vox--2020-04-21--Why some states became coronavirus hot spots — and others haven’t

If you look at a map of coronavirus cases in the US , it can be hard to figure out any patterns .
California reported some of the first coronavirus infections — including the country ’ s first instance of community transmission — but New York has reported 12 times as many deaths .
Michigan , meanwhile , has the third-highest number of coronavirus deaths in the US , but neighboring Ohio doesn ’ t even register in the top 10 .
Florida was slow to shut down in response to the pandemic , but so far it ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , many of which were quicker to act .
Why ?
What explains why some states become hot spots for Covid-19 , the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus , but not others ?
I turned to experts with these questions .
While they cautioned that there ’ s a lot about the coronavirus and how pandemics work in modern society that we don ’ t know and are still learning about , they gave two major explanations for why some areas become hot spots and others don ’ t .
First , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Some places just happen to have populations , like the elderly and those with underlying medical conditions , that are more vulnerable to Covid-19 .
Factors beyond an area ’ s immediate control , such as its population density and perhaps even its weather , can also contribute to the virus ’ s spread .
Whether any given place experiences a super-spreading event , in which one or more individuals transmit the coronavirus to a disproportionate number of people , can partly come down to chance , too .
Second , early @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Even in states that are not suffering a high number of Covid-19 deaths , chances are those figures would be even lower if they — or if the country as a whole — had acted sooner .
There ’ s good evidence for this in some states , but there ’ s also research of past pandemics to back it up .
“ A hot spot is a reflection of the combination of the random nature of things — in terms of who gets hit harder earlier — and then the timing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ such as social distancing , William Hanage , an epidemiologist at Harvard University , told me .
The key here is that states have direct control over one of these two factors .
They can ’ t do much about luck .
They have little ability to predict whether someone infected within their borders happens to spread the virus to a lot of people , and little control over their local weather or population density .
But they can take swift , aggressive action to mitigate their chances of an outbreak — to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that someone becomes a super-spreader or that people are gathering in very dense crowds .
In other words , some of this comes down to uncontrollable chance .
But to the extent that it doesn ’ t , different places need to be ready to take aggressive action and sustain it as long as necessary .
Some of the major contributors to a big , deadly outbreak are issues that are , at least for now , largely out of any given place ’ s control ( even if past years of policy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is a role for luck , ” Hanage said .
For example , the age and general health of a population can contribute to just how bad a major outbreak gets , with older and less healthy populations more likely to become seriously ill and die from Covid-19 .
Italy has suffered one of the deadliest coronavirus outbreaks in the world — with a death rate of more than 10 percent among confirmed cases — and one potential explanation for that is it has the second-oldest population in the world .
Cities , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ taken some steps prior to Covid-19 to shield their more vulnerable residents from infectious disease — by , for example , providing better health care or elderly care services .
But once the coronavirus hit , places had to deal with the realities on the ground .
There are other factors outside of any particular place ’ s immediate control , too .
Timing is a big one .
If a place is among the first hit by a new disease outbreak , it ’ s going to have fewer examples to learn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
States now look to New York as an example of things going very wrong , but that was possible only because New York got hit hard before most of them .
Whether a place is among the first hit is largely up to chance or , at least , variables largely outside of any government ’ s control .
Places with higher population density are likely more vulnerable to the spread of the coronavirus .
Places that rely on packed public transportation are likely more vulnerable , too .
It ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ virus easier to spread , as is true with some other viruses .
( New York City , perhaps not coincidentally , checks all of these boxes as the densest city in the US , with the highest rates of public transportation ridership , and relatively cold weather . )
Whether a place gets hit by a super-spreading event can also come down to chance .
There are things that governments and members of the public can do to mitigate the chance of such an event , like trying to keep people at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ large gatherings .
But there are some things that are harder to control .
Perhaps someone spreads a virus widely before she ’ s symptomatic and before it ’ s known that the community is having a problem with that virus .
Maybe some people are just more infectious for reasons we don ’ t yet know .
Some communities can have infected people travel to them at the wrong time , widely spreading a disease .
It ’ s kind of like rolling a die .
A die can be loaded in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from place to place and time to time , to prevent a bad roll that leads to a massive outbreak .
But there ’ s always a chance that the roll goes very , very wrong — maybe the one person in an otherwise well-behaved town who disobeys a stay-at-home order turns out to be highly infectious despite showing no symptoms , launching a super-spreading event .
With the coronavirus , there ’ s also a lot we don ’ t know , from exactly how and where the virus most often spreads @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
There could be variables affecting coronavirus outbreaks that we don ’ t even know exist .
That makes outbreaks of the virus less predictable , leaving more of the situation to chance than would otherwise be true .
While chance plays a role in any place becoming a hot spot , that doesn ’ t mean countries , states , and cities are powerless — far from it .
Experts say that during a big outbreak , governments should do what can feel like an overreaction : The big goal is to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ once policymakers are reacting to a bad outbreak , they ’ re already acting too slowly .
“ Any time you are dealing with an outbreak , if it appears like you overreacted , then you probably did the right thing , ” Krutika Kuppalli , a fellow in the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security Emerging Leaders in Biosecurity program , told me .
To put it another way , states have to do as much as they can , even if it feels like too much , to load the die @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the disease to others .
Consider the stories of California and New York .
Despite reporting some of the first Covid-19 cases in the US , California has avoided a massive outbreak .
Again , some of that could come down to chance or uncontrollable variables , such as New York City ’ s higher population density and use of public transit , or California ’ s generally warmer weather .
“ Any time you are dealing with an outbreak , if it appears like you overreacted , then you probably did the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is that California , particularly the San Francisco Bay Area , reacted quicker to the outbreak .
The Bay Area issued the first shelter-in-place order in the US on March 16 , and California issued a statewide stay-at-home order three days later — while New York didn ’ t impose its own mandate until March 22 .
Even before these orders , some parts of California seemed to adopt social distancing early : OpenTable data suggests that seated dining on March 1 was down just 2 percent in New York City , but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ It was down by only 3 percent in Los Angeles , though , so not every city in California acted the same . )
The extra days and weeks may not seem like that much time .
But when coronavirus cases and deaths can double every few days , that short time span is important .
“ It ’ s exponential , ” Hanage said .
“ And if you ’ re too late with it , you ’ re making the problem much , much , much worse.
” That ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ without any clear indication .
The research increasingly shows that people can transmit the virus before they develop any symptoms , and regardless of whether they develop symptoms at all .
Given the continued lack of testing in the US , that can mean the coronavirus is already spreading before people are aware it ’ s in the community — and it also might mean some places are underestimating just how bad their outbreaks are , potentially hiding hot spots before they become too bad to ignore .
“ By the time that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the hospital , there ’ s already a fair amount of transmission in the community , ” Natalie Dean , a biostatistics professor at the University of Florida , told me .
“ If you wait until that happens and then you clamp down , at some level it ’ s already going to be out of control at that point.
” To that end , it ’ s important for states to act not only earlier on the calendar but also earlier in terms of their overall outbreak .
For example , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stay-at-home orders took effect with only a two-minute difference , but Ohio ’ s order came when it was reporting around 100 new cases a day while Michigan ’ s came when it was reporting 500-plus cases a day .
So Ohio ’ s order was likely more effective at preventing a bigger outbreak — and that could help explain why Ohio has one-fifth as many Covid-19 deaths as Michigan , despite having a slightly larger population .
One potential counterpoint to the need for early action is Florida .
The governor there @ @ @ @ @ @ @ issuing a stay-at-home order until April 1 .
Yet the state has yet to see a huge outbreak , falling outside the top 20 for confirmed coronavirus deaths per 100,000 people .
Part of it may be that Florida got , in a sense , lucky .
Maybe its relatively sprawling population , lack of widespread public transportation use , and warmer weather helped .
But there ’ s another explanation : Florida is much more than its state government , and other parts of the state took relatively early action .
For @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Miami and Orlando , had stay-at-home orders in place in the weeks before the state took action .
There ’ s also evidence that Floridians started to embrace social distancing before officials demanded it : OpenTable ’ s restaurant data shows that seated dining in the state started to fall in March and was collapsing , with drops of 20 percent or more , by the second week of the month .
There ’ s also evidence supporting the efficacy of early action from the 1918 flu pandemic , which was linked to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and about 675,000 deaths in the US .
