ANOTHER PRETTY PIG SIGHTING.

Suppose a county fair had a contest to find the prettiest big pig.

So imagine this is going down and there are only two entrants this year because there are lots of pigs that are pretty and lots of pigs that are big, there are very few that are both pretty and big.  And the judge comes in and he just looks at the first pig and says, “That’s an ugly pig.  Let’s give the award to the second pig.”  What’s the judge’s mistake?  It’s kind of obvious.  Well, sure that pig is ugly but the other pig might be even uglier.  You might as well look at the second pig first.

That's a standard point in political economy: one might be able to demonstrate under carefully drawn whiteboard diagrams how the right kind of Stiglitzian omniscience gets you allocative efficiency.  But it helps to then ask whether or not that kind of omniscience exists anywhere outside Joe Stiglitz's word processor.

Unfortunately, The Week essayist Jeff Spross didn't get the memo.

Rationalizing the production of masks and ventilators and food and so forth would require stepping outside the market context: It would require some authority to take in information about who needs what and where, then reorganize production and supply chains and shipping to meet those needs. In other words, it would require central planning by the U.S. government.

Obviously, this need for central planning will wax in crises and wane in normal times. The problem we've run into is we have been so allergic to proactive government industrial planning in normal times, that America has no real institutional capacity or know-how for it now that the crisis is upon us. The U.S government's attempts so far have been flailing and embarrassing.

Nice try. I have a lot of fun with pundits tossing around ideas like "allocation czar" simply because I've had some experience with how those worked out.  (Not well.)  The current president does seem more interested in dunking on the previous president for not replenishing the federal reserves of protective equipment in the wake of previous Ebola and respiratory disease events than in loosening regulations in order to bring additional producers into action, and the federal restrictions on the sale of food in interstate commerce are hampering intrastate commerce.  The first pig might fall short on prettiness; all the same, the second pig might look better in the abstract than in the flesh.  Bet on emergence: those dairy farmers and swineherders are looking for any opportunity to sell their goods.