Scott Lincicome on the Economy, Inflation, and the Supply Chain

Conversations with Bill Kristol

News, Society & Culture, Government, Politics

4.7 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 19 November 2021

⏱️ 62 minutes

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Summary

Why have the costs of basic goods and services been increasing in recent months? Will shortages in stores and delays in orders for durable goods persist—and what is the meaning of the often invoked supply-chain issues? What public policies might help ameliorate the situation? In this Conversation, Scott Lincicome, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, considers the dynamics of the economy during the pandemic—the fiscal stimulus, accommodative monetary policy, dislocations in the global supply chain—and considers possible paths forward beyond the Covid era. He points to container ships backed up in our major ports as an example of how a sclerotic regulatory framework can worsen a serious problem and increase our vulnerability to a threat like supply shocks. Lincicome recommends modernizing infrastructure via automation, increasing our workforce via immigration, and improving our resilience via deregulation.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome to Conversations. I'm very pleased to be joined again by Scott Lensacom,
0:21.7	who the Senior Fellow with Economic Studies at Cato Institute and a regular contributor and
0:28.9	newsletter writer for our friends at the dispatch. A must read, you should read it, despite its
0:35.4	slightly cutesy name, capitalism, but it's nonetheless an excellent newsletter. And Scott,
0:41.6	the last conversation we had was in January of 2021, in January of this year, about 11 to 11
0:47.0	months ago, where we agreed that there were a ton of lessons to be learned from the success of
0:51.3	the vaccine, including the case for globalization, for free trade, for free movement of capital,
0:58.4	for immigration. And I noticed that no one has actually learned these lessons that we stressed.
1:03.2	Not at all, not at all. But, you know, being a libertarian and writing about free market economics,
1:08.9	you become accustomed to people not listening. Yeah, well, hopefully, this one they'll listen to
1:15.7	more. And, yeah, so Scott's going to explain to us sort of where we stand at the, as we exit,
1:21.2	hopefully, the pandemic in terms of the economy in general, but particularly this very interesting
1:26.4	question of supply and demand, supply chains, inflation, and so forth. But I actually want to
1:31.1	begin just with one other thing, just struck me in the last 24 hours. We're speaking here,
1:35.8	what are we, what week before Thanksgiving? I mean, if you really step back to 30,000 feet,
1:40.8	this is maybe it's just me being crotchety when I see everyone complaining, isn't this
1:47.2	sort of an amazing, I don't success story, maybe too strong. But if you had said to us that the
1:51.4	whole world economy was going to shut down almost two years ago, because of this
1:56.0	terrible pandemic, something that we haven't really seen in decades, it may be at a century,
2:00.0	almost, and that we would make it through, I believe aside the terrible, the deaths of the illnesses,
2:05.9	which partly is due to palli-bed governance, and partly it's just what happens in a pandemic.
2:10.2	But the economies would be where they are, GDP about where it was before the pandemic,
	...

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