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Minimizing the Social Cost of COVID-19

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Efforts to turn an effective institutional response to the pandemic into a political or ideological battleground are misguided, at best. As the late Nobel laureate Ronald H. Coase showed, regardless of ideology or politics, each society must develop institutional arrangements that constrain individual freedom.

HONG KONG – In 1960, the Nobel laureate economist Ronald H. Coase introduced the “problem of social cost”: human activities often have negative externalities, so individual rights cannot be absolute. Institutions must intervene. There is no better example of this dynamic than the COVID-19 crisis.

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