Profs and Pints Online presents: “Our Current Crash and Economic History,” with Trevor Jackson, assistant professor of economic history at George Washington University and teacher of courses on inequality and economic crises.

We’ve experienced the most spectacular economic collapse in recorded history over the last three months, with more than 33 million Americans losing their jobs. Governments have spent trillions of dollars trying to pull economies out of a tailspin. Some are experimenting with universal basic income, while others are using emergency war powers to rapidly expand the production of medical supplies. All of this has happened in a world economy that was already fragile, with slow growth and increasing inequality over the decade since the 2008 crisis.

Join economic historian Trevor Jackson for an interactive, online talk on what we can learn about our current economic events by looking at the economic crises of the past. He’ll tackle questions such as whether our current crisis is shaping up to be worse than the Great Depression, or what effects the 1918 pandemic had on economies. More broadly, he’ll discuss what the lessons taught by past economic crisis do—or don’t—tell us about how to make sense of the current one.

As part of his talk, Professor Jackson will discuss provocative ideas about the current crisis that he focused on in recent articles written for the publications Dissent and Foreign Policy. The Federal Reserve and other central banks around the world have responded to this crisis in truly unprecedented ways and on a mind-boggling scale. With so much dysfunction in politics, they have emerged as the most powerful institutions in the world. They are also unelected, and there are risks that they are either doing too much, or too little.  How are they responding to the crisis, and what does that mean for the rest of us? Is runway inflation a possible result of so much money being pumped into the economy, or is it actually deflation that is the bigger risk? (This talk remains available in recorded form.)

Profs & Pints Online: Our Current Crash and Economic History