My vague sense is that you’re right and that until 2021, the program was very good and beneficial and helped with a faster recovery. I commend OpenPhil for engaging with this and I agree that we should evaluate the impact of the whole program, I just don’t have the capacity and means to do that. My vague sense is that the program would come out net positive on the whole, however, perhaps if there are large negative effects of current high inflation—like lots of populists getting elected and we can causally attribute this to high inflation- then it also doesn’t seem inconceivable that the overall impact might be negative. Similar to the China Trade Shock literature which showed that trade reform was beneficial for growth and lowered consumer prices slightly, but also might have helped Trump win, this might be similar, and I’d rather take a slightly slower recovery then another 4 years of Trump (but note that this could have gone the other way as well: perhaps a faster recovery in the past reduced the chance of Trump in 2016, helped Biden in 2020, and the low unemployment numbers will help the Democrats now actually—it’s really an empirical question).
My vague sense is that you’re right and that until 2021, the program was very good and beneficial and helped with a faster recovery. I commend OpenPhil for engaging with this and I agree that we should evaluate the impact of the whole program, I just don’t have the capacity and means to do that. My vague sense is that the program would come out net positive on the whole, however, perhaps if there are large negative effects of current high inflation—like lots of populists getting elected and we can causally attribute this to high inflation- then it also doesn’t seem inconceivable that the overall impact might be negative. Similar to the China Trade Shock literature which showed that trade reform was beneficial for growth and lowered consumer prices slightly, but also might have helped Trump win, this might be similar, and I’d rather take a slightly slower recovery then another 4 years of Trump (but note that this could have gone the other way as well: perhaps a faster recovery in the past reduced the chance of Trump in 2016, helped Biden in 2020, and the low unemployment numbers will help the Democrats now actually—it’s really an empirical question).