The elements that transformed the Spanish Flu, that happened between 1918 and 1920, into a catastrophe, which infected over 500 million people and killed 50 million people were distinctive. The first one was the coincidental ending of the Great War where millions of soldiers lived amassed in narrow trenches with poor hygienic conditions and the second was the movement of these troops returning home at the end of the conflict. Millions of people were moving simultaneously from one nation to the other and even between continents. This was the ideal medium for the spread of the virus. The movement of this many people back then was a rare and exceptional event.
Today, the world is radically different. If the COVID-19 pandemic is teaching us one thing, it’s that the world, now more than ever, is small and interconnected, where frontiers have become a fickle creation of our imagination and of our ideologies and where our relationships with other people within and outside our borders entails dependence on each other and vulnerability. The diffusion of the virus, like a radioactive tracer, is allowing us to see these connections that were before invisible, but nonetheless real and palpable. It should then be of common understanding that to safeguard our health systems we must distance ourselves socially.
Less than a decade after the Spanish flu, Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy publishes the short story “Chains”. Using fiction he explores the concept of connections. One of the characters, to try and prove how small the world was at that time (population: 1 billion), hypothesizes the connection of two random people through a chain of less than 5 people.
At that time the concept was unusual, and it alluded to the impossibility of proving that every person on earth is connected to one another in this manner.
Milgram studied this possibility in his 1967 “small-world experiment” to try and give a scientific answer to this phenomena. He sent out packages to 296 people living in Omaha, Nebraska, with instructions asking them to bring the package closer to a stockbroker in Boston, Massachusetts. They were only supposed to mail the package to people they knew on a first name basis and also leave their name in the package so that each transaction would be recorded. Out of the 296 letters sent, only 64 letters eventually reached the stockbroker in Boston. The average length of the chain was between 5.5 and 6. Historically, it seems that no one had used the term six degrees of separation before this experiment. Facebook has also given us a number recently, in 2011, where they found that each user on average is related to other by 3.57 degrees of separation. While this may show us that we are more interconnected, it is good to remember that there is a differentiation between knowing someone online and in real life, or on a first name basis as Milgram put it.
Our level of interdependence is higher than ever, it has become the strength of global nations. There are migrants who will endure arduous journeys to be with their loved ones. Perspectives can be changed daily. While Italy had been refusing migrants coming from Africa for years, in a matter of hours emigration from Italy came to a holt. These same nations who were once being rejected had started closing their borders to Italians due to the coronavirus. This happened in the matter hours, a ripple effect, which propagated the number of nations closing their frontiers increased to hundreds in a matter of days. We see the same thing in America, as Mexico closes its borders on American travelers.
This amount of connections has other consequences, our behaviors have started to be defined by what others do, not only because of social media but because the number of people we are in contact with increases continuously. These connections have a much stronger effect on our decisions than we think. We very well know that other people’s behavior can cause people to take up smoking, getting credit card debt and even the decision to take on recycling. Even in financial markets we see this behavior, with the rush to the banks during the Great Depression, which may have well been a cause of the financial crisis. The same thing is happening now with the stock market fluctuating, following the decisions made by big mutual funds or by people stockpiling toilet paper. Two systems are in place here, the biological and the psychological. It is very likely that natural selection has made us so synchronized with one another. We tend to replicate the majority of what other people do, from small hints of smiles all the way to what car we should buy.
So what else can we learn from the 1918 Spanish Flu? Even though the flu produced just as many deaths as the first world war little economic studies have shown consequences of this pandemic. Angus Maddison, a British macro economist specialized in history found that European GDP had fallen by almost 8% in the matter of two years. We must consider that these years were right after the war where European countries like Germany and France had been torn apart. We usually tend to ignore this pandemic when looking at the Great Depression and tend to attribute it to a reorganization of the economy after the war. I have found few studies that isolate the effects of the pandemic versus the war.
There has been one study done in 2013 by Martin Karlsson, Therese Nilsson and Stefan Pichler that tried to identify the influence of the Spanish flu on the “economic performance” of Sweden. Sweden is an interesting case because they remained neutral during the war. Some regions in Sweden had higher mortality rates than others, and these counties experience much slower growth. They found that each deceased person was replaced by 0.45 minors and 0.42 females, whereas the male labor supply was insignificant. Capital incomes were also strongly negatively impacted, with assets owned by people depreciating. Poverty also increased: with every person deceased there were 4 asking to be housed in state housing. This finding seems to be inconsistent with the other finding of the increased scarcity of labor, where you would expect more labor to alleviate financial burdens, but as explained by the authors it may be due to a significant reduction in average worker quality. Another study done in the USA by Brainerd & Siegler, 2006, suggested that states most hit by the pandemic had higher salaries. This is because the lack of labor increased the demand of workers and increased salaries. COVID-19 attacks the majority people who are out of the workforce, so predicting it’s effects on the basis of older pandemics may be much harder than we think.
We could also theorize that because the 1918 pandemic happened during an economic lull, the decisions taken by governments to close down economic activities may not have had that big of an impact as it would now, where people have been working more than ever. Our economic growth is unfortunately substantiated by technological bubbles that are every day more fragile. A single grain of sand could make this house of cards collapse. Governments respond the same way they did in 2008 and 2012 by recurring to monetary policy to avoid these bubbles bursting. A measure that may very well be inefficient. This is exactly the paradox that we are living in: the difference between today and 1918 is that there is no immediate economic chaos but a slow inexorable decline.
The same way behavioral contagion can bring disastrous consequences, it can also be a vehicle for positive changes. We need to promote these good examples, with explicit requests, practice and exemplification. We need to all recognize our interdependence on one another, that no one can save themselves on their own. If there is one thing that this pandemic is telling us, it is, that none of us are actually that far from each other.
Sofia Wolfson
Emory University
University of Miami