Covid-19 is a global pandemic inflicting large health and economic costs. 

In his recent book The Pandemic Information Gap: The Brutal Economics of COVID-19 (MIT Press, 2020), economist Joshua Gans explains that those costs have been so large because governments and others have lacked the information to control the pandemic. Unless we know who is infectious, we can’t break the chains of transmission, and that results in the escalation of our problems. Pandemics, he writes, are information problems. 

Now, in this follow-up book The Pandemic Information Solution (Endeavor Literary Press, 2021), Gans outlines the solution to the information gap. By engaging in rapid, frequent screening, we can control the pandemic and restore normality. We can lower the number of cases, break chains of transmission, and make it safe for people to interact again. This will require changing our mindset about testing, gathering the right information, and matching that information to the right decisions. We have the ingredients to do all these things. We just need to put them together in a scalable and sustainable system. This book is a guide to the issues and trade-offs that policymakers and other key decision-makers need to grapple with and follow.

Written and published urgently to help policymakers and public health officials address the Covid-19 pandemic and prepare for future pandemic threats, the book’s chapters include: 

Joshua Gans is a professor of strategic management and the Jeffrey S. Skoll Chair of Technical Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto (with a cross-appointment in the Department of Economics). From 2013 to 2019, he was area coordinator of strategic management. Prior to 2011, he was the foundation professor of management (information economics) at the Melbourne Business School, University of Melbourne. Prior to that, he was at the University of New South Wales School of Economics.  

In 2011, Joshua was a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research (New England). Joshua has a PhD from Stanford University and an honors degree in economics from the University of Queensland. In 2012, Joshua was appointed as a research associate of the NBER in the Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship Program. At Rotman, he teaches entrepreneurial strategy to MBA and commerce students.  

Joshua recently published The Pandemic Information Gap: The Brutal Economics of COVID-19 (MIT Press, 2020). His other books include Principles of Economics (Cengage); Core Economics for Managers (Cengage); Finishing the Job (MUP); Parentonomics (MIT Press); Information Wants to be Shared (Harvard Business Review Press); The Disruption Dilemma (MIT Press); Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence (Harvard Business Review Press); Scholarly Publishing and its Discontents; and Innovation + Equality (MIT Press).  

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