AND WASHINGTON DOESN’T KNOW HOW IT WORKS: The Economy Is Not a Machine. The government definitely has the power to stifle the economy,  but Keynesian theories of reviving it through government spending make less sense than ever in recovering from this slowdown. It will take more than government pump-priming; the market process itself, in all its complexity, must revive.

GIVE CAPITALISM A CHANCE: A Remarkable Leap Forward. It took four years to develop the first test for HIV. Now after just four months, despite the FDA’s red tape, biotech entrepreneurs have come up with an array of Covid-19 tests, including the first one approved for home use.

NOT IF THEY KEEP ELECTING PROGRESSIVES: Will New York Ever Recover From Covid-19? Joel Kotkin says the demographics were all going the wrong way even before the pandemic imprisoned people in studio apartments.

ANOTHER REASON NOT TO LET UNIONS RUN YOUR GOVERNMENT: No Gain, Lots of Pain. The stock market downturn portends big losses for government pension funds—and billions in new obligations for taxpayers.

NO, MAYOR DI BLASIO, CLIMATE CHANGE IS NOT THE GREATEST THREAT TO NEW YORK: Cities and Pandemics Have a Long History.  Athens, Constantinople and other cities were humbled by plagues like the one that ended the Age of Pericles (and Pericles himself). “Only in the past century have cities ceased to be killing fields,” writes Edward L. Glaeser, and that was only because urban leaders focused on controlling disease instead of remaking society.

How can we reduce the threat of future pandemic and bring the world’s cities back to those halcyon days of November 2019? Almost assuredly, this is worth a massive increase in public-health-related spending. America’s nineteenth-century cities became healthier only because they spent as much on clean water as the federal government spent on everything else, but for the post office and the military. Covid-19 has destroyed trillions of dollars of shareholder value and generated a $2 trillion bailout. It makes sense to spend billions to avoid future losses of trillions.

Read the whole thing.

WARNING: RECYCLING MAY BE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH: Stop the Virus Now, Save the Planet Later. Greens dream of a wondrous “circular economy,” but the pandemic exposes the grimmer reality. In: plastic bags. Out: recycling.

LOVE IN THE TIME OF COVID: Cupid in Quarantine. Couples will either grow together or grow apart. Make your choice.

PROGRESSIVES GONE WILD: Chaos by the Bay. San Francisco responds to the coronavirus with an experiment in lawlessness.

THANKS, BUT YOU’VE ALREADY DONE QUITE ENOUGH DAMAGE: Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley Will Do Everything Necessary To Combat Coronavirus (Unless It Involves Deregulation). After the debacles of the CDC and FDA, there’s bipartisan agreement on the need for more central planning.

SPONTANEOUS ORDER: Cheering Section. At 7 p.m., people pause and applaud hospital and health-care workers.

STOP THEM BEFORE THEY REGULATE AGAIN: The FDA Graveyard. For decades, the FDA’s archaic rules have been delaying medical progress and consigning tens of millions of Americans to an “invisible graveyard.” Now a very small part of the graveyard has suddenly become visible: the people dying of Covid-19 because of one bureaucratic obstruction after another to providing tests, masks and other protective equipment.

MOTHER NATURE ISN’T LOOKING SO MATERNAL ANYMORE: How the Pandemic Will Change Our Views on Technology, Innovation, Privacy — and Nature. Europeans and North Americans are paying the price for their neo-Luddite policies.

AND BLAMING EVERYONE ELSE FOR HIS MISTAKES: Preparing for the Wrong Emergency. Focused on climate change, Mayor Bill de Blasio failed to equip New York for the coronavirus.

ANTISOCIAL DISTANCING: Springtime for Introverts. Andrew Ferguson’s marvelously felicitous take on the pandemic’s silver lining for introverts like himself: “The world has caught up with us at last.”

CUTTING RED TAPE FOR COVID: Regulatory Relief Can Save Lives. We need reform at the local, state and federal levels to fight the virus.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How Not to Tank Your Relationship in Quarantine. Some tips in The Atlantic from Roy Baumeister and me on how to avoid going negative  when spending 24/7 with your beloved. For a fuller discussion of the negativity effect, you can hear me on Krys Boyd’s NPR show, Think. Roy discusses it (and other issues in social science) on Scott Barry Kaufmann’s Psychology Podcast. And for the fullest discussion, of course, there’s our book, The Power of Bad. 

