Why is the Center for Disease Control like a power company? Because learning about pandemics is so electrifying!! Yes??
Not surprisingly, I’d like to take this bad joke even further and explain an economic argument for how the CDC and the power grid have a lot in common. We’ve previously talked about how useful information is during a pandemic, contributing single-handedly to an estimated 45 percent of social distancing. In our most recent infectious disease scare, monkeypox/mpox, Google searches for “monkeypox” surged after the first U.S. case and again the day mpox was declared a global health emergency.
Information delivery shares a lot with electricity delivery, thus why both tasks are often handed to centralized governmental actors, such as the