How economics can inform coronavirus decision-making

Everything there’s to say about the new coronavirus has been said. I won’t add to that. I can’t. I have no real answers myself.  But I—like you, I imagine—do have a lot of decisions to make.

I need help balancing long-term benefits with short-term costs. I need help weighing what’s dear to me with what I think would benefit others. I need help making educated guesses about low-probability, high-consequence events. I need help guessing how others will behave in the face of lots of unknowns and unknowables. I need help reasoning through how institutions will behave. I need help deciding how to react to the new coronavirus here at home and when I consider upcoming trips.

Economics—aka “organized common sense”—tends to be a good guide for things. It is, after all, the science of decision-making under binding constraints and uncertainties. That bodes well as an organizing principle. Still, there are plenty of judgment calls along the way, another hallmark of economics.

I live in New York City. It’s big, it’s diverse. Not owning a car is a sign of freedom. Not owning a washing machine is a sign of efficiency. Living in close proximity to others is a basic feature. It’s a resilient place as a result—but resilience can be strained when you don’t know whether that sneeze in the coffee shop line behind you comes laced with SARS-CoV2.

When do I forgo daily necessities? (And yes, I count the 120mg of mid-morning cappuccino from the cafe across the street among life’s necessities.) When, in other words, do I try to minimize exposure?

The equation, after all, is clear: infections = exposure × vulnerability.

Then, of course, there are the more consequential decisions. I worry a lot about climate risks. Plenty of extreme weather events made worse by a warming globe are hitting home already, though in the end, climate is largely about policymaking for posterity. Is that climate policy meeting later this month “essential travel”?

I’d have been willing to trade off the extra ton of CO₂ emitted today for potential benefits later on. Yes, that single ton melts roughly 3 square-meters (over 30 square-feet) of Arctic sea ice, but there’s no stopping the melting without sensible policy. If that one trip gets us 0.000001% closer to getting to that policy, it’s a win. That’s at least my justification for still boarding flights.

Covid-19, the disease from the new coronavirus, is slightly more personal. The tradeoff is more immediate. Should that matter in my decision?

There’s also the bit about me getting sick easily to begin with. My kids have my gynecologist spouse’s genes. When she gets splashed with some bodily fluids, she washes them off and moves on. I’ve never met a cough I didn’t get myself. When I get one, I cough for weeks. Chance is that my next cough is just that, rather than the result of SARS-CoV2.

Still, my cough would probably worry others, especially when I’m sitting in a middle seat in the back of a narrow metal tube for six hours. I would pick myself for some kind of Medieval quarantine if I were a friendly airport worker looking for any and all signs. (That’s the reason why everyone should get flu shots, especially now. It decreases the chance that Covid-19-like symptoms are actually just the flu.)

What about longer-term travel planning?

The big one in my case: Our kids have been looking forward to spending the summer by themselves with my parents in Austria, and so have we. Academic summers mean research unburdened by immediate teaching demands—and kids’ taekwondo lessons—plus lots of conference travel. (The one long child-free weekend in New York, of course, is part of the planning, too.)

When and how to make that travel call? For my children, the short-term risk of increased exposure during the flight might well be outweighed by six weeks of relatively low exposure. The kids would surely be more shielded from Covid-19 while frolicking in the Austrian hills than while navigating New York City public pools, if those will even be open this summer. Label me a European socialist if you will, but I prefer to weather a pandemic in a society with paid sick leave, universal health care, and government policy largely guided by science and medical professionals.

Then again, transatlantic flights ought to be both cheap and relatively empty, if they are still being offered then. But what if the quarantine decision happens midflight? I’ve gone through a sleepless night when the Thai military decided to stage a coup while my wife and then-infant were midflight en route to visiting grandparents in Bangkok. It worked out fine. Then again, even the Thai military knows better than to upset the tourist industry. SARS-CoV2 has no such scruples.

Even more worrisome is the response of less-than-rational governments with objective functions weighed more toward politics than science.

That’s the biggest wild card. Regardless of how rational your personal decision framework might be, if those in charge can’t be trusted to decide rationally—and for the common good—all bets are off.

I used to tell those expressing skepticism of climate science to imagine a medical crisis. Wouldn’t you trust science then? I would certainly like to be able to do that right about now.