A 2007 study in PNAS found that the places that took quicker action on social distancing — closing schools and banning big public gatherings — saw better outcomes : One example cited in the study is the difference between Philadelphia , which was slow to act , and St. Louis , which was faster .
As this chart shows , St. Louis did a much better job of flattening the curve and averting excess deaths : The goal with disease outbreaks is to look less @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
And the key is early , aggressive action .
States can ’ t control luck , but they can be vigilant Experts are clear that , even though some elements may be outside of any city , state , or country ’ s immediate control , no one should rely on luck to get them by this crisis .
Instead , experts cautioned that everyone should assume coronavirus will eventually come to them .
The reality is that in a full-blown pandemic the risk is so widespread that it ’ s likely @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , before an infection hits a place not taking the right precautions .
“ Even if you ’ re not rolling the dice now , ” Hanage said , “ you ’ re almost certainly going to be rolling them before this is over.
” In much of the US , that means painful social distancing measures for the time being — to flatten the curve and build up health care and testing capacity .
Experts especially emphasize the need for much , much more testing .
While America has built greater testing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have stalled out in recent weeks at around 150,000 tests a day — far from the 500,000-plus or even millions of tests nationwide that some experts argue is necessary .
Even that might overstate how well some states are doing ; while New York has the highest testing rates in the country at 32 per 1,000 people , Florida has less than half that at 12 per 1,000 and Texas has even less at 6 per 1,000 .
Testing remains crucial to addressing the crisis .
It gives officials the means to isolate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ people whom those verified to be sick came into close contact with ( a.k.a .
“ contact tracing ” ) , and deploy community-wide efforts if a new cluster of cases is too large and uncontrolled otherwise .
Without it , the only way to deal with the outbreak is more social distancing , which further hurts the economy , or letting the disease run its course — at the cost of potentially hundreds of thousands or millions of lives .
The recognized need for more testing is one of the major reasons @ @ @ @ @ @ @ right now .
“ The whole point of this social distancing is to buy us time to build up capacity to do the types of public health interventions we know work , ” Dean said .
“ If we ’ re not using this time to scale up testing to the level that we need it to be … we don ’ t have an exit strategy .
And then when we lift things , we ’ re no better equipped than we were before.
” But the US just isn ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the supplies necessary to run tests and tight restrictions on who can be tested .
“ If we ’ re not using this time to scale up testing to the level that we need it to be … we don ’ t have an exit strategy ” To fix the gaps , experts argue , the federal government needs to relax criteria for testing , invest in new supplies and labs , and better coordinate supply chains to address , among other issues , chokepoints .
States , with limited resources and little @ @ @ @ @ @ @ simply can ’ t do this all on their own .
Such fixes , however , are easier said than done .
Experts warn the next phase of testing will be much more difficult than the initial phase , which largely required getting existing labs to start doing coronavirus testing — the low-hanging fruit .
“ We ’ ve made substantial progress ramping testing this month , ” Scott Gottlieb , a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration , wrote in a tweet on April 10 .
“ But many gains @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( clinical labs , academic labs ) .
Now we must expand lab capacity , platforms , throughput , test kits .
Getting next million tests/week will be harder than getting first.
” Until that work is done , states will need need to remain cautious .
While some of the Covid-19 risk is due to uncontrollable factors , aggressive early actors like California , Germany , and South Korea show the risk can be mitigated .
It ’ s important cities , states , and countries don ’ t leave this all @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you , and our audience around the world , with information that has the power to save lives .
Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment : to empower you through understanding .
Vox ’ s work is reaching more people than ever , but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn .
Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation , but it will enable @ @ @ @ @ @ @ articles , videos , and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires .
Please consider making a contribution to Vox today .

If you look at a map of coronavirus cases in the US, it can be hard to figure out any patterns. California reported some of the first coronavirus infections — including the country’s first instance of community transmission — but New York has reported 12 times as many deaths.
Michigan, meanwhile, has the third-highest number of coronavirus deaths in the US, but neighboring Ohio doesn’t even register in the top 10.
Florida was slow to shut down in response to the pandemic, but so far it’s reporting fewer deaths than nine other states, many of which were quicker to act.
Why? What explains why some states become hot spots for Covid-19, the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, but not others?
I turned to experts with these questions. While they cautioned that there’s a lot about the coronavirus and how pandemics work in modern society that we don’t know and are still learning about, they gave two major explanations for why some areas become hot spots and others don’t.
First, sometimes it just comes down to chance. Some places just happen to have populations, like the elderly and those with underlying medical conditions, that are more vulnerable to Covid-19. Factors beyond an area’s immediate control, such as its population density and perhaps even its weather, can also contribute to the virus’s spread. Whether any given place experiences a super-spreading event, in which one or more individuals transmit the coronavirus to a disproportionate number of people, can partly come down to chance, too.
Second, early action did appear to prevent coronavirus cases. Even in states that are not suffering a high number of Covid-19 deaths, chances are those figures would be even lower if they — or if the country as a whole — had acted sooner. There’s good evidence for this in some states, but there’s also research of past pandemics to back it up.
“A hot spot is a reflection of the combination of the random nature of things — in terms of who gets hit harder earlier — and then the timing of what we call non-pharmaceutical interventions” such as social distancing, William Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard University, told me.
The key here is that states have direct control over one of these two factors. They can’t do much about luck. They have little ability to predict whether someone infected within their borders happens to spread the virus to a lot of people, and little control over their local weather or population density. But they can take swift, aggressive action to mitigate their chances of an outbreak — to limit the risk, for example, that someone becomes a super-spreader or that people are gathering in very dense crowds.
In other words, some of this comes down to uncontrollable chance. But to the extent that it doesn’t, different places need to be ready to take aggressive action and sustain it as long as necessary.
Chance plays a role in Covid-19 outbreaks
Some of the major contributors to a big, deadly outbreak are issues that are, at least for now, largely out of any given place’s control (even if past years of policy contributed to them). “There is a role for luck,” Hanage said.
For example, the age and general health of a population can contribute to just how bad a major outbreak gets, with older and less healthy populations more likely to become seriously ill and die from Covid-19. Italy has suffered one of the deadliest coronavirus outbreaks in the world — with a death rate of more than 10 percent among confirmed cases — and one potential explanation for that is it has the second-oldest population in the world.
Cities, states, and countries could perhaps have taken some steps prior to Covid-19 to shield their more vulnerable residents from infectious disease — by, for example, providing better health care or elderly care services. But once the coronavirus hit, places had to deal with the realities on the ground.
There are other factors outside of any particular place’s immediate control, too.
Timing is a big one. If a place is among the first hit by a new disease outbreak, it’s going to have fewer examples to learn from in figuring out what to do. States now look to New York as an example of things going very wrong, but that was possible only because New York got hit hard before most of them. Whether a place is among the first hit is largely up to chance or, at least, variables largely outside of any government’s control.
Places with higher population density are likely more vulnerable to the spread of the coronavirus. Places that rely on packed public transportation are likely more vulnerable, too. It’s possible that colder weather can make the virus easier to spread, as is true with some other viruses. (New York City, perhaps not coincidentally, checks all of these boxes as the densest city in the US, with the highest rates of public transportation ridership, and relatively cold weather.)
Whether a place gets hit by a super-spreading event can also come down to chance. There are things that governments and members of the public can do to mitigate the chance of such an event, like trying to keep people at home, restricting travel, and stopping large gatherings.
But there are some things that are harder to control. Perhaps someone spreads a virus widely before she’s symptomatic and before it’s known that the community is having a problem with that virus. Maybe some people are just more infectious for reasons we don’t yet know. Some communities can have infected people travel to them at the wrong time, widely spreading a disease.
It’s kind of like rolling a die. A die can be loaded in all sorts of ways, which vary from place to place and time to time, to prevent a bad roll that leads to a massive outbreak. But there’s always a chance that the roll goes very, very wrong — maybe the one person in an otherwise well-behaved town who disobeys a stay-at-home order turns out to be highly infectious despite showing no symptoms, launching a super-spreading event.
With the coronavirus, there’s also a lot we don’t know, from exactly how and where the virus most often spreads to just how deadly Covid-19 truly is. There could be variables affecting coronavirus outbreaks that we don’t even know exist. That makes outbreaks of the virus less predictable, leaving more of the situation to chance than would otherwise be true.
