Sheilagh Ogilvie: evaluation

Transcript context

…Do you have a sense of the relative importance of those two factors? I have a table in the book where I try to put together probably 15 or 16 quantitative examples that we have from shortly after the Black Death straight through to the present day, and it varied hugely. On the whole, it seems as if voluntary market withdrawal was pretty high in the medieval and early modern period. But people were poorer then, and so the implications of withdrawing from the market were really big for them because a lot of them didn’t have any cushion of savings. Until the late medieval period, there was no tendency for the local community or the state to provide support for people who observed lockdown. I think there were really big differences compared to nowadays, but on the whole, it looks like voluntary market withdrawal was really higher in past epidemics than it was, for instance, during influenza in the early 20th century or COVID in the early 21st. The range of GDP declines — what would those numbers be?…

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