Attention Economy


Thursday, April 2, 2020

Epidemiologists versus Economists

The Real Reason Epidemiologists and Economists Keep Arguing
“To oversimplify, think of epidemiologists as experts who have spent their entire careers preparing to understand and suppress rapidly spreading disease. Their distinctive intellectual bent is to build models of transmission and then develop real-world interventions to change the expected outcome. Their core value is preserving public health….
Unlike epidemiologists, who identify a biological enemy and try to defeat it without thinking much about the costs, economists live on trade-offs. It’s an article of faith for economists that there is no such thing as an absolute value — not even the value of human life. Instead, most economists embrace the hardheaded reality that helping one person often leaves another less well-off”.