Pandemics and Societal Choices (Part I) Thanks to all who participated in our first Eco 100 online meeting today. I'll post an edited recording soon. I hope to be a bit more adept with the zoom software next time (e.g. to allow more questions and participation). In this blog post, I'll summarize some of the main points. The short deck of slides I used is here . Links to the videos and sources I relied on heavily, below. We want to get to the economics of this situation but it's hard to do that without a first basic understanding of how epidemics spread and how they can end. Contagion and Exponential growth This is by no means the first global pandemic. There have been many throughout history. The last large 1918 flu pandemic killed possibly as many as 50 million people. Fortunately for us, modern medicine and communications allow us to take some more effective measures to prevent and treat people with disease, but the fast-moving nature of the epidemic c
I hope everybody is safe, healthy, and calm. Nothing is the same. We are amid a global pandemic and an economic crisis of unprecedented-in-our-lifetimes proportions. Everybody's life has or will be affected, though clearly some households much more than others. It's been a very sudden crisis in how a disease only detected in November spread around the world, catching individuals and governments by surprise and woefully unprepared. But it's also a slow-moving crisis in the sense that many of the health and economic consequences are still to come and hard to predict. Governments are now rushing to adopt historically extraordinary measures that would have been unimaginable just weeks or even days ago. Societies have been forced to face a truly unpleasant tradeoff : the need to strike a balance between applying ever-stricter social distancing measures -- that we know impose very high economic and social costs -- or let the rate of progression of the disease rise to levels