New from Breakingviews: Pestilence scares come along every so often. Perhaps the best outcome from Covid-19 is that it becomes the near-miss society and business need to change course in a hurry, writes rob1cox:
ZURICH - Nobody expects the Spanish influenza. Or the Bubonic plague. Even so, pestilential panics like Covid-19 come along every so often, and they sometimes become full-blown levellers of humanity. Thankfully, the so-called coronavirus appears to be nothing like the 14th century’s Black Death. But going by what happened following deadlier prior outbreaks, “plague-enomics” can still lead to far-reaching structural shifts.
“The Black Death was a cataclysmic event and retrenchment was inevitable, but it ultimately diminished economic impediments and opened new opportunity,” argued David Routt, a University of Richmond professor, in a paper on the plague’s economic impact. While wages in England, for example, rose by as much as 40% from the 1340s to the 1360s, the income of English lords declined by 20% as the plague raged, according to Routt.
Covid-19 is the first big health scare since major nations agreed to keep a rise in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius with the 2015 Paris Agreement. More recent outbreaks, like SARS in 2003 or H1N1 in 2009, predated Paris and came before most voters identified climate change as a serious priority.
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