Easier said than done. We are in completely uncharted territory. We’ve never tried to freeze an economy before, let alone tried to thaw it out a few weeks or months later. That’s why our new project, cryonomics, looks at the economics of unfreezing an economy.
To understand why this will be so hard, think of an economy as a remarkably complex pattern of relationships. Those relationships are not only between employees and employers, but also between borrowers and lenders, between shareholders and companies, between landlords and tenants, between producers tied together on supply chains, and between brands and tastemakers and their fans.
The patterns that make up our economy weren’t designed from above. They evolved from the distributed decisions of consumers and producers, and are shaped by the complex interaction between the supply of goods and services and their demand.
The problem is that the patterns the government plans to freeze are not the patterns we will need when they finally let us thaw.
When the government decides to pull the economy out of hibernation, the world will look very different. As a simple example, it’s quite possible that many Australians, forced to stay home rather than eat out, discover they love to cook. This will influence the demand for restaurants at the end of the crisis. On the other hand, our pent-up desire for active social lives might get us out into the hospitality sector with some enthusiasm. There will be drastic changes because of global supply chain disruptions and government policies. These changes will be exacerbated by the fact that not all countries will be unfrozen at the same time.
The upshot is that the economy which the government is trying to hibernate is an economy designed for the needs and preferences of a society that has not suffered through a destructive pandemic.
Digital services and home delivery will no doubt be more popular than they were before
Unfreezing the economy is going to be extremely disruptive. New patterns will have to be discovered. As soon as the JobKeeper payments end, many of the jobs that they have frozen in place will disappear. And despite the government’s efforts, many economic relationships will have been destroyed.
Yet there will also be new economic opportunities – new demands from consumers, and new expectations. Digital services and home delivery will no doubt be more popular than they were before.
These disruptions will be unpredictable – particularly if, as we expect, the return to work is gradual and staggered (perhaps according to health and age considerations or access to testing).
As we unfreeze, the problem facing the economy won’t primarily be how to stimulate an amorphous ‘demand’ (as many economists argue government should respond to a normal economic recession) but how to rapidly discover new economic patterns.
It is here that over-regulation is a major problem. So much of the laws and regulations imposed by the government assume the existence of particular economic patterns – particular ways of doing things. Those regulations can inhibit our ability to adjust to new circumstances.
In the global response to the crisis there has already been a lot of covert deregulations. The most obvious are around medical devices and testing. A number of regulatory agencies have stood down some rules temporarily to allow companies to respond to the crisis more flexibly. The Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority is now willing to let banks hold less capital. The Australian Securities and Investment Commission has dropped some of its most intrusive corporate surveillance programs.
The deregulatory responses we’ve seen so far relate to how we can freeze the economy. A flexible regulatory environment is even more critical as we unfreeze. Anything that prevents businesses from adapting and rehiring staff according to the needs of the new economic pattern will keep us poorer, longer.
Today the government is focused on fighting the public health crisis. But having now turned a health crisis into an economic crisis, it must quickly put in place an adaptive regulatory environment to enable people and businesses to discover what a post-freeze economy looks like.
Darcy WE Allen, Chris Berg, Sinclair Davidson, Aaron M Lane, and Jason Potts are with the RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub.
