Public health has five main advantages over economics when it comes to fighting potential pandemics:
1. We take public health professionals very seriously. In part this reflects the big progress of medical knowledge over the past century — doctors know much more about preventing death than they did in the 1930s.
The progress made by economists over the same time span, for example in terms of thinking about how to prevent worldwide economic depression, is much less impressive. (Judge for yourself: Here’s a recent speech on this topic by Christina Romer, head of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers; her modesty is persuasive.)
2. Public health officials have really figured out the public communication part of their work (e.g., look at the government’s integrated Web site on pandemic flu). They need to tell us there is an issue and to raise our awareness, without creating a panic; and, if things get worse, they need to inform us how best to adjust our behavior. Look at the mainstream news media over the past week — full of stories aimed at getting your attention without creating inappropriate levels of fear.
Contrast this with how former Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. communicated with Congress and the country back in September 2008; we jumped from complacency to pervasive financial fear overnight. And try to find an integrated crisis response Web page for the United States and the global financial situation even today — start with Treasury or the International Monetary Fund, and good luck!
3. The underlying message from public health, of course, is quite different from what the supervisors of our financial system like to convey. Public health officials and doctors tell us that we are potentially vulnerable and we need to be vigilant.
Financial officials, in contrast, feel that any sense of uncertainty will immediately lead to self-fulfilling panic (e.g., see the G-20’s most recent communiqué). This is exactly the wrong attitude — what really causes panic is the sense that officials have been blindsided and the government has no ready responses in hand.
- 4. The public health system drills constantly to deal with crises. To be sure, the level of preparation has increased since 9/11, but there is a much longer-standing tradition of practicing through “war game”-type simulations, including involving actual hospitals and other key parts of both the hard logistics and soft communications system. Bad things can still happen, but these people are seriously prepared.
In contrast, try suggesting to finance ministry or central bank types that we should work to forestall financial pandemics in a similar fashion; they will look at you with great suspicion (yes, I’ve tried this) — in their minds, publicly preparing for the worst is tantamount to fomenting panic.
5. The biggest issue, of course, is that pre-emptively organizing for and dealing with health pandemics does nothing to ruffle the feathers of powerful interests in the health sector, be it doctors, health care providers, insurers or drug companies. They have built a system that derives its value partly from our being (appropriately, for the most part) worried.
In contrast, while finance talks a lot about risk, those involved in it have tried to create the impression that they understand and can manage risks — so, for a (modest?) fee, you don’t have anything to worry about. This, it turns out, is incorrect.
Before the germ theory of disease, public health officials made a great deal of progress containing epidemic outbreaks.
But they also made some spectacular and horribly costly mistakes, for example with regard to cholera or malaria or yellow fever in the 19th century. Over the last 100 years, medical advances mean that the profession can quickly figure out a great deal about even something as difficult as a new virus. Public health will slow down disease spread; big investments in medical technology pay off (hopefully) with cures and vaccines. Nothing is perfect and everything can always get better, but this works.
Where is economics, relatively speaking?
We recognize an insolvent bank when we see one, sometimes. But can we prevent major bank-type institutions from failing, can we stop such failures from cascading through the global financial system, and can we be sure that such panics will not push the global economy into deep and prolonged recession?
Experience from the past two years surely teaches us that economics is in a position similar to that of medicine before the germ theory of disease, and we should plan accordingly.
Also if you haven't read Johnson's piece in the Atlantic, The Quiet Coup, you need to. Its on our new economic oligarchy and the IMF solution out of our crisis
The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.
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