The Pandemic Information Gap

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Why solving the information problem should be at the core of our pandemic response: essential reading about the long-term implications of our current crisis.

COVID-19 is caused by a virus. The COVID-19 pandemic is caused by a lack of good information. A pandemic is essentially an information problem: this is the enlightening and provocative idea at the heart of this book. If we solve the information problem, argues economist Joshua Gans, we can defeat the virus. For example, when we don’t know who is infected, we have to act as if everyone is infected. If we actively manage the information problem–if we know who is infected and with whom they had contact–we can suppress the virus or buy time for vaccine development.

This is an expanded version of an eBook originally published as Economics in the Age of COVID-19.1 All about Information 1
2 Health before Wealth 13
3 Predictable Surprises 29
4 Telling the Truth 45
5 A War Footing 57
6 This Time It Really Is Different 71
7 The Testing Economy 87
8 Keeping It to Yourself 105
9 Reemergence 115
10 Rallying Innovation 125
11 The Big Rationing 143
12 The Future 151
Notes 163
About the Author 199″Gans believes the focus of the pandemic should be about understanding the information problem, and knowing critical facts at every phase of pandemic recovery to suppress future outbreaks.”
—Business Insider

“It’s a shame that policymakers did not have books such as Joshua Gans’s Economics in the Age of COVID-19 to lay out the issues for them in January.”
—Nature

“The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed a number of areas where government was unprepared despite years of preparation, but it has also revealed a very un-governmental nimbleness in responding to the economics of the pandemic-induced recession. Economist Joshua Gans says there was no pandemics playbook on how to keep an economy running in a situation like this, and despite the real hardships many are facing today, policymakers have made more right decisions than wrong to this point.”
—Public Radio Tulsa

“Written in an unpretentious conversational style, Economics in the Age of Covid–19 (Gans) provides an accessible overview of the past, present, and future economic choices confronting nations grappling against the viral pandemic of Covid-19.”
—Postdigital Science and EducationJoshua Gans is Professor of Strategic Management and holds the Jeffrey S. Skoll Chair of Technical Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. He is the author of The Disruption Dilemma (MIT Press), Prediction Machines, and other books, and coauthor of Innovation + Equality (MIT Press).US

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