Early action and vigilance matter
While chance plays a role in any place becoming a hot spot, that doesn’t mean countries, states, and cities are powerless — far from it. Experts say that during a big outbreak, governments should do what can feel like an overreaction: The big goal is to prevent things from getting bad, so once policymakers are reacting to a bad outbreak, they’re already acting too slowly.
“Any time you are dealing with an outbreak, if it appears like you overreacted, then you probably did the right thing,” Krutika Kuppalli, a fellow in the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security Emerging Leaders in Biosecurity program, told me.
To put it another way, states have to do as much as they can, even if it feels like too much, to load the die so that people aren’t spreading the disease to others.
Consider the stories of California and New York. Despite reporting some of the first Covid-19 cases in the US, California has avoided a massive outbreak. Again, some of that could come down to chance or uncontrollable variables, such as New York City’s higher population density and use of public transit, or California’s generally warmer weather.
“Any time you are dealing with an outbreak, if it appears like you overreacted, then you probably did the right thing”
But one likely contributor is that California, particularly the San Francisco Bay Area, reacted quicker to the outbreak. The Bay Area issued the first shelter-in-place order in the US on March 16, and California issued a statewide stay-at-home order three days later — while New York didn’t impose its own mandate until March 22. Even before these orders, some parts of California seemed to adopt social distancing early: OpenTable data suggests that seated dining on March 1 was down just 2 percent in New York City, but 18 percent in San Francisco. (It was down by only 3 percent in Los Angeles, though, so not every city in California acted the same.)
The extra days and weeks may not seem like that much time. But when coronavirus cases and deaths can double every few days, that short time span is important. “It’s exponential,” Hanage said. “And if you’re too late with it, you’re making the problem much, much, much worse.”
That’s especially true because the coronavirus can spread without any clear indication. The research increasingly shows that people can transmit the virus before they develop any symptoms, and regardless of whether they develop symptoms at all. Given the continued lack of testing in the US, that can mean the coronavirus is already spreading before people are aware it’s in the community — and it also might mean some places are underestimating just how bad their outbreaks are, potentially hiding hot spots before they become too bad to ignore.
“By the time that you start seeing cases show up in the hospital, there’s already a fair amount of transmission in the community,” Natalie Dean, a biostatistics professor at the University of Florida, told me. “If you wait until that happens and then you clamp down, at some level it’s already going to be out of control at that point.”
To that end, it’s important for states to act not only earlier on the calendar but also earlier in terms of their overall outbreak. For example, Ohio’s and Michigan’s stay-at-home orders took effect with only a two-minute difference, but Ohio’s order came when it was reporting around 100 new cases a day while Michigan’s came when it was reporting 500-plus cases a day. So Ohio’s order was likely more effective at preventing a bigger outbreak — and that could help explain why Ohio has one-fifth as many Covid-19 deaths as Michigan, despite having a slightly larger population.
One potential counterpoint to the need for early action is Florida. The governor there was slow to take action, not issuing a stay-at-home order until April 1. Yet the state has yet to see a huge outbreak, falling outside the top 20 for confirmed coronavirus deaths per 100,000 people.
Part of it may be that Florida got, in a sense, lucky. Maybe its relatively sprawling population, lack of widespread public transportation use, and warmer weather helped.
But there’s another explanation: Florida is much more than its state government, and other parts of the state took relatively early action. For example, some cities, such as Miami and Orlando, had stay-at-home orders in place in the weeks before the state took action. There’s also evidence that Floridians started to embrace social distancing before officials demanded it: OpenTable’s restaurant data shows that seated dining in the state started to fall in March and was collapsing, with drops of 20 percent or more, by the second week of the month.
There’s also evidence supporting the efficacy of early action from the 1918 flu pandemic, which was linked to as many as 100 million deaths globally and about 675,000 deaths in the US. A 2007 study in PNAS found that the places that took quicker action on social distancing — closing schools and banning big public gatherings — saw better outcomes:
[C]ities in which multiple interventions were implemented at an early phase of the epidemic had peak death rates ≈50% lower than those that did not and had less-steep epidemic curves. Cities in which multiple interventions were implemented at an early phase of the epidemic also showed a trend toward lower cumulative excess mortality, but the difference was smaller (≈20%) and less statistically significant than that for peak death rates.
One example cited in the study is the difference between Philadelphia, which was slow to act, and St. Louis, which was faster. As this chart shows, St. Louis did a much better job of flattening the curve and averting excess deaths:
The goal with disease outbreaks is to look less like Philadelphia and more like St. Louis. And the key is early, aggressive action.
States can’t control luck, but they can be vigilant
Experts are clear that, even though some elements may be outside of any city, state, or country’s immediate control, no one should rely on luck to get them by this crisis.
Instead, experts cautioned that everyone should assume coronavirus will eventually come to them. The reality is that in a full-blown pandemic the risk is so widespread that it’s likely a matter of time, not chance, before an infection hits a place not taking the right precautions. “Even if you’re not rolling the dice now,” Hanage said, “you’re almost certainly going to be rolling them before this is over.”
In much of the US, that means painful social distancing measures for the time being — to flatten the curve and build up health care and testing capacity.
Experts especially emphasize the need for much, much more testing. While America has built greater testing capacity since March, progress appears to have stalled out in recent weeks at around 150,000 tests a day — far from the 500,000-plus or even millions of tests nationwide that some experts argue is necessary. Even that might overstate how well some states are doing; while New York has among the highest testing rates in the country at 32 per 1,000 people, Florida has less than half that at 12 per 1,000 and Texas has even less at 6 per 1,000.
Testing remains crucial to addressing the crisis. It gives officials the means to isolate sick people, track and quarantine the people whom those verified to be sick came into close contact with (a.k.a. “contact tracing”), and deploy community-wide efforts if a new cluster of cases is too large and uncontrolled otherwise. Without it, the only way to deal with the outbreak is more social distancing, which further hurts the economy, or letting the disease run its course — at the cost of potentially hundreds of thousands or millions of lives.
The recognized need for more testing is one of the major reasons much of the US is social distancing right now. “The whole point of this social distancing is to buy us time to build up capacity to do the types of public health interventions we know work,” Dean said. “If we’re not using this time to scale up testing to the level that we need it to be … we don’t have an exit strategy. And then when we lift things, we’re no better equipped than we were before.”
But the US just isn’t there yet, with continued shortages in the supplies necessary to run tests and tight restrictions on who can be tested.
“If we’re not using this time to scale up testing to the level that we need it to be … we don’t have an exit strategy”
To fix the gaps, experts argue, the federal government needs to relax criteria for testing, invest in new supplies and labs, and better coordinate supply chains to address, among other issues, chokepoints. States, with limited resources and little control of the national supply chain, simply can’t do this all on their own.
Such fixes, however, are easier said than done. Experts warn the next phase of testing will be much more difficult than the initial phase, which largely required getting existing labs to start doing coronavirus testing — the low-hanging fruit.
“We’ve made substantial progress ramping testing this month,” Scott Gottlieb, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, wrote in a tweet on April 10. “But many gains were made by getting players into fight (clinical labs, academic labs). Now we must expand lab capacity, platforms, throughput, test kits. Getting next million tests/week will be harder than getting first.”
Until that work is done, states will need need to remain cautious. While some of the Covid-19 risk is due to uncontrollable factors, aggressive early actors like California, Germany, and South Korea show the risk can be mitigated. It’s important cities, states, and countries don’t leave this all to chance.


vox--2020-04-22--Will the worst downturn since the Great Depression last as long?

Weeks of record job losses have left the United States with an unemployment rate that ’ s widely estimated to be higher than at any time since the Great Depression .
That shocking reality naturally invites analogies and raises what is perhaps the most important economic question of our time : How long will the bad times last ?
After all , what made the Great Depression so great was not just the severity of the slump but its extraordinary length — beginning in the United States in the second half of 1929 and not really ending until almost 10 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the modern economy will come roaring back when things “ open up , ” but disagree about when that can or should happen and exactly what it means .
Although very severe recessions are sometimes short , America ’ s most recent recessions — even the milder ones — have tended to be long , and the most recent one was both long and deep .
A prolonged collapse akin to the Great Depression is by no means inevitable , but it ’ s not impossible either .
