In April 2020, the unemployment rate in the United States trebled from four percent to 14.7 percent and 20 million jobs were lost. Although that fact is devastating, it is more difficult for the average person to visualize not only the magnitude of the economic disruption brought by the Covid-19 pandemic but also the tangible meaning of the figures. This distance makes it harder for us to empathize with people who need more care and attention now than ever before; it’s all very well to “clap for the NHS”, but how much did the average person care when they were buckling from lack of funding before the pandemic?

Etienne Wasmer, professor of Economics at NYU Abu Dhabi, has spent his career transposing the facts and figures of finance and labor into comprehensible policy recommendations. When Covid-19 first ravaged the U.S. and Europe, his first instinct was to understand what was going wrong and how countries could survive.

“The shock of Covid-19 on economics was so huge and so unexpected that everyone in the profession started to work on Covid-19,” Wasmer described. He started working with NYUAD mathematics professors Alberto Gandolfini and Elena Beretta to find the optimal quarantine measures. “We are studying the best way to contain the pandemic … we try to illustrate the trade-off: do we want to only have one lockdown cycle or several … and when should we trigger the lockdowns?” he questioned.

Another more far reaching project Wasmer is involved with is assessing where the U.S., France and Germany went wrong with their responses to Covid-19. The issues with the measures taken — or rather, not taken — in the U.S. are well known at this point and Wasmer summarized them succinctly: “There was a little bit too much laissez-faire and we saw a massive increase in unemployment … with a magnitude that I have never seen before in 20 years of research.”

Meanwhile, Wasmer argued that some other European countries have the opposite problem: they shut down too quickly and plunged themselves into economic recession. When the pandemic started, many French and German businesses adopted what is known as short-time work schemes, which allow employees to work fewer hours, or even no hours at all, without experiencing a drastic reduction in salary. This sounds like an excellent compromise between economic stability and health protection, but there are two main issues with it. Firstly, it still means that most people are not working, which is bad not only for the economy at large but also for the employees, who could have earned more money by working than they do under short-time work. Wasmer elaborated on this with a personal anecdote:

“At some point I wanted to … buy a car in France. It was April and I thought that maybe … it would be a good idea to sustain the economy and maybe get a good deal on a car. So I called three car sellers in France … and two of them never answered and one said they were not open, while I was ready to purchase a car and probably pay the salary of one or two people for just one purchase.”

The second issue with short-time work is that not all industries allow for teleworking and jobs that support and don’t support working from home are divided along class lines. “People who can work from home have faced very small consequences. They have kept their income and their salary and they work from home,” Wasmer explained. “Unskilled workers, especially those working in contact with customers or other workers … have faced huge consequences, either mass layoffs or huge exposure to Covid-19 … This inequality … has negative consequences on the cohesion of society.”

This becomes even more complicated when one considers that certain marginalized groups, such as Black people are more likely to die from Covid-19, which may be correlated with the economic disparities faced by those populations.

There is, of course, no definitive answer on how to achieve the balance between economic stability and protection from the virus, but Wasmer believed that one factor is particularly important. “At the end of the day, the economy is a question of trust. It’s trust in the institutions, trust in the banks, trust in the firms and also trust in the ability to purchase … If you decide to shut down the economy, there will be fewer jobs and less consumption, but you might save a lot in the next three or four months.”

In a presentation given in late March, Wasmer discussed the potential for social unrest caused by economic recession. When asked to clarify what this could look like, it became clear that for Wasmer and his colleagues, the social consequences of economic recessions are vital considerations. “Many of us think of ourselves not as economists but as social scientists. To understand the market you must understand society.”

This commitment to understanding the big picture manifests in how Wasmer tries to make his work useful to others, which includes giving students advice about what industries they should seek and avoid employment in once the pandemic is over. Future projections like these come primarily from data collected through a wide variety of processes, including interviews and surveys of workers, statistics on average salaries and hours worked and figures showing the amount of investment in particular sectors, which indicates trust in an industry’s growth potential.

This process of using data to make informed speculations about future economic trends is paramount in the wake of crises like the Covid-19 pandemic, when we could face a new normal where the survival of various jobs is not guaranteed. As Wasmer put it: “I strongly believe that we are going to live in a new and different world than before the pandemic, so whether we like it or not, we have to face it.”

Wasmer believes that mobility and freedom of choice should be prioritized above all else. “Mobility is a basic human right,” he stated. “We don’t see that but a very large proportion of the people on this planet cannot move from one country to another, or even from one part of a city to another and their life is miserable. I think the possibility to move across sectors, jobs, areas, countries, is what makes life great compared to people who don’t have this possibility.”

This philosophy explains both his current position at NYUAD, an institution that values global mobility and his optimistic perspective on a post pandemic world. “Even in the worst times, there are opportunities,” he opined. “The lack of opportunity comes from the lack of mobility. Things change, but there are always opportunities. This doesn’t mean that there is no inequality — there is a lot of inequality and we have to find ways to reduce the consequences and helping mobility is one of them.”