Social Welfare During Covid-19 and Its Future

Write a short (less than one page single-spaced) essay that explains how a specific aspect of the covid-19 pandemic can be understood using the ideas we have covered in this course. This assignment is intentionally open-ended; you may pick any aspect of the pandemic that interests you and where you see a clear connection to public economics. You can analyze a general topic – for example, in class we discussed how the externalities of disease contagion provide a rationale for governments to regulate economic activity during a pandemic. Or, you can focus on a narrower policy issue – for example, a specific bill or policy debate in your home country. You are free to use news articles, academic articles, or any other reliable information sources to generate ideas and support your arguments. You can also make your argument based on abstract reasoning.
The key requirement is that you explicitly connect the topic you’ve chosen to the concepts we’ve covered in class.
This essay will be graded not only based on effort, but also on whether your writing is clear and your reasoning is precise and correct. Furthermore, you must provide original analysis; it is not sufficient to repeat points about the pandemic that were already made in lecture.
Here are some additional guidelines:
Content
• Make an argument! Simply describing specific policies or facts is not enough; you must make an economic argument based on them.
• Originality: do not simply restate arguments and facts from lecture. I want to hear about your own ideas. Offer a new topic, idea, or argument.
• Correctness: it is essential to use terms from class correctly. Misusing a term or concept will be heavily penalized.
• Support your claims. Positive claims require evidence or at least reasoning; normative claims also require a statement of the ethical assumptions underlying them.
Style
• Use correct spelling, grammar, and syntax. Not everyone is a native English speaker, and I am not looking for perfection. But your writing should not be difficult to understand.
• Organization: focus on one or two key economic arguments or ideas, make those arguments early in the essay, and present arguments to support your claims in a logical way. For each sentence, ask yourself whether it should follow the sentence which precedes it and whether it advances your argument.
• Be concise: the essay is just one page. The goal is to advance an economic argument; every sentence in your essay should work towards this goal. Do not waste space on background or commentary that is not essential.