Sheilagh Ogilvie: belief

Transcript context

…The range of GDP declines — what would those numbers be? I think that’s a question that should be answered, but we can’t answer it right now. All we can observe is the degree to which people stopped buying beer in a particular tavern in a Middle Eastern city in the 15th century. We can’t generalize that to the whole of the economy. In a sense, we’re just trying to have good macroeconomic estimates of what GDP was for a lot of these economies. Let’s say 50 percent to 60 percent, sometimes 90 percent withdrawal from the market of individuals. For instance, the merchant use of the postal system in 17th century Italian cities during plagues went down 90 percent compared to what it normally was. Why did the 1969 pandemic not have bigger economic effects?…

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