The fate of the American @ @ @ @ @ @ @ course of the virus but on economic policy choices .
Will Congress and the Federal Reserve provide the kind of dramatic stimulus we need to return to full employment , or will they opt to just muddle through ?
The Great Depression was really long The most striking thing about the American economy in the 1930s is that the Depression went on and on and on .
There are a few different ways you could look at this , but probably the simplest is to consider the unemployment rate .
Here ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ways .
One is the official unemployment rate from Stanley Lebergott of the Bureau of Labor Statistics , the other line is a more optimistic model constructed years later by economist Michael Darby , who argues that the official statistics of the day improperly classified people with unemployment relief jobs as not working .
The Lebergott-Darby gap of roughly 5 percentage points makes a difference , but either way , it ’ s a long depression .
Even using Darby ’ s numbers , the unemployment rate never got low during President Franklin @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
After getting steadily worse under President Herbert Hoover in the early 1930s , the economy got better under Roosevelt , which is why he won reelection overwhelmingly in 1936 .
But things were still really bad during the New Deal ’ s best moments .
Then it got worse , because in 1937 , the US stopped making progress and fell into a new recession within the depression .
Policymakers corrected some of the errors that led to the 1937 recession ( more on that later ) , and the unemployment rate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 1940 , the labor market was still in shambles .
It ’ s only the extraordinary events surrounding World War II that really brought the Depression to an end .
And that resolution shows us two things .
One is that if politicians had been willing to try more drastic things earlier , they may have been able to generate the rapid recovery that took place in 1940 earlier , too .
The other is that if war hadn ’ t broken out , the very modest and unsteady pace of recovery that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ continued for years more .
Nothing about the nature of an economy guarantees that it will “ bounce back ” from bad news .
But it does sometimes happen .
“ V-shaped ” recessions used to be common Macroeconomic forecasters often talk about the idea of “ V-shaped ” recessions — recessions where a swift decline is followed by a swift recovery .
And America has had a lot of recessions like that .
In July 1981 the unemployment rate was 7.2 percent , surging to 10.8 percent by December 1982 , but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ June 1984 .
That was the worst of the V-shaped recessions , but they used to be fairly common — especially in the 20 years following the end of World War when we had four of them in a row .
These recessions all have an underlying dynamic , where the Federal Reserve starts to worry that the economy is overheating and inflation is rising so they raise interest rates .
Then interest-sensitive sectors of the economy rapidly start to shrink , and unemployment soars .
When the time is right , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ up again .
America ’ s more lingering recessions — like the one that sparked by the financial crisis but also the much more mild but annoyingly long-lasting one touched off by the collapse of the 1990s stock market bubble — tend to have more complicated dynamics .
The Fed tries to fight them by cutting interest rates , but the Fed didn ’ t cause these recessions by raising rates , so taking them all the way down to zero doesn ’ t necessarily get the job done .
Today , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ zero and the economy is still heading south , so there ’ s reason to worry that once again we won ’ t get a “ V. ” But there ’ s also a case for optimism .
The recurrence of the phrase “ opening up the economy ” in contemporary politics reflects the view that current economic problems are caused by top-down closure orders .
When restrictions are lifted , the hope is the economy will come roaring back .
With this view , you might see the economy as sort of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ been compressed , for now , for the sake of flattening the curve .
But when pressure abates — whether because of policy shifts or medical breakthroughs — it ’ ll bounce right back .
Former Treasury Secretary and National Economic Council director Lawrence Summers tentatively endorsed something like this view in early April , analogizing the current depression to a seasonal downturn or a long weekend .
He acknowledged , though , that this was “ only an optimistic guess ” and he was “ not sure ” if it ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ forecasting as a discipline is not very good , and in this case , economists are looking at a situation they have no real experience with .
And it ’ s certainly possible that this could prove correct .
Simply proclaiming that America is back open for business is unlikely to produce a huge surge in growth , but real medical advances that put the public health crisis behind us could .
You could imagine a tremendous amount of pent-up demand as a long-frustrated public goes out and does things they ’ ve @ @ @ @ @ @ @ months .
There could also be a surge of optimism as people feel the American can-do spirit has triumphed against an “ invisible enemy ” and now is a great time to make risky bets on the future .
Millions of Americans have been familiarizing themselves with new digital productivity tools during the extended work-from-home era and organizations may return to the post-Covid world stronger and more efficient for it .
All that said , historically speaking long downturns usually become long because they far outlast the events that precipitated them .
We @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Recession is an unfortunate example of the problem .
The economy initially headed into what looked like a mild recession , driven by a decline in housebuilding activity associated with the fall in housing prices .
But then came a severe financial crisis that sparked concerns about widespread bank failures or a total breakdown of the financial system .
That plunged the country into what became an extremely severe recession over the winter of 2008- ’ 09 .
But a range of emergency measures undertaken by the Federal Reserve and the US Congress @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by mid-2009 , was clearly not going to collapse .
And , indeed , by the second half of 2009 the economy was growing again — just not fast enough .
Jobs came back , but at a much slower pace than they ’ d disappeared , giving the recession a prolonged and asymmetrical character .
A financial breakdown caused the job losses , but fixing the financial breakdown didn ’ t cause a rapid bounce-back .
Making things worse , it took six years for total employment to return to its precrisis @ @ @ @ @ @ @ did , the US population had grown considerably .
In 2015 and 2016 , more Americans were working than at any previous time in history .
But because the working-age population kept growing the labor market remained weak .
It was really only in the 24 months before coronavirus arrived that the job market was finally functioning “ normally ” with workers quitting jobs at high rates , and employers experimenting with pay raises to retain staff or recruiting marginal candidates like ex-convicts and recovering addicts .
The shallow recession of the early @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a similar quality — the recovery was much slower and weaker than the initial collapse , provoking much frustration .
The common element that these two recessions share with the Great Depression is that none of them were deliberately provoked by a Federal Reserve trying to control inflation .
Consequently in all three cases even though the Fed cut interest rates to try to help the economy , the switch couldn ’ t be flung hard enough to make the economy bounce back .
What it took was either time or , in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ measures .
The Depression lasted a long time and the recovery was uneven , so there isn ’ t a single unitary explanation of what ended it .
Instead , there were basically four prongs : • FDR took the United States off the gold standard , breaking with prevailing orthodoxy to devalue the dollar and helping to bolster the private sector recovery from 1933 to 1937 .
• Work-relief programs consistently knocked about 5 percentage points off the unemployment rate .
• Fear of Hitler started causing Europeans to shift gold into @ @ @ @ @ @ @ additional monetary expansion that helped reverse the 1937 recession .
• Finally , America geared up to enter World War II and then actually joined the war , causing a huge surge in deficit spending that finally generated full employment .
Conversely , in 1937 , when public officials decided the recovery was underway and it was time to return to more conventional policy , everything slid back down quickly .
In retrospect , the United States almost certainly could have restored full employment in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the spirit of 1933 .
What we got instead was a frustrated back-and-forth effort .
Big fiscal stimulus in 2009 , followed by significant austerity starting in 2011 .
Bold Federal Reserve initiatives like quantitative easing , alternating with statements about how eager the Fed was to return to normal .
The results were much better than in the Great Depression , but much worse than the recovery could have looked like .
The economy probably won ’ t revive on its own The basic case for pessimism about the economy in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are going to exit this crisis poorer than they were at the beginning , thanks to some combination of job loss , reduced hours , pay cuts , investment losses , lost tips , or reduced sales .
People who have less money than they had before the crisis can ’ t simply “ go back to normal ” when the crisis is over , they need to deal with the fact that they are poorer now by restraining their spending .
But because my spending is your income and vice-versa , that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ back .
If the coronavirus crisis were a uniquely American phenomenon , Americans could get out of the jam by selling things to foreigners — but the whole world is basically in the same boat .
If interest rates were high , the Fed could make them low making debt more affordable and generating a surge of debt-financed activity — but rates were low when the crisis began and they ’ ve already been cut to zero .
That essentially leaves us where we were in the Great Depression , with an economy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ simply because it ’ s been depressed .
People with no money can ’ t buy things , and in a global downturn there ’ s nowhere to turn for customers .
A solution would need to involve either unorthodox Federal Reserve actions — a search for a modern-day equivalent to abandoning the gold standard — or else the government serving as a customer of last resort , as it did during the lead-up to World War II .
