Edwin T. Burton on the potential perfect storm for stagflation:

Economists have spent a lot of time and ink discussing supply-chain disruptions in the wake of the spread of Covid-19 as causes of inflation. This discussion is mostly beside the point and is focused on the symptoms of the inflation disease. The root cause of our current inflation and the growing inflation that lies ahead is the excessive growth in the money supply.
Milton Friedman, perhaps the greatest monetary economist in history, once said: “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than output.” This straightforward Friedman dictum is certainly borne out by the data available to us over the past two years.

Casey B. Mulligan on substance abuse during the pandemic:

For every drug or alcohol death, there are more than 100 people with an ongoing substance-use disorder, which is modern parlance for drug or alcohol addiction. For alcohol, narcotics, or meth, I estimate 47 million Americans have substance-use disorder, 8 million above the trend from before 2020. This change will contribute to worsening of several metrics of economic and social activity on an ongoing basis. Employment and labor-force participation are likely among them.
The supply-demand toolkit readily explains this. Our federal government was sending people massive amounts of cash, on average $30 per household per day. Normally incomes go down during a recession, but during the pandemic, personal incomes increased by record amounts.
We know from prior research that liquidity is quickly followed by elevated mortality from alcohol and drugs. This effect is especially strong when the liquidity is not coming with any incentive to invest in job-related human capital. Indeed, the pandemic payments were disincentives to work.