Not only the factories, but our brains too need to retool to meet the COVID-19 pandemic. Evolution and change is needed for the things we think and the things we think about.
Whatever we cared about before, we are now using them as our lens to think about the novel virus. Not only us, but the professionals and the subject matter experts are also thinking the same way.
Perhaps the most important two examples of experts following their training and beliefs are the two disciplines whose knowledge is most central to the current crisis: epidemiologists and economists.
While most of their approach is common, yet the difference is shaping the government responses to the pandemic and this difference will become a chasm while the public health catastrophe continues and the current economic crisis deepens.
Epidemiologists are the ones who have spent their entire life in understanding and suppressing a rapidly spreading disease and developing real-world interventions to change the expected outcome. What they value most is public health
Early models of transmission showed a steep infection curve. Social distancing was suggested as an intervention that will elongate that curve so that hospitals aren’t overwhelmed, and deaths are reduced.
But, here differences erupt. While epidemiologists identify a biological enemy and try to defeat it without thinking much about the costs, economists live on trade-offs.
Macro-economists have typically spent their lives preparing to understand and respond to crises in the economy. They are concerned when the economy is put on halt. When they see governments taking measures that will have precisely that effect, they’re preconditioned to respond with horror and to advise a different course of action.
The upshot of these different world views is that, on the whole, epidemiologists are insisting that we must take all necessary steps to control the spread of COVID-19. Meanwhile, many economists are saying that we must find a way to reopen the economy and that we must explicitly weigh the trade-off between virus-related health and broader human well-being that is in part a product of a functioning economy.
Meanwhile, when the economists talk the trade-off talk, lots of epidemiologists (and others) find it morally reprehensible when people are dying.
The conflict between these two approaches is going to come to a head if and when the rate of new infections and deaths starts to go down as a result of social isolation. That’s when economists will say it’s time to start getting people back to work. And it’s when epidemiologists will say we are courting the disaster of a recurring outbreak.
In the meantime, the best we can do is be self-aware of our own intellectual tendencies.