To normalize the economy , it won ’ t be good enough to lift @ @ @ @ @ @ @ emergency , people are going to need sources of income .
The federal government , which is uniquely positioned to spend much more than it takes in , can serve as that source of income .
But for it to happen , politicians will need to avoid the kind of premature pivot to deficit reduction that happened in 2010 and 2011 .
Every day at Vox , we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you , and our audience around the world , with information that has the power to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ been more vital than it is in this moment : to empower you through understanding .
Vox ’ s work is reaching more people than ever , but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn .
Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation , but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles , videos , and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires .
Please consider making a contribution to Vox today .

Weeks of record job losses have left the United States with an unemployment rate that’s widely estimated to be higher than at any time since the Great Depression.
That shocking reality naturally invites analogies and raises what is perhaps the most important economic question of our time: How long will the bad times last? After all, what made the Great Depression so great was not just the severity of the slump but its extraordinary length — beginning in the United States in the second half of 1929 and not really ending until almost 10 years later.
Policymakers are hoping that the modern economy will come roaring back when things “open up,” but disagree about when that can or should happen and exactly what it means. Although very severe recessions are sometimes short, America’s most recent recessions — even the milder ones — have tended to be long, and the most recent one was both long and deep.
A prolonged collapse akin to the Great Depression is by no means inevitable, but it’s not impossible either. The fate of the American economy will rest not just on the course of the virus but on economic policy choices. Will Congress and the Federal Reserve provide the kind of dramatic stimulus we need to return to full employment, or will they opt to just muddle through?
The Great Depression was really long
The most striking thing about the American economy in the 1930s is that the Depression went on and on and on. There are a few different ways you could look at this, but probably the simplest is to consider the unemployment rate.
Here’s a chart showing joblessness calculated in two ways. One is the official unemployment rate from Stanley Lebergott of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the other line is a more optimistic model constructed years later by economist Michael Darby, who argues that the official statistics of the day improperly classified people with unemployment relief jobs as not working. The Lebergott-Darby gap of roughly 5 percentage points makes a difference, but either way, it’s a long depression.
Even using Darby’s numbers, the unemployment rate never got low during President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs. After getting steadily worse under President Herbert Hoover in the early 1930s, the economy got better under Roosevelt, which is why he won reelection overwhelmingly in 1936. But things were still really bad during the New Deal’s best moments.
Then it got worse, because in 1937, the US stopped making progress and fell into a new recession within the depression. Policymakers corrected some of the errors that led to the 1937 recession (more on that later), and the unemployment rate started falling again.
But even by 1940, the labor market was still in shambles. It’s only the extraordinary events surrounding World War II that really brought the Depression to an end. And that resolution shows us two things.
One is that if politicians had been willing to try more drastic things earlier, they may have been able to generate the rapid recovery that took place in 1940 earlier, too. The other is that if war hadn’t broken out, the very modest and unsteady pace of recovery that was happening under Roosevelt might have just continued for years more. Nothing about the nature of an economy guarantees that it will “bounce back” from bad news.
But it does sometimes happen.
“V-shaped” recessions used to be common
Macroeconomic forecasters often talk about the idea of “V-shaped” recessions — recessions where a swift decline is followed by a swift recovery.
And America has had a lot of recessions like that. In July 1981 the unemployment rate was 7.2 percent, surging to 10.8 percent by December 1982, but then tumbling back to 7.2 percent by June 1984.
That was the worst of the V-shaped recessions, but they used to be fairly common — especially in the 20 years following the end of World War when we had four of them in a row. These recessions all have an underlying dynamic, where the Federal Reserve starts to worry that the economy is overheating and inflation is rising so they raise interest rates. Then interest-sensitive sectors of the economy rapidly start to shrink, and unemployment soars. When the time is right, the Fed flips the switch and things pick up again.
America’s more lingering recessions — like the one that sparked by the financial crisis but also the much more mild but annoyingly long-lasting one touched off by the collapse of the 1990s stock market bubble — tend to have more complicated dynamics. The Fed tries to fight them by cutting interest rates, but the Fed didn’t cause these recessions by raising rates, so taking them all the way down to zero doesn’t necessarily get the job done. Today, the Fed has already taken rates down to zero and the economy is still heading south, so there’s reason to worry that once again we won’t get a “V.”
But there’s also a case for optimism.
“Opening up the economy”
The recurrence of the phrase “opening up the economy” in contemporary politics reflects the view that current economic problems are caused by top-down closure orders. When restrictions are lifted, the hope is the economy will come roaring back.
With this view, you might see the economy as sort of like a spring. It’s been compressed, for now, for the sake of flattening the curve. But when pressure abates — whether because of policy shifts or medical breakthroughs — it’ll bounce right back. Former Treasury Secretary and National Economic Council director Lawrence Summers tentatively endorsed something like this view in early April, analogizing the current depression to a seasonal downturn or a long weekend. He acknowledged, though, that this was “only an optimistic guess” and he was “not sure” if it’s right.
I think that if we’re able to get the public health under control that normality will return more quickly than it does after financial crises or normal recessions, but I’m not sure of that. — Lawrence H. Summers (@LHSummers) April 3, 2020
The overall record of macroeconomic forecasting as a discipline is not very good, and in this case, economists are looking at a situation they have no real experience with.
And it’s certainly possible that this could prove correct. Simply proclaiming that America is back open for business is unlikely to produce a huge surge in growth, but real medical advances that put the public health crisis behind us could. You could imagine a tremendous amount of pent-up demand as a long-frustrated public goes out and does things they’ve been afraid or banned from doing for months.
There could also be a surge of optimism as people feel the American can-do spirit has triumphed against an “invisible enemy” and now is a great time to make risky bets on the future. Millions of Americans have been familiarizing themselves with new digital productivity tools during the extended work-from-home era and organizations may return to the post-Covid world stronger and more efficient for it.
All that said, historically speaking long downturns usually become long because they far outlast the events that precipitated them.
We have some scary precedents
The recent Great Recession is an unfortunate example of the problem.
The economy initially headed into what looked like a mild recession, driven by a decline in housebuilding activity associated with the fall in housing prices. But then came a severe financial crisis that sparked concerns about widespread bank failures or a total breakdown of the financial system. That plunged the country into what became an extremely severe recession over the winter of 2008-’09. But a range of emergency measures undertaken by the Federal Reserve and the US Congress successfully saved the financial system which, by mid-2009, was clearly not going to collapse. And, indeed, by the second half of 2009 the economy was growing again — just not fast enough.
Jobs came back, but at a much slower pace than they’d disappeared, giving the recession a prolonged and asymmetrical character. A financial breakdown caused the job losses, but fixing the financial breakdown didn’t cause a rapid bounce-back.
Making things worse, it took six years for total employment to return to its precrisis levels, and by the time it did, the US population had grown considerably. In 2015 and 2016, more Americans were working than at any previous time in history. But because the working-age population kept growing the labor market remained weak. It was really only in the 24 months before coronavirus arrived that the job market was finally functioning “normally” with workers quitting jobs at high rates, and employers experimenting with pay raises to retain staff or recruiting marginal candidates like ex-convicts and recovering addicts.
The shallow recession of the early 2000s was much less severe but had a similar quality — the recovery was much slower and weaker than the initial collapse, provoking much frustration. The common element that these two recessions share with the Great Depression is that none of them were deliberately provoked by a Federal Reserve trying to control inflation. Consequently in all three cases even though the Fed cut interest rates to try to help the economy, the switch couldn’t be flung hard enough to make the economy bounce back. What it took was either time or, in the case of the Depression, extraordinary measures.
Unconventional thinking ended the Depression
The Depression lasted a long time and the recovery was uneven, so there isn’t a single unitary explanation of what ended it. Instead, there were basically four prongs:
FDR took the United States off the gold standard, breaking with prevailing orthodoxy to devalue the dollar and helping to bolster the private sector recovery from 1933 to 1937.
Work-relief programs consistently knocked about 5 percentage points off the unemployment rate.
Fear of Hitler started causing Europeans to shift gold into the United States around 1938, providing additional monetary expansion that helped reverse the 1937 recession.
Finally, America geared up to enter World War II and then actually joined the war, causing a huge surge in deficit spending that finally generated full employment.