THEY HAD ONE JOB, AND THEY BLEW IT: The Real-Life Costs of Bad Regulation. Early administrative failings of the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control greatly exacerbated the Covid-19 crisis in the United States. Unless there’s major reform, the first response to the next viral threat should be to shut down not the economy but the FDA.

THE NO-FEAR GREETING: Goodbye to Handshakes — and Good Riddance. Now that a virus has finally stopped us from shaking hands, we have a singular opportunity to eliminate this custom once and for all. There’s a much better way to greet one another—and no, it’s not the fist bump, and it’s certainly not the ridiculous elbow tap, either.

TO AVOID COVID-19 AND OTHER ILLNESSES, DON’T USE “SUSTAINABLE” GROCERY BAGS: Greening Our Way to Infection.  The campaign to eliminate single-use plastic bags at the supermarket could prove deadly during the coronavirus outbreak. It has forced shoppers to switch to reusable tote bags that have proved quite “sustainable” for viruses and bacteria from food. The pathogens can linger for days — and then be spread all over the supermarket, especially at the checkout counter.  Researchers have repeatedly demonstrated that the pathogens in the bags are a serious public-health hazard unless grocery shoppers wash the bags regularly, which few people do.

The plastic-bag bans have never made any sense, because the replacement bags are harmful not only to people but also to the environment, as I’ve written. I compared the bag bans to medieval sumptuary laws — which forbade commoners from wearing certain clothes or using certain products that offended their social superiors — but perhaps I was unfair to the medieval rulers who made the laws. At least their edicts didn’t sicken or kill their subjects.

THE REAL REASON YOU CAN’T USE THE GROCERY BAG OF YOUR CHOICE: The Perverse Panic over Plastic. The green campaign against plastic isn’t merely a waste of time and money. Besides inconveniencing humans, it’s harmful to the environment. Banning plastic grocery bags contributes to global warming because it leads to more carbon emissions. Forcing Americans and Europeans to recycle plastic leads to more plastic pollution in the ocean because some of the recyclables end up being dumped in Asian rivers.

So why do greens keep stoking this panic? Because it makes them feel virtuously superior. The plastic bans are best understood as a modern version of medieval sumptuary laws, which forbade merchants and other commoners to wear clothes or use other products that offended the sensibilities of  aristocrats and clergymen. The sumptuary edicts consistently failed to accomplish their stated purpose, but they kept getting issued anyway (there were thousands of them across Europe, as I explain in City Journal) because they enabled nobles to lord it over their social inferiors.

The plastic panic also serves to provide employment for green activists. It’s one more example of what I call the Crisis Crisis: the never-ending series of hyped threats leading to policies that grow the government and leave everyone worse off. (There’s more on this in my new book, The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It.)

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Yale Cancels Western Art. “Introduction to Art History,” for decades one of the most popular and famous courses at Yale, is being eliminated because its emphasis on Western art is “problematic,” according to the chair of the art history department, Tim Barringer. The Yale Daily News translates that to mean that Western art is a “product of an overwhelmingly white, straight, European and male cadre of artists.” The horror!

The course will be offered one final time during this spring semester, but it sounds as if Barringer has already managed to ruin it. He has promised students that the course will consider Western art in relation to “questions of gender, class and ‘race'” as well as its involvement with capitalism. And he has promised that a “key theme” will be the relationship between art and climate change. Yes, just what everyone wants to learn from an art history professor.

NEVER LET THE CONSTITUTION GET IN THE WAY OF AN IMPEACHMENT: Abuse of Procedure. The House Democrats make an underwhelming case for impeachment — one without a constitutional basis.

BREAKING BAD: How to overcome online negativity. In Business Insider, the strategies that enabled one hotel in New York to dominate the TripAdvisor rankings. An excerpt from my new book, The Power of Bad. 

STARTING WITH ELIZABETH WARREN: The Gist of Bad. In his Slate podcast, Mike Pesca explains the awfulness of Elizabeth Warren’s plan for student debt and also talks to me about climate change, bad apples in the workplace, nostalgia, and other topics from my new book, The Power of Bad.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: What are the Most Common Nightmares? The top two are “Falling” and “Being Chased,” followed by “Death” and “Feeling Lost.” At the bottom of the list: “Going Bald.”