How can public policy best deal with infectious disease? In answering this question, scholarship on the optimal control of infectious disease adopts the model of a benevolent social planner who maximizes social welfare. This approach, which treats the social health planner as a unitary “public health brain” standing outside of society, removes the policymaking process from economic analysis. This paper opens the black box of the social health planner by extending the tools of economics to the policymaking process itself. We explore the nature of the economic problem facing policymakers and the epistemic constraints they face in trying to solve that problem. Additionally, we analyze the incentives facing policymakers in their efforts to address infectious diseases and consider how they affect the design and implementation of public health policy. Finally, we consider how unanticipated system effects emerge due to interventions in complex systems, and how these effects can undermine well‐intentioned efforts to improve human welfare. We illustrate the various dynamics of the political economy of state responses to infectious disease by drawing on a range of examples from the COVID‐19 pandemic.

中文翻译：

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国家应对传染病的政治经济学

公共政策如何才能最好地应对传染病？在回答这个问题时，传染病最优控制的学术研究采用了使社会福利最大化的仁慈社会计划者的模式。这种将社会健康规划者视为站在社会之外的单一“公共卫生大脑”的方法，将决策过程从经济分析中剔除。本文通过将经济学工具扩展到决策过程本身，打开了社会健康计划者的黑匣子。我们探讨了政策制定者面临的经济问题的性质以及他们在试图解决该问题时面临的认知限制。此外，我们分析了政策制定者在应对传染病方面面临的激励措施，并考虑它们如何影响公共卫生政策的设计和实施。最后，我们考虑如何因对复杂系统的干预而出现意外的系统效应，以及这些效应如何破坏改善人类福利的善意努力。我们通过借鉴 COVID-19 大流行的一系列例子来说明国家应对传染病的政治经济学的各种动态。