That’s the subject of my latest book review for Law & Liberty. It’s about How the World Ran Out of Everything by Peter S. Goodman of the New York Times. The book is about supply-chain problems during the pandemic, a topic I covered in some depth here at NR.
Of course, there were plenty of supply-chain problems, as one might expect from a once-in-a-century pandemic. But as I note in the review, “Far from running out of everything, the remarkable economic story of the pandemic is that despite all the supply-chain disruptions, Americans actually consumed more goods than they did before the pandemic. And once the disruptions were resolved, goods consumption remained at that higher level.”
Goodman misses this because, as a journalist, he specializes in seeing things. Economics is about the unseen, in Frederic Bastiat’s famous framing.
I conclude:
Ironically, Bastiat was a journalist. But he was a rare one who understood political economy. “Not to know political economy is to allow oneself to be dazzled by the immediate effect of a phenomenon; to know political economy is to take into account the sum total of all effects, both immediate and future,” Bastiat wrote. Most journalists are dazzled by the immediate effects, which it is their job to see. That’s why they usually aren’t very good at economics.
Read the whole thing here.