Book: Controlling Contagion by Sheilagh Ogilvie

Ogilvie, Sheilagh. 2025. Controlling Contagion: Epidemics and Institutions from the Black Death to Covid. Princeton University Press.

As the title suggests, this book provides a mighty overview of how different institutions -- state, market, community, religion, family, and medical guilds and associations -- influence how societies react to epidemic disease from the Black Death in the 14th century through COVID-19 in the 21st. Ogilvie carefully delineates the strengths and weaknesses of each institution, illuminating each with numerous historical examples. For example, markets produce wealth, which is useful in a whole bunch of ways when fighting contagion, but markets also encourage interaction while failing to price in the social externalities associated with contagion. 

I found the bits about the history of variolation and immunization particularly new and interesting, Who knew that many medical guilds initially opposed one or both for dubious reasons both economic and epistemological. The material on the so-called "European marriage system" and whether or not it helped societies in epidemic times also stood out to me. My one complaint might be the occasional absence of a "denominator" to give me a sense of, when reading one of the many lists of diverse examples of particular points, whether the list contained all of the available examples on that point or just some tiny fraction of them. The final chapter of the book offers some wise thoughts on particularly effective and ineffective institutional combinations, while carefully noting that the very limited historical data as well as obvious identification problems (i.e., more theories and institutions than historical epidemics) severely limit the boldness of any conclusions. 

Recommended.

Full disclosure: I have reached an odd place in life where I could spend all my reading time reading books by people I know and still not read all of the books written by people I know. In this case, Sheilagh is an old friend from graduate school days. As I remember it, she came to Chicago in the midst of her doctoral studies to do a Master's degree in economics, with her main interest being interacting with Gary Becker. You can listen to her lively interview with Tyler Cowen, mostly about this book, here.