Ricardo Hausmann for Project Syndicate

Let’s be optimistic and assume that one or more of the 11 COVID-19 vaccines currently undergoing Phase 3 clinical trials are found to be safe and effective by early 2021. Let us also assume that production can be ramped up quickly, so that countries can vaccinate a significant part of their populations by late next year.

In this rosy scenario, the current “special period,” when social distancing severely restricts economic activities – from schools to universities, restaurants to airlines, concerts to sports events,...

Eduardo Levy Yeyati for Americas Quarterly

Argentina this week formally exited the ninth sovereign debt default in its history. The agreement with creditors took longer than expected, but was settled at reasonable levels, close to original projections, and just in time to avert another blow to the country’s suffering economy. Having reached a deal in the current, uncertain context and with no financial program in hand could be regarded as a success for the government.

The deal reduced Argentina’s debt payments by approximately 27% and — even more crucially...

Ricardo Hausmann and Ulrich Schetter for Vox EU

Countries all over the world are fighting COVID-19 by reducing social and economic interactions, measures that have proven effective in parts of the world but are extremely costly. We are in the midst of the deepest recession since the great depression, and World GDP is expected to fall by 4.9% in 2020, with two-digit declines in many countries (IMF 2020). A series of excellent papers suggest that the huge costs in terms of livelihoods are justified by the gains in terms of lives saved from the pandemic (e.g. Acemoglu et...

Ricardo Hausmann for Project Syndicate

 Certainty is like a rainbow: wonderful but relatively rare. More often than not, we know that we don’t know. We may seek to remedy this by talking to people who may know what we want to know. But how do we know that they know? If we cannot ascertain whether they actually do know, we must trust them.

Historically, we have bestowed our trust on the basis of science, experience, or divine inspiration. But what if the knowledge we seek does not yet exist, and even science knows that it does not know what is being...