Glen Weyl: recommendation

Transcript context

…More generally about the crisis, should we allow price gouging, say, for masks or reagents? They don’t like calling it price gouging, by the way. Yeah, the problem I have with the price mechanism here is not the usual “price gouging” or variable pricing, but the fact that there’s so many externalities in the allocation of some of these critical inputs here. In principle, we could try to price those externalities, but in practice, trying to get such a pricing mechanism and the information required for it in place quickly is going to be very hard. Therefore, I think we need to have a lot of nonprice allocation, not of the whole economy but just of the really critical elements, like testing and certain types of PPE, because I think otherwise we’re all going to be harmed by that not being allocated to those nodes, as you were talking about, where they have the largest costs associated with it. If we need to do two million tests a day or whatever’s the number, and if you’re a little skeptical about targeting the super spreaders, or you just want high prices, mobilize elastic supply as quickly as possible. Make sure who should get the stuff.…

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