On the Information Gap and Brutal Economics of COVID-19
From the New Books Network's Book of the Day Podcast
As the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in March, a self-isolating and easily distracted economist, Joshua Gans, resolved to take himself in hand. “I decided I would do what I was good at,” Gans said: write a book about the complex interplay between epidemiology and economics and the policy dilemmas it poses.
By June, Gans had published Economics in the Age of COVID-19 and, within days, he had started work on the expanded version—The Pandemic Information Gap: The Brutal Economics of COVID-19 (MIT Press, 2020)—to come out in the autumn. Its central thesis is that “at their heart, pandemics are an information problem. Solve the information problem and you can defeat the virus.”
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Joshua Gans is Professor of Strategic Management and holder of the Jeffrey S. Skoll Chair of Technical Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.
Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors.
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