JFI Senior Fellow Johannes Haushofer publishes in Science on the best interventions for a pandemic

Johannes Haushofer, who serves as a JFI Senior Fellow in Guaranteed Income and an Assistant Professor at Princeton University, published an important piece in Science this week that discusses varied opportunity costs of pandemic interventions intended to reduce virus transmission rates.

Johannes and his co-author, Jessica Metcalf, write, “Because many of these interventions differ from each other in terms of their economic and psychological cost—ranging from very inexpensive, in the case of interventions based on behavioral economics and psychology, to extremely costly, in the case of school and business closures—it is crucial to identify the interventions that most reduce transmission at the lowest economic and psychological cost.”

Below is a graphical representation of the familiar “curve” tracking numbers infected, with varying upticks in cases dependent on “loosening” or “tightening” those interventions.

Read the full the paper here.