Economics, COVID-19, and the Entangled Political Economy of Public Health

Without doubt, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) presents problems of public health. To most people, public-health problems, especially of a pandemic intensity, call for public action. Indeed, public-health concerns and national defense have long served as paradigmatic illustrations of public goods where market resolutions to those problems are absent and where governmental action is required. Theories of public goods, however, are largely caricatures of a situation that create the illusion that the theory provides adequate knowledge for dealing with the problem. To the contrary, public-goods theories provide no such knowledge and are incapable of providing such knowledge. Most fundamentally, such theories presume that theorists have in front of them the knowledge that is necessary to overcome the alleged problem. This common presumption is wrong.