Surprise after surprise – A preface of the editor

Abstract

At the end of the assembling this Special Issue in August 2021, the 11 of its kind, it is not yet clear whether the worldwide use of the designation COVID-19 is appropriate. There are some indications that the first cases of the new type of coronavirus may have occurred before 2019 and, more importantly, it is not known whether this deadly disease affects calendar years 2020 and 2021 or whether 2022 will be a pandemic year, too. All we know for sure is that when the WHO declared the outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on 30 January 2020, no one thought that it would hit the economies of every country on Earth hard. The medical problem initially appeared to have only a public health dimension. There is a famous phrase in Marx’s Capital that all macroeconomists, regardless of their worldview, have always regarded as trivial: “Whatever the form of the process of production in a society, it must be a continuous process, must continue to go periodically through the same phases. A society can no more cease to produce than it can cease to consume. When viewed, therefore, as a connected whole, and as flowing on with incessant renewal, every social process of production is, at the same time, a process of reproduction.” That in peacetime the governments of most countries in the world would be willing to halt production by administrative fiat – that is, with the deliberate intention of reducing GDP and increasing unemployment – was utterly inconceivable.