What lockdowns do and what they don’t do

Just a short post to advertise my Guardian article‘Fear of coronavirus, not lockdown, is the biggest threat to the UK's economy’. The key point I make is that the economy would suffer badly even if there was no lockdown. People, once they realised the extent of the threat, would stay at home. The three reasons I give for imposing a lockdown are classic reasons in economics for state intervention. The state has an information advantageThe government, because it talks directly to top scientists, can see the pandemic coming a lot faster than the majority of people. That didn’t work out too well in the UK, where people were leading the government, but if the state functioned well this would be true. The state deals with externalitiesWhile the ...

from
http://financialnewshub.com/what-lockdowns-do-and-what-they-dont-do/