Might a ‘Coasean’ social contract mitigate overall societal harm from COVID-19?

Friday, April 3rd, 2020 | tedla55p | 8 Comments

Brian Williamson1, Prof Nick Wilson2 (1Economic consultant, UK; 2University of Otago Wellington)

In this blog, we outline how a win-win social contract could be forged to address the major dimensions of response to the COVID-19 pandemic when using a mitigation strategy: the particular need to protect older people from high death rates and the desirability of maximising freedom from lock-downs and economic wellbeing for nearly everyone else. The social contract could take a range of forms, but one approach could be for a government to offer a period of extra payments to older age-groups to commit to home quarantine, with the option of opt out either with no payment or an insurance surcharge reflecting risk until either a vaccine arrived or until protective immunity arose in the population.

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