Conversely, in 1937, when public officials decided the recovery was underway and it was time to return to more conventional policy, everything slid back down quickly.
In retrospect, the United States almost certainly could have restored full employment in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis more rapidly had policymakers acted more forcefully in the spirit of 1933. What we got instead was a frustrated back-and-forth effort. Big fiscal stimulus in 2009, followed by significant austerity starting in 2011. Bold Federal Reserve initiatives like quantitative easing, alternating with statements about how eager the Fed was to return to normal.
The results were much better than in the Great Depression, but much worse than the recovery could have looked like.
The economy probably won’t revive on its own
The basic case for pessimism about the economy in the medium term is this: Most Americans are going to exit this crisis poorer than they were at the beginning, thanks to some combination of job loss, reduced hours, pay cuts, investment losses, lost tips, or reduced sales. People who have less money than they had before the crisis can’t simply “go back to normal” when the crisis is over, they need to deal with the fact that they are poorer now by restraining their spending. But because my spending is your income and vice-versa, that collective restraint will keep holding the economy back.
If the coronavirus crisis were a uniquely American phenomenon, Americans could get out of the jam by selling things to foreigners — but the whole world is basically in the same boat.
If interest rates were high, the Fed could make them low making debt more affordable and generating a surge of debt-financed activity — but rates were low when the crisis began and they’ve already been cut to zero.
That essentially leaves us where we were in the Great Depression, with an economy that’s going to be depressed simply because it’s been depressed. People with no money can’t buy things, and in a global downturn there’s nowhere to turn for customers. A solution would need to involve either unorthodox Federal Reserve actions — a search for a modern-day equivalent to abandoning the gold standard — or else the government serving as a customer of last resort, as it did during the lead-up to World War II.
To normalize the economy, it won’t be good enough to lift restrictions and address the underlying public health emergency, people are going to need sources of income. The federal government, which is uniquely positioned to spend much more than it takes in, can serve as that source of income. But for it to happen, politicians will need to avoid the kind of premature pivot to deficit reduction that happened in 2010 and 2011.


Why we can’t build

In a viral essay , venture capitalist Marc Andreessen makes a simple exhortation : It ’ s time to build .
Behind the coronavirus crisis , he writes , lies “ our widespread inability to build.
” We ’ ve been unable to build enough coronavirus tests , or even enough cotton swabs to fully utilize the tests we do have .
We don ’ t have enough ventilators , ICU beds , personal protection equipment .
The government hasn ’ t built the capacity to quickly get money to people or businesses who need it .
And it ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ could be building our way out of the housing crisis and the climate crisis .
We could be building a better education system , more advanced infrastructure .
We could have more and better factories , supersonic aircraft , delivery drones , flying cars .
Andreessen is a Silicon Valley pioneer .
He co-created the Mosaic web browser and co-founded Netscape .
He built multiple billion-dollar companies , runs one of the industry ’ s largest VC firms and sits on the board of Facebook , among others .
His essay channels the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in which the tech industry has been criticized for moving too fast and breaking too much , we ’ re seeing the consequences of moving too slow and building too little .
Wouldn ’ t you prefer the drawbacks of disruption to the calamities of stagnation ?
Even so , Andreessen is braced for criticism , and he has an answer ready .
“ Here ’ s a modest proposal to my critics .
Instead of attacking my ideas of what to build , conceive your own !
What do you think we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is uncharacteristically underestimating the appetite for building .
The absence of creation doesn ’ t reflect an absence of desire — even in that epicenter of supposed stagnation , Washington , DC .
I ’ ve covered Congress for almost 20 years .
The place is littered with proposals to construct universal pre-k and reimagine the health system , to decarbonize the US economy and incentivize drug development through prizes and solve the housing crisis .
They just don ’ t pass .
It ’ s become a running joke in Washington that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But we ’ re not rebuilding American infrastructure .
The question , then , is why don ’ t we build ?
What ’ s stopping us ?
Here ’ s my answer : The institutions through which Americans build have become biased against action rather than toward it .
They ’ ve become , in political scientist Francis Fukuyama ’ s term , “ vetocracies , ” in which too many actors have veto rights over what gets built .
That ’ s true in the federal government .
It ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ It ’ s even true in the private sector .
I ’ m not against soliciting more ideas of what to build .
But what we need is sustained funding , focus , and organizing to make building in America possible again .
And that requires patiently engaging with the kinds of institutions that frustrate builders .
That the US government has become a dysfunctional vetocracy is obvious .
Hell , I wrote a whole book about it .
But in short : America ’ s system of checks and balances requires unusual @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pass legislation .
First , you need the agreement of the House , the Senate , the White House , and , increasingly , the Supreme Court .
More granularly , congressional power is diffused across committees .
The Senate has built in a supermajority requirement , known as the filibuster , which effectively raises the threshold for passage from 51 votes to 60 votes .
This raises the question : If the problem is embedded in the structure of the US government , how did the US ever do anything big ?
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ of our political history , two unusual conditions held .
First , the parties were ideologically mixed , which made compromise easier .
Second , one party was usually electorally dominant , which gave the party in the minority a reason to compromise : If you can ’ t win , you may as well deal .
Both those conditions have dissolved .
America ’ s political parties are more ideologically — and demographically — polarized than ever before .
We ’ re also in the most competitive period American politics has ever @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , both sides utilize the system ’ s bias toward inaction to foil their opponents .
You can see this in the rise of the filibuster over time .
The rule has been around almost as long as America , but it ’ s only been deployed as an omnipresent veto in recent decades : The result is a system biased toward inaction .
The left can ’ t remake American health care .
The right can ’ t voucherize American schools .
The left can ’ t pass a climate bill .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Security .
Neither side can rewrite our immigration laws , hence the turn towards oscillating executive orders .
Neither side can pass their infrastructure packages .
Neither side can reform social insurance .
In the midst of a pandemic , a financial crisis , or a terrorist attack , emergency measures can pass , for a little while , but absent some kind of crisis , paralysis is the rule .
( This is a sketch , and it ignores some important party asymmetries , so read the book if you want to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ungovernable . )
If paralysis ended once you walked out of the Capitol , we wouldn ’ t have a housing crisis .
We ’ d have better social insurance infrastructure .
We ’ d have better infrastructure , period .
But it doesn ’ t .
To put the question simply : Why is Penn Station , the flagship rail station in New York City , such a dump ?
Why can ’ t the richest city in the richest nation in the world have , at the very least , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ restaurants , working elevators , and a minimum of human waste falling through the ceiling ?
Marc Dunkelman spent years cataloging the many failures to revamp Penn Station , a number of which came complete with hefty doses of federal funding .
Each time , the story was the same : Plenty of people who wanted to build , and plenty of money with which to build , but too many people with vetoes who simply didn ’ t want the building to happen .
This is representative democracy at its worst : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ know to show up at meetings most people never hear about , and so ends up handing power to special interests and aggrieved NIMBYs .
I highly recommend this Weeds podcast on “ neighborhood defenders ” and the way participatory local processes favor the status quo for more on that dynamic .
Dunkelman , himself a liberal , locates the crisis in a progressive skepticism of power that had roots in a real crisis but that has itself become a crisis for effective state and local governance : You can see this if @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Francisco and watch the line of people who assemble to oppose even the most modest development .
You can see it in California ’ s inability to build high-speed rail , despite tens of billions of dollars in federal subsidies , because the state got so trapped in its own vetocracy it couldn ’ t just build the damn thing in a straight line .
You can see it in the inability of American cities to build public transit at cost and quality levels that simply rival that of poorer , older European @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the new development in Asia .
As Dunkelman puts it , “ in New York , and in other cities , government power is now spread so thin that places once incapable of stopping bad projects now can not get good projects off the ground.
” That applies far more broadly , of course , than just city governance .
But the problem isn ’ t just progressives who grew afraid of what would happen if government power could be wielded too easily .
The problem is also conservatives who want government to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ most .
Andreessen singles out for criticism the archaic structures through which America delivers unemployment insurance .
“ A government that collects money from all its citizens and businesses each year has never built a system to distribute money to us when it ’ s needed most , ” he marvels .
Unemployment insurance is administered by the states .
In many of those states , the system works just fine .
