Sin motivos para relajarse

En el último número del New York Review of Books publicaron una conversación entre varios economistas, entre ellos Krugman, Soros y Niall Ferguson, dónde simplemente no hay buenas noticias sobre la crisis económica. Todo es preocupación, incertidumbre y pronósitocos bastante terribles. Auténticamente me preocupa que nadie sabe qué sigue. Sin embargo, lo único que me gustó realmente es que Krugman dice que da lo mismo lo que pase en lo economía, este es el momento para construir un sistema de seguridad social universal en Estados Unidos. Es decir, frente a tanta incertidumbre lo mejor es proteger, pues si esto se pone peor, entre menos redes de protección social hayan peor se la pasará más gente.

The other thing not to miss is the importance of a strong social
safety net. By most accounts, most projections say that the European
Union is going to have a somewhat deeper recession this year than the
United States. So in terms of macromanagement, they're actually doing a
poor job, and there are various reasons for that: the European Central
Bank is too conservative, Europeans have been too slow to do fiscal
stimulus. But the human suffering is going to be much greater on this
side of the Atlantic because Europeans don't lose their health care
when they lose their jobs. They don't find themselves with essentially
no support once their trivial unemployment check has fallen off. We
have nothing underneath. When Americans lose their jobs, they fall into
the abyss. That does not happen in other advanced countries, it does
not happen, I want to say, in civilized countries.

And there are people who say we should not be worrying about things
like universal health care in the crisis, we need to solve the crisis.
But this is exactly the time when the importance of having a decent
social safety net is driven home to everybody, which makes it a very
good time to actually move ahead on these other things.

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