Archive: The Wall Street Journal

The Challenge of Contact Tracing in America We’re a nation of rebels, bitterly divided. Making this work will require sensitivity and tact.

-- The Wall Street Journal:

Something is coming that is well-meant and seriously intended but carries the promise of trouble. It is the planned state-by-state coronavirus contact-tracing regime. It has all the potential to be an onerous system that provokes resentment, spurs anxiety, and invites pushback. The plan is to curb Covid-19’s spread by tracking those exposed. They will be […]

Americans Need Hope as Well as Safety The economic crash has deadly consequences of its own. The bias now should be toward a return to life.

-- The Wall Street Journal:

New jobless claims came out this week, putting American unemployment at an estimated 33.4 million. ADP, the payroll-processing company, reports the private sector lost more than 20 million jobs in April alone. Earnings reports are dreadful, and whole sectors—air travel, hospitality—are being wiped out. Nothing will turn around soon. It is a catastrophe. But you […]

The Iron Lady and the Coronavirus Age Like Thatcher, we’ll need to achieve much out of the ordinary. Love of country is the place to start.

-- The Wall Street Journal:

I’ve been trying to get a sense of the economic effects of the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed an estimated 675,000 Americans. Government record-keeping in those days wasn’t what it is now; there’s not much data. You see references in academic papers to factories closed, businesses shuttered. You see newspaper pictures of people in masks […]

Needed: A Little Give and a Lot of Integrity In this pandemic, some local officials have been too officious, and federal ones too deceptive.

-- The Wall Street Journal:

It looks at the moment as if coronavirus wasn’t a huge tsunami wave that was going to knock down skyscrapers but a big, welling wave that came, filled the city, changed the waterline, will recede somewhat and well upward again. Maybe it’s not a curve but a curve within a roller coaster. Testimony from those […]

A Holy Week Amid a National Tribulation ‘Hardship generally makes people stronger,’ a social psychologist observes. What will we learn?

-- The Wall Street Journal:

It is Holy Week. Easter is coming, Passover here. We are perhaps halfway through the big pause and fully conscious we are living big history. We’ve never experienced a time like this before—a global pandemic, a national shutdown—and may never again. When it’s over most of us will look back on it as a life-changing […]