Almost fifteen years ago, a friend from the neighborhood asked me if I wanted to start talking about the possibility of a world pandemic and possibly organizing events to raise awareness of the danger and discuss policies for prevention and preparedness. His name was Drew Harris, and he had heard that I had written a lot about financial and currency crises, so I might be interested in establishing some kind of dialogue between economists and public health experts. He had become quite concerned about the eruption of African influenza, and had read projections that a generalized outbreak could wipe away around six percent of Africa’s GDP.
At the time, Drew had an office in New Brunswick, so we had a series of lunch meetings over the subsequent three years to talk about possible events and actions. At some point, we even contacted some of my ex colleagues from the Federal Reserve to see if they would be able to come to Rutgers to present what they were doing at the time, if anything, to prepare for the pandemic (it turned out there was a System committee that was supposed to study this issue).
What happened with our efforts? Well, the African influenza problem did not spread and fell off the world radar. And at the same time we were hit by the 2007-8 global financial crisis, which forced economists like me to turn full attention to that problem.
I recall that story today because, as some of you may know, Drew Harris was the original creator of the graph of the pandemics curves to flatten (see, for instance, https://www.nytimes.com/article/flatten-curve-coronavirus.html). I have been reflecting on the fact that the Covid-19 pandemic was not a complete surprise, and we could have been much better prepared. Drew was right and we did not listen.
On the other hand, one might say that he was right too early. Perhaps one lesson to be learned, or re-learned, is that crises will hit us all of the time, but that they come in different bitter flavors. We had financial crises; today we have a pandemic; tomorrow it may be global warming, or political disintegration, or the collapse of the internet. What does this suggest in terms of preparing for the next world crisis?