The Economic History Podcast
The Economic History podcast is a platform for sharing knowledge, ideas and new research with a general interest audience. Each fortnight, we meet leading academics in the field and discuss a range of topics, including pandemics, long run economic growth, gender issues, financial crises, inequality, sustainable development and a number of weird and fun economic experiments in history. There is no time like the past to help us understand the present.
The Economic History Podcast
Plagues, Pandemics, Policies and Perceptions
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Seán Kenny
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Episode 9
In this episode, we meet Prof. Patrick Wallis to discuss some of his previous work on pandemics and plagues. We look at the comparative magnitudes of some of the worst disease outbreaks and discuss how the perceptions of pandemics, the norms around personal responsibility and the nature of policy responses have all evolved over time. We also consider the nature of media reporting across cases and how government action may have been influenced by the socioeconomic status of the initial sufferers.