Blog Post

AEIdeas

During World War II, MIT-trained engineer Vannevar Bush ran the Office of Scientific Research of Development. The agency’s job was to invent the weapons that would help defeat the Axis. Among the OSRD’s biggest successes were the proximity fuse, advanced radar, and atomic bomb. Bush was a tough, practical administrator who had little time for dreamy projects. His first filter for evaluating research proposals, as recounted in the 2018 biography of Bush, Endless Frontier: “Will it help win a war — this war?”

US policymakers, both federal and state, should apply a similar level of immediacy and realism when judging ideas for tacking the COVID-19 pandemic. They should, for instance, understand that America is not Singapore. The island city-state topped the most recent World Economic Forum competitiveness report, thanks in large part to its highly efficient and effective government. And its leaders have responded forcefully to the nation’s coronavirus outbreak with all manner of testing, contact tracing, and quarantining — including hefty fines and imprisonment for disobedience. “What Singapore was doing … dwarfs what most are discussing in the United States,” The New York Times reports. And yet, reporter Aaron Carroll adds, “in the last week, they’ve put the entire country into lockdown.”

An office worker wearing a protective face mask walks past closed restaurants at Boat Quay, during the first day of “circuit breaker” measures to curb the coronavirus outbreak (COVID-19), in the central business district, in Singapore, April 7, 2020. REUTERS/Edgar Su

So what about approaches that seem far more extensive and wide-ranging than what even Singapore has been doing? For instance: Nobel laureate economist Paul Romer has proposed testing 7 percent of the US population each day, with those testing positive going into quarantine. That’s more than 20 million tests a day, which seems insanely ambitious when right now we’re not even consistently doing 140,000 a day. Quoted by Carroll in the NYT piece, Romer seems unphased:

Critics will argue that … we cannot even seem to manage a million a day. They say we lack the materials, as well as the reagents for chemical analysis, the delivery infrastructure and the machines to run so many tests. Mr. Romer is not dissuaded. … “Building interstate highways, scanning every book, going to the moon — these were all outrageous ideas at one time. But if we put enough resources and our minds behind it, we are able to make the impossible possible.”

But has Romer suggested an approach, while certainly promising, that would help win this war? Or at least today’s battle to restart the American economy as soon as possible? He thinks it’s a more realistic path forward for the US than testing and contact tracing, Singapore-style. As he tweets, “If you support a policy that requires highly skilled strong government to pull it off; and if Singapore can’t make it work; might be time to consider alternatives.”

But Romer’s plan, as well as many other innovative approaches, just seems beyond what we can do, ASAP. And time is of the essence. In a new analysis, Goldman Sachs estimates that a six-month shutdown would result in a terrible 11 percent economic contraction for the year as a whole. (The next worst performance in the postwar era is -2.5 percent in 2009.) And given the pace of the economy’s deterioration, even a national quarantine until June seems too lengthy. We simply can’t wait for mass testing and tracing — or even just the former — to become available before instituting a thaw, at least regionally. It seems likely that social distancing measures in many (and an expanding number of) places will be considerably reduced in the next few weeks without the sort of data and monitoring we all would like.