How useful was social science during the pandemic?

Macartan Humphreys | WZB

Plan

The pandemic was useful for social science, but how useful was social science for the pandemic?

A look at (a small!) selection of work in political science and economics on:

Was this useful? Where could we have done better?

Rapid responses, broad responses

“Staying in lane” issues fairly well negotiated

Lots of epi models: does social science have value added?
Social scientists are particularly good at predicting regular events after the fact
Real challenge to predict outside the routine
Is it too much to ask?

Bosancianu et al 2023: lots of available theory (in all directions)

Capacity arguments mixed: astonishing unconditional relations, capacity correlates early on, trust later on

Not much traction from political variables

Trust and inequality stand out

Expert predictions (generally very diverse) and implied updating

Over 100 entries across challenges: Golden, Slough, and Zhai (2023)

Social scientists better than chance but only in the tails

Trust and inequality again

Not clear much demand for social science predictions
Quite modest traction: but still, value added over epidemiological and machine learning models
Purely political arguments did not do a lot; theoretical logics thin
Trust and inequality consistently important

A lot of social science is focused on measurement.

Did social science effectively help track the situation?

Sierra Leone dashboard making use of existing sample and team (esp Voors and Mereggi in country): resources

Drawn on by MoF