If pandemics become “the new normal” then tens of millions of urban service jobs could disappear, the annual conference of the Dublin Economics Workshop (DEW) heard on Monday.
Edward Glaeser, a professor of economics at Harvard University said cities had become “engines of global growth” and productivity.
However, high-density, services industry-dominated cities had left the world peculiarly vulnerable to an airborne pandemic like Covid-19, he said.
Pandemics temporarily shut down the industrial economies of the past but as soon as they passed through, “the coal mines and the factories were up and running again because customers weren’t afraid of getting the disease from their coal or their ice boxes,” Prof…
