Economics in the Age of Covid-19, Updated Edition by Joshua Gans

2019 and 2020 has been quite a mess politically, economically, and for the health and safety of almost everyone on this Earth. This book aims to look at the economic factors that come into play during a pandemic. Also, to explain how different actions taken during this pandemic can have long term consequences.

Though this book is clearly aimed at the misinformation, and craziness happening in America, it does talk about examples of pandemic responses that were done well like in Denmark, and Taiwan.

This book is very short, and the postmortem of the COVID-19 pandemic is still on-going, sadly, because the pandemic hasn’t stopped in many parts of the world.

These are the two problems that plague (!)* this book. The topic he is writing about is not even finished, so it’s hard to write an accurate, and comprehensive book about the economics of COVID-19. The other problem is that this book is too US-centric in my opinion.

I appreciate the scholarship of the book, and look forward to more detailed accounts balancing the response to pandemic, with the economy yet to be written. The human race certainly has a lot to learn from this if we are going to survive the next pandemic, and the climate disaster that is looming.

• Mr. Gans put a few puns in the book and marked them with an exclamation mark. I enjoyed the puns. Thank you!

Rating: ★★★

Book #35 in my #ReadingChallenge2021