Pandemic policymakers' role

Aproper kind of economic thinking will be helpful as the world seeks a balanced approach to the policy challenges raised by the current flu virus. What are needed are the ideas of trade-off, cost versus benefit, economic history, and avoidance of scapegoat blame and finger-pointing. Proper economic thinking is not about narrow expertise or specialist-dependence.

In particular, balanced cost/benefit big-picture thinking will put medical experts in their proper place among the set of players who advise the Magistrates who make policy for the 150 different nations whose citizens are worried about the virus.

All my adult life, I have been a professional academic. Economics professor Frank H Knight, a founder of the Chicago School of Economics, was born too soon (1885) to earn a Nobel Prize himself, but was teacher/mentor to at least three laureates (Milton Friedman, George Stigler and

James M Buchanan). According to what may be an apocryphal story, Knight once said: "When I meet another economist on the street, I don't know whether to laugh or hide my face."

Professor Knight practiced "proper" economic thinking. He referred to what was known, even in his day, as the notorious inability on the part of most economists to foresee oncoming problems, or to cure trouble when it came to be.

Knight was saying that the profession's fault (and this is evident in the factual record of his voluminous publications) is that economists may be blinded by their own expertise, and so prejudge and take too narrow a view of the world they seek to understand. But let us be quick to say that this fault is common to other specialists.

It is an old story by John Godfrey Saxe (1872) that I here paraphrase: Six learned but blind experts meet an elephant. The plasterer touches the beast's side and says, "It's a wall." The metalwork