It’s Awful, Why Did Nobody See it Coming?

Abstract

That disasters are not natural, but are social phenomena, is not an insight that will surprise the readers of this journal; and this insight has long been a mainstay ofthe research about disasters in disciplines other than Economics (O’Keefe et al. 1976). Epidemics are no different. Yet, Economics, as a discipline, has largely ignored epidemics as a topic for serious scholarship. A quick search in EconLit suggests that during the past 50 years (1970–2019), the top 150 journals in Economics published fewer than 20 papers on the topic ofepidemics or pandemics. The eminent top-five journals of the profession have published, between them, two paper on the topic since 1970 (Adda 2016;Almond 2006). Economists, alas, have published more on baseball. Yet, with COVID-19, we are now living through the most precipitous economic decline in almost a century, and one that is clearly, at this point, a deeper, more sudden, and more widespread economic shock than the Global Financial Crisis of2008. Economists have largely recognized that Economics failed to predict the Global Financial Crisis; but the profession’s saving grace had been a very large and detailed literature on financial crises that we could draw on. In contrast, previous scholarship in Economics has very little to offer us about pandemics. Remarkably, that simple observation has not been recognized as a major failure ofeconomists’ practices. Why has the economics profession failed so miserably?