Sheilagh Ogilvie: evaluation

Transcript context

…Let’s say we send you back in time, let’s say to southwestern Germany. It’s an area you know a lot about, during the Black Death, and you can give people advice, what they should do to cope. What do you tell them? That’s a very good question. Maybe the first thing I would say is, don’t believe what your priest says, [laughs] because one of the things I do in the book is I try to assess the effect of different social institutions. One of them is religion. Although religion did provide consolation and a certain amount of charitable support, one of the very, very salient things it did during the Black Death was that most religious figures admonished people that, in order to induce God to take away the plague, it was essential for them to get together in processions and church services, not observe social distancing, but engage in super spreader events. Perhaps I was joking slightly to say don’t listen to your parish priest, but in the short term, I would definitely have said that. The question about what to do in the longer term is a good one because just allowing people to decide for themselves about whether to withdraw from the market or whether to keep away from their neighbors is one partial solution. We know that people withdraw from the market spontaneously, even nowadays and in most historical societies, but they probably don’t withdraw as much as they would if they were taking into account the effect of their actions on other people. Although I would be advising the villagers to keep your market transactions going — it’s the thing that’s going to generate enough resources for you to pay for recovery and invest in health inputs and so on — I would be saying, “You might want to get together within your community to think about observing some sanitation, some social distancing in a coordinated way, not just as individuals.” Are there any fictional depictions of pandemics that you find persuasive? Manzoni, Camus, Pamuk? Anything? Even Boccaccio. Who do you think, “Oh, this captures it”?…

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