Much has been written about the economic consequences of covid-19, yet, just as in many of the analyses of the Great Depression and the 2008 crisis, the years of accumulating debt preceding the event do not attract the attention they deserve. Covid-19—or to be more precise, the lockdown—has initiated a cascading liquidation of the debt bubble that has been building for a generation. From the early 1980s, each recession has been responded to with iteratively lower interest rates.

Figure 1 illustrates the daily mortality attributed to covid-19 in Sweden, New York, Illinois, and Texas. The figure plots the daily number of deaths per million population. This figure illustrates the rise and fall of deaths from covid-19 in four different policy environments. The data were obtained from Worldometer.

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As the widening gyre that that is 2020 continues to turn, it seems that every day some new disastrous and ill-thought-out proposal is made or policy implemented. Among the chaos, the chorus to cancel rent in particular has stuck out for its sheer insolence and the ease with which it has entered the discourse as a sensible policy solution.

One of the duties that a central bank is expected to fulfill is to keep the general level of prices in the economy stable. The whole idea of price stability originates from the view that volatile changes in the price level prevent individuals from clearly seeing market signals as conveyed by the changes in the relative prices of goods and services.

Austrian economists have traditionally argued against central planning on the grounds that much of the economically relevant knowledge in society could never be made available to a single planning authority. But today, with an unprecedented and ever increasing volume and variety of data now potentially accessible to the planner, it seems that an omniscient government may be possible after all. Has the big data revolution rendered the promarket arguments of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek obsolete?

Imagine creating a graduate school in economics today, from scratch. What would it look like?

For starters, it would be online, inexpensive, fast, flexible, and taught using the great treatises. It would stress economic history. It would be rigorous. It would focus on fundamentals. And critically, it would teach real economics from an Austrian perspective. In other words, nothing like traditional brick-and-mortar programs and their dreadful textbooks!

[This article is part of the Understanding Money Mechanics series, by Robert P. Murphy. The series will be published as a book in 2021.]