Long-run economic effects are not always dreadful
the inevitable attendants of economic progress. Interconnected trade networks and teeming cities have made societies both richer and more vulnerable, from the empires of antiquity to the integrated global economy of the present. The effects of covid-19 will be very different from those of past pathogens, which struck populations far poorer than people today, and with less knowledge of things like viruses and bacteria.
It seems also to have ushered parts of north-west Europe onto a more promising growth path. Real incomes of European workers rose sharply following the pandemic, which struck the continent from 1347 to 1351. In pre-industrial times, higher incomes usually enabled faster population growth, which eventually squeezed incomes back to subsistence levels . But in parts of Europe, Malthusian rules did not reassert themselves after the pandemic receded.
More often, though, a pandemic’s economic consequences are unambiguously negative. Trade links which spread a pathogen can themselves be undone by its effects. During the Roman Empire, a high degree of specialisation and trade lifted incomes to levels that would not be reached again for more than a millennium. Alas, the same links facilitated the spread of disease.
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