Hoyt Bleakley's blog

With the mass of options presented to policy makers, the task of sorting out priorities can seem overwhelming. So, how to do it?  A simple answer from economics is to intervene when people don’t have the incentives to do the right thing.

And when it comes to contagious disease, this happens a lot. 

At the University of Chicago, we often say that “a little economics goes a long way” in understanding a problem. Hopefully this post is an example of that motto. Here I set out a simple framework and use it to think about the economic impact of different human-capital policies.

Better health means, in part, lower mortality, which is obviously an positive thing. Reducing mortality also means there will be more people around. But better health doesn't have to mean the return of Malthus, as some economists have argued recently.

Picture a place where children are so infested with parasites that they are listless and weak. Even when they are feeling well enough to go to school, they are so anemic that learning is difficult. While this could be a scene in many of today's poor, tropical countries, it was also typical in the southern United States less than a century ago. In 1910 about 40 percent of Southern children suffered from infection by hookworm, a tiny bloodsucking worm that invaded their intestines. Malaria also infected a large fraction of Southerners back then.

In fact, hookworm and malaria were so prevalent in the South that historians blame them for giving rise to the widespread stereotype of the “lazy Southerner.” Yet they were so successfully and thoroughly vanquished, that the notion of hookworm and malaria in the southern United States sounds improbable today.