Pearson at Christopher.dejohn@pearson.com and stating your name, affiliation, school email address, course number.
Professors’ and students’ lives have been turned upside down as a result of what’s going on with the Coronavirus pandemic. Courses which have traditionally been taught in the classroom with maybe some online components are now completely virtual. We empathize with professors who are being thrown into an online environment without much help.
That’s why now was the right time to start this blog and create a series of podcasts. What is written/recorded here isn’t perfect and hasn’t been put through the rounds of review our textbook goes through. But this is timely. And it is an effort to help bring the current situation in the world into your classroom in a way that you can easily share with students and incorporate in your coursework in an online environment.
We hope these posts and podcasts do the job to help in this unprecedented time. And we want to hear from you if there’s more we can be doing, or if there’s something specific you’d like us to cover. Please reach out at our contact page!
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