THREE THINGS THAT WON’T CHANGE.

Prophesy about how everything will be different after we get through the crisis is one of the few growth industries these days. I don’t bother reading it. I don’t consult astrologers, either. Let’s face it. Nobody knows what the world’s going to be like. The prophets don’t know. You don’t know. I certainly don’t know. One reason to try to survive the virus is to see how it all turns out.

That said, there are three things I’d wager a week’s worth of toilet paper won’t change: demand and supply, moral hazard and working for a living.

In this part of the universe, demand and supply are like gravity. They influence just about everything. My bet is they will continue to do so.

Take the current heroes of the pandemic. As has been widely noted, we upper-income, highly educated types adjust pretty easily to working at home. By contrast, shelf-stockers, checkout clerks, bus drivers, garbage collectors, workers in seniors’ residences and dozens of other not very credentialed folk can’t work from home. They are on the front lines, keeping essential services going.

A common observation these days is that their work is undervalued. They’re the people the economy truly depends on but their pay doesn’t reflect that. Sure, many have been getting what amounts to danger pay since the lockdowns began (though not all, as I recently blogged on the FP Comment website). Good! They deserve it. And thank you again. We can’t thank you enough.

But will that continue? My bet is no. If in a year or two things have returned more or less to normal — though with handshakes gone the way of top hats — demand and supply will reassert themselves. Yes, these jobs are very

WE WANT PEOPLE TO WORK. WORK IS A GOOD THING. WE DON’T WANT TO DISCOURAGE IT, AS A UBI VERY LIKELY WOULD.

important. No, we can’t have an economy without them. But the supply of people willing and able to do them is huge. And it will be larger still if wages include a danger premium even after the danger has passed.

Mind you, there could be a long-term reduction in supply if people going into these lines of work come to understand they will be asked to show up during pandemics. That may divert some of them into work that gets furloughed during contagions. Such a shift in supply could pull up the wages of lockdown-critical workers even after the lockdown is over. But my guess is it won’t be a big effect.

A second thing I don’t believe will pass from human experience is moral hazard, i.e., if you inadvertently subsidize people’s choices one way or another, you may alter their behaviour in ways you don’t like.

There’s no moral hazard in the current unprecedented spike in unemployment. Nobody engineered the pandemic so they could take a few weeks off with emergency pay. Thus if you do compensate people who are unemployed, you’re not rewarding anybody’s dubious behaviour.

You will affect their decisions, however. If you provide generous unemployment assistance, you make it easier for firms to lay people off without feeling guilty about it. If you have a rule that says nobody who’s making any money at all gets government help, you discourage at least some people from doing small side jobs they could be doing. Or (a truly moral hazard) you encourage them to lie about whether they are doing small things on the side.

Moreover, depending on how attached people are to their current employers, the more generous the assistance you provide the more likely it is people won’t go back at the first opportunity. True, most people will decide the best thing to do for the long term is to go back as soon as possible. But workers who had just started with their current employer or who tend to move from job to job for whatever reason may prefer the assistance, however long it lasts.

Not everyone does it all the time but calculation of this sort seems part of human nature. A pandemic won’t eliminate it.

Finally, I don’t think working for a living will go out of fashion, either. More than a few commentators have argued that large-scale financial assistance to just about all low-income workers shows we really could do a universal basic income (UBI) if we wanted to. But we’ve always known we could do a UBI. We have tax returns from just about everybody. We could send all filers cheques if we wanted to. And once it became known filing would get you a cheque, filing would be all but universal.

The problem with UBI is not that we’re not able to do it. It’s that we haven’t thought it’s a good idea. We want people to work. Work is a good thing. We don’t want to discourage it, as a UBI very likely would.

That in a unique historical circumstance — a pandemic in a world of welfare states — you are able to provide temporary incomes to people who need them is no good reason, once the pandemic is over, to provide permanent incomes to your entire population.