Episode 08: Joshua Gans
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The Economics of the COVID-19 Pandemic
Stanford health economics professor Jay Bhattacharya has said that the coronavirus is one of the biggest failures of the economics profession. And whether or not that’s an exaggeration, it’s true many economics have stayed quiet throughout the course of this virus. But not Joshua Gans.
Joshua Gans is a Professor of Strategic Management and holder of the Jeffrey S. Skoll Chair of Technical Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto (with a cross-appointment in the Department of Economics). He is also Chief Economist of the University of Toronto's Creative Destruction Lab.
Listen as we dive into all things pandemic today: COVID-19 as a disease vs a function of behavior, gauging risk, privacy laws, and the range of COVID testing options.
“Epidemiology in many respects is closer to a social science than it is to a natural science.”
Episode Quotes:
On pandemic research within Economics:
"Economists had looked at infectious diseases, most notably AIDS. There was some work done, but it was, to say it was a fringe would be almost an understatement. There was no work done on if we have a global pandemic, what is the optimal macroeconomic response? There was nothing there."
On creating public policy during a pandemic:
"Here's where it gets frustrating. Here are the scientists doing their business, coming up with various studies and, you know, critical facts. But at the same time, they've got to take that and it's got to go all the way to public policy. And in between, there is this lump of stuff they don't know about: social science. And so they make guesses."
On the fundamental information problem of pandemics:
"It took me a little while to come around to realize that this calamity was more solvable than people were saying. And it wasn't going to require necessarily vaccine and other things like that. If we could just get our head around it. But that turned out to be a non-obvious view to a lot of people. And it certainly wasn't the way in which health people that I was speaking to had talked about it. So it was more a uniquely economic strategy type approach. What is the fundamental problem here? And can we solve that?"