What Economics Can Say about an Effective Response to the Coronavirus

Robert N. Stavins, an RFF university fellow, Harvard professor, and RFF Board member, recently hosted Scott Barrett on an episode of his Environmental Insights podcast. Barrett, a professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, specializes in both climate change mitigation and disease eradication. In the podcast interview, Stavins and Barrett discussed lessons from historic pandemics, how economists can help with policymaking surrounding the coronavirus, and what the “post-pandemic economic equilibrium” might look like. An abridged version of their conversation is transcribed below.

Robert N. Stavins: How was it that you broadened your scope, from a focus on environmental and natural resource issues, to include global health issues?

Scott Barrett: First off, a lot of the environmental issues that we study are health issues, right? For example, 99 percent of the reason we're looking at air pollution is its effect on human health. No one in environmental economics bats an eye about that; that's just accepted. But for some reason, infectious diseases are seen to be in some other territory and not part of ours, and I've never understood that.

Another analogy we use in environmental economics is exploitation of a fishery. This is us going into a biological population and harvesting for our own benefit. And you can think of pathogens as being kind of the flip side of that, which is that they're the predators, we're the prey, and they're dipping into us. What we want to do is take measures that will reduce the harm that's caused by that....