VACCINES ASIDE, the solutions to combating COVID-19 — screening, personal risk management, contact tracing, to name a few — are based on a deeper principle. Specifically, the primary economic tool at our disposal for fighting the economic consequences of pandemics is the collection and use of information about infectious people. I believe, therefore, that our preparation for dealing with inevitable future pandemic threats must involve building our information infrastructure and the decision-making skills to make use of it.
In my first book about the brutal economics of COVID-19, The Pandemic Information Gap, I speculated that we would need to invest heavily in supranational institutions to deal with pandemics. From the vantage of 2020, that seemed like the only option. Pandemics always start somewhere, and therefore we need to ensure that the right people know about the onset as soon as it happens. And those right people must also have the authority to act on that information — even if it means that the rights (say, of movement and trade) of those most immediately affected are subverted for the global good.
This is always a tough call. Sovereignty is something we default to, and some proposed pandemic solutions are seen as moving us in the opposite direction. But faced with an unprecedented global negative externality, do we have a different option?
Now that we are further down the track, I have to admit that I find myself backing away from regarding a supranational authority over other interests as a necessity; instead, I see this option as being potentially desirable. That is not much of a shift in thinking, but the reason for it is instructive. I now believe there are ways to deal with the pandemic information problem at a national level. I say this knowing that we cannot necessarily rely on individuals to do the right thing at the right time, and knowing that we might not make the needed investments in information infrastructure quickly enough.
Nonetheless, there is
