Research explains how people act in pandemics – selfishly, but often with surprising altruism | Utteeyo Dasgupta

In his book A Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe describes 17th-century behavior that is unmistakably familiar today

Pandemics usher in death, uncertainty and restrictions and lockdowns. They also provide an ideal laboratory for economists to study behavior under constraints. Strange as it may seem, our behavior today is little different than it was 355 years ago.

In a recent article published in the Economic Inquiry, Chandan Jha, Sudipta Sarangi and I dug into the descriptions of the 1665 English plague in Daniel Defoe's book, A Journal of the Plague Year, which although not published until 1722 is believed to be based on firsthand accounts from the time. We found that although institutions have evolved, medical science has improved and the internet has fundamentally changed the ways we communicate, our core responses to acute constraints remain unmistakably familiar.

Related: What can we learn about 2020 from the Black Death? Dorsey Armstrong has all the answers

Utteeyo Dasgupta is associate professor of economics at Wagner College, and research fellow at IZA