In some , it worked fine , but simply wasn ’ t prepared for an unemployment crisis of genuinely unprecedented dimensions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the system ’ s dysfunction is a feature , not a bug .
In Florida , the unemployment insurance system is designed to be difficult to use because conservative governors wanted it to go unused .
They ’ re regretting those decisions now , but only because it ’ s screwing over their own voters in a time of crisis .
In a grotesque way , Florida ’ s disastrous UI system represents the successful completion of a project : They intended to build a UI system that failed those who needed it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Which goes to a problem that afflicts governance at all levels of America : If you live in a vetocracy and one of your two political parties actively wants the government to work poorly , the government will work poorly .
And so it does .
But some of Andreessen ’ s examples really can ’ t be blamed on the government , at least not in a traditional sense .
America doesn ’ t have more ICU beds because hospitals have budgets to balance .
You can ’ t both run a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for a once-in-a-century pandemic .
Similarly , the companies that make ventilators are private companies .
They didn ’ t make more ventilators because there wasn ’ t demand for more ventilators .
Same goes for surgical masks , eye shields , hospital gowns .
Now , you can argue the government should ’ ve been stockpiling more of this stuff all along — and definitely should have been ramping up production in January and February — but a capitalist logic of efficiency prevails both inside and outside the market .
Take , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ administration program to loan money to renewable energy companies that became infamous because one of those companies , Solyndra , was a bust .
That program led to a slew of successes ( including Tesla ) and turned a profit to taxpayers .
As Michael Lewis argues at length in his book The Fifth Risk , the problem , if anything , was that it was too cautious — so afraid of a Solyndra-like story that it wasn ’ t funding sufficiently risky investments .
But they proved right to be afraid .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ turn a constant profit on its programs and to avoid anything that might look like a boondoggle , you can imagine the pressure actual private companies are under .
CEOs of all kinds of companies lament “ short-termism.
” Startup theorist Eric Ries has even gotten SEC approval for a “ long-term stock exchange ” meant to ease the problem .
In practice , short-term shareholder capitalism acts as a kind of vetocracy on public companies : If the market thinks whatever you ’ re doing is going to cut quarterly earning for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you severely , and instantly , for trying .
There are CEOs like Amazon ’ s Jeff Bezos who ’ ve been able to get themselves a longer leash , but they ’ re the exceptions that infuriate the rules .
Silicon Valley isn ’ t immune to these dynamics .
As Peter Thiel has complained , there ’ s been too much spending on bits and not enough spending on atoms .
Software scales easily , and if you get it right , you can make billions in a couple of years @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is eating the world ” and helped drive the enthusiasm for super-scalable , digital business models .
As the sorry state of vaccine funding shows , companies with more uncertain business models have had more trouble getting investors .
Andreessen knows this story better than I do , and would , I ’ m sure , tell it with more nuance .
He ’ s even a backer of Ries ’ s long-term stock exchange .
But hyperefficient , financialized , globalized capitalism leads to fragile supply chains , copycat investments , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it ’ s harder and harder for even CEOs to ignore when the market , or activist investors , or board members , or even just a critical mass of Twitter users , veto their plans .
We need to rebuild institutions Andreessen ’ s essay ends with a call for mentorship , social pressure , and a realignment of priorities .
“ Every step of the way , to everyone around us , we should be asking the question , what are you building ?
” He writes .
“ What are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ people to build , or teaching other people to build , or taking care of people who are building ?
If the work you ’ re doing isn ’ t either leading to something being built or taking care of people directly , we ’ ve failed you.
” I don ’ t think that ’ ll be enough .
So let me end with my answer to Andreessen ’ s question : What should we build ?
We should build institutions biased toward action and ambition , rather than inaction and incrementalism @ @ @ @ @ @ @ work of reforming existing institutions that aren ’ t going anywhere .
You can ’ t sidestep the existence of the government , as too many in Silicon Valley want to do .
You have to engage with it .
You have to muster the political power to rebuild parts of it .
And then you need to use the government to make markets competitive again .
At the federal level , I ’ d get rid of the filibuster , simplify the committee system , democratize elections , and make sure majorities @ @ @ @ @ @ @ As I ’ ve argued for years , we should prefer the problems of a system where elected majorities can fulfill the promises that got them elected to one where elected majorities can not deliver on the promises that the American people voted for .
The latter system , which is the one we live in now , drives frustration and dysfunction .
But legislators on both sides prefer the status quo because it gives them power when they ’ re in the minority , and because they ’ re more afraid of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to what they ’ ve promised to do .
The allure of what they could build isn ’ t as powerful as the fear of what the other side may build .
I ’ ll let others make granular recommendations at the state , local , and market levels .
But whatever the recommendations , the same thing is needed : A sustained and concerted movement that cares about institutional reform .
But people get much more excited about building something , anything , than about reforming existing institutions .
Meta-building isn ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ patient , focused work it requires is particularly frustrating , in my experience , to entrepreneurial personalities .
But if you want America to build more , you need to do the institutional work to make more building — of all kinds — possible again .
Every day at Vox , we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you , and our audience around the world , with information that has the power to save lives .
Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Vox ’ s work is reaching more people than ever , but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn .
Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation , but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles , videos , and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires .
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In a viral essay, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen makes a simple exhortation: It’s time to build. Behind the coronavirus crisis, he writes, lies “our widespread inability to build.” America has been unable to create enough coronavirus tests, or even enough cotton swabs to fully utilize the tests we do have. We don’t have enough ventilators, ICU beds, personal protection equipment. The government hasn’t built the capacity to quickly get money to people or businesses who need it.
And it’s not just the coronavirus. The US could be building our way out of the housing crisis and the climate crisis. We could be building a better education system, more advanced infrastructure. We could have more and better factories, supersonic aircraft, delivery drones, flying cars.
Andreessen is a Silicon Valley pioneer. He co-created the Mosaic web browser and co-founded Netscape. He built multiple billion-dollar companies, runs one of the industry’s largest VC firms and sits on the board of Facebook, among others. His essay channels the inversion of the moment: After years in which the tech industry has been criticized for moving too fast and breaking too much, we’re seeing the consequences of moving too slow and building too little. Wouldn’t you prefer the drawbacks of disruption to the calamities of stagnation?
Even so, Andreessen is braced for criticism, and he has an answer ready. “Here’s a modest proposal to my critics. Instead of attacking my ideas of what to build, conceive your own! What do you think we should build?”
I think Andreessen is uncharacteristically underestimating the appetite for building. The absence of creation doesn’t reflect an absence of desire — even in that epicenter of supposed stagnation, Washington, DC.
I’ve covered Congress for almost 20 years. The place is littered with proposals to construct universal pre-K and reimagine the health system, to decarbonize the US economy and incentivize drug development through prizes and solve the housing crisis. They just don’t pass. It’s become a running joke in Washington that every week is “infrastructure week.” But we’re not rebuilding American infrastructure.
The question, then, is why don’t we build? What’s stopping us?
Here’s my answer: The institutions through which Americans build have become biased against action rather than toward it. They’ve become, in political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s term, “vetocracies,” in which too many actors have veto rights over what gets built. That’s true in the federal government. It’s true in state and local governments. It’s even true in the private sector.
I’m not against soliciting more ideas of what to build. But what we need is sustained funding, focus, and organizing to make building in America possible again. And that requires patiently engaging with the kinds of institutions that frustrate builders.
The federal vetocracy
That the US government has become a dysfunctional vetocracy is obvious. Hell, I wrote a whole book about it. But in short: America’s system of checks and balances requires unusual and even extraordinary levels of consensus to pass legislation. First, you need the agreement of the House, the Senate, the White House, and, increasingly, the Supreme Court.
More granularly, congressional power is diffused across committees. The Senate has built in a supermajority requirement, known as the filibuster, which effectively raises the threshold for passage from 51 votes to 60 votes.
This raises the question: If the problem is embedded in the structure of the US government, how did the US ever do anything big? The short answer is that for most of our political history, two unusual conditions held. First, the parties were ideologically mixed, which made compromise easier. Second, one party was usually electorally dominant, which gave the party in the minority a reason to compromise: If you can’t win, you may as well deal.
Both those conditions have dissolved. America’s political parties are more ideologically — and demographically — polarized than ever before. We’re also in the most competitive period American politics has ever seen. In a system like that, both sides utilize the system’s bias toward inaction to foil their opponents. You can see this in the rise of the filibuster over time. The rule has been around almost as long as America, but it’s only been deployed as an omnipresent veto in recent decades:
The result is a system biased toward inaction. The left can’t remake American health care. The right can’t voucherize American schools. The left can’t pass a climate bill. The right can’t privatize Social Security. Neither side can rewrite our immigration laws, hence the turn towards oscillating executive orders. Neither side can pass their infrastructure packages. Neither side can reform social insurance.
In the midst of a pandemic, a financial crisis, or a terrorist attack, emergency measures can pass, for a little while, but absent some kind of crisis, paralysis is the rule. (This is a sketch, and it ignores some important party asymmetries, so read the book if you want to dig deeper into how polarization makes American ungovernable.)
The state and local vetocracy
If paralysis ended once you walked out of the Capitol, we wouldn’t have a housing crisis. We’d have better social insurance infrastructure. We’d have better infrastructure, period. But it doesn’t.
To put the question simply: Why is Penn Station, the flagship rail station in New York City, such a dump? Why can’t the richest city in the richest nation in the world have, at the very least, a train station with seating, some nice restaurants, working elevators, and an absence of human waste falling through the ceiling?
Marc Dunkelman spent years cataloging the many failures to revamp Penn Station, a number of which came complete with hefty doses of federal funding. Each time, the story was the same: Plenty of people who wanted to build, and plenty of money with which to build, but too many people with vetoes who simply didn’t want the building to happen.
This is representative democracy at its worst: A democracy that only represents those who know to show up at meetings most people never hear about, and so ends up handing power to special interests and aggrieved NIMBYs. I highly recommend this Weeds podcast on “neighborhood defenders” and the way participatory local processes favor the status quo for more on that dynamic.
Dunkelman, himself a liberal, locates the crisis in a progressive skepticism of power that had roots in a real crisis but that has itself become a crisis for effective state and local governance:
Beneath America’s deep frustration with government is something else: a deep-seated aversion to power. Progressives resolved decades ago to prevent the public from being bulldozed by another Robert Moses—and the project to diffuse power to the public has succeeded. But the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. The left’s zeal to hamstring government has helped to burnish the right’s argument that government would mess up a one-car parade. The new protections erected to guard against Moses’ second coming have condemned new generations to live in civic infrastructure that is frozen in time.
You can see this if you attend a planning meeting in San Francisco and watch the line of people who assemble to oppose even the most modest development. You can see it in California’s inability to build high-speed rail, despite tens of billions of dollars in federal subsidies, because the state got so trapped in its own vetocracy it couldn’t just build the damn thing in a straight line. You can see it in the inability of American cities to build public transit at cost and quality levels that simply rival that of poorer, older European cities, to say nothing of leapfrogging the new development in Asia.
As Dunkelman puts it, “in New York, and in other cities, government power is now spread so thin that places once incapable of stopping bad projects now cannot get good projects off the ground.” That applies far more broadly, of course, than just city governance.
But the problem isn’t just progressives who grew afraid of what would happen if government power could be wielded too easily. The problem is also conservatives who want government to work poorly when it’s needed most. Andreessen singles out for criticism the archaic structures through which America delivers unemployment insurance. “A government that collects money from all its citizens and businesses each year has never built a system to distribute money to us when it’s needed most,” he marvels.
Unemployment insurance is administered by the states. In many of those states, the system works just fine. In some, it worked fine, but simply wasn’t prepared for an unemployment crisis of genuinely unprecedented dimensions:
In some states, though, the system’s dysfunction is a feature, not a bug. In Florida, the unemployment insurance system is designed to be difficult to use because conservative governors wanted it to go unused. They’re regretting those decisions now, but only because it’s screwing over their own voters in a time of crisis. In a grotesque way, Florida’s disastrous UI system represents the successful completion of a project: They intended to build a UI system that failed those who needed it, and they very much did.
Which goes to a problem that afflicts governance at all levels of America: If you live in a vetocracy and one of your two political parties actively wants the government to work poorly, the government will work poorly. And so it does.
The capitalist vetocracy
But some of Andreessen’s examples really can’t be blamed on the government, at least not in a traditional sense.
America doesn’t have more ICU beds because hospitals have budgets to balance. You can’t both run a profitable hospital and maintain enough spare capacity for a once-in-a-century pandemic.
Similarly, the companies that make ventilators are private companies. They didn’t make more ventilators because there wasn’t demand for more ventilators. Same goes for surgical masks, eye shields, hospital gowns. Now, you can argue the government should’ve been stockpiling more of this stuff all along — and definitely should have been ramping up production in January and February — but a capitalist logic of efficiency prevails both inside and outside the market.
Take, for instance, the wildly successful Obama administration program to loan money to renewable energy companies that became infamous because one of those companies, Solyndra, was a bust. That program led to a slew of successes (including Tesla) and turned a profit to taxpayers. As Michael Lewis argues at length in his book The Fifth Risk, the problem, if anything, was that it was too cautious — so afraid of a Solyndra-like story that it wasn’t funding sufficiently risky investments. But they proved right to be afraid.
If even the government is forced to turn a constant profit on its programs and to avoid anything that might look like a boondoggle, you can imagine the pressure actual private companies are under. CEOs of all kinds of companies lament “short-termism.” Startup theorist Eric Ries has even gotten SEC approval for a “long-term stock exchange” meant to ease the problem.
In practice, short-term shareholder capitalism acts as a kind of vetocracy on public companies: If the market thinks whatever you’re doing is going to cut quarterly earning for an uncertain payoff, it can punish you severely, and instantly, for trying. There are CEOs like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos who’ve been able to get themselves a longer leash, but they’re the exceptions that infuriate the rules.
Silicon Valley isn’t immune to these dynamics. As Peter Thiel has complained, there’s been too much spending on bits and not enough spending on atoms. Software scales easily, and if you get it right, you can make billions in a couple of years. Andreessen famously declared that “software is eating the world” and helped drive the enthusiasm for super-scalable, digital business models. As the sorry state of vaccine funding shows, companies with more uncertain business models have had more trouble getting investors.
Andreessen knows this story better than I do, and would, I’m sure, tell it with more nuance. He’s even a backer of Ries’s long-term stock exchange. But hyperefficient, financialized, globalized capitalism leads to fragile supply chains, copycat investments, and products with predictable demand curves. And it’s harder and harder for even CEOs to ignore when the market, or activist investors, or board members, or even just a critical mass of Twitter users, veto their plans.
We need to rebuild institutions
Andreessen’s essay ends with a call for mentorship, social pressure, and a realignment of priorities. “Every step of the way, to everyone around us, we should be asking the question, what are you building?” He writes. “What are you building directly, or helping other people to build, or teaching other people to build, or taking care of people who are building? If the work you’re doing isn’t either leading to something being built or taking care of people directly, we’ve failed you.”
I don’t think that’ll be enough. So let me end with my answer to Andreessen’s question: What should we build? We should build institutions biased toward action and ambition, rather than inaction and incrementalism.
But that means doing the difficult work of reforming existing institutions that aren’t going anywhere. You can’t sidestep the existence of the government, as too many in Silicon Valley want to do. You have to engage with it. You have to muster the political power to rebuild parts of it. And then you need to use the government to make markets competitive again.
At the federal level, I’d get rid of the filibuster, simplify the committee system, democratize elections, and make sure majorities could implement their agendas once elected. As I’ve argued for years, we should prefer the problems of a system where elected majorities can fulfill the promises that got them elected to one where elected majorities cannot deliver on the promises that the American people voted for. The latter system, which is the one Americans live in now, drives frustration and dysfunction.
But legislators on both sides prefer the status quo because it gives them power when they’re in the minority, and because they’re more afraid of what their opponents might do than committed to what they’ve promised to do. The allure of what they could build isn’t as powerful as the fear of what the other side may build.
I’ll let others make granular recommendations at the state, local, and market levels. But whatever the recommendations, the same thing is needed: A sustained and concerted movement that cares about institutional reform. But people get much more excited about building something, anything, than about reforming existing institutions. Meta-building isn’t a popular pastime, and the patient, focused work it requires is particularly frustrating, in my experience, to entrepreneurial personalities.
But if you want America to build more, you need to do the institutional work to make more building — of all kinds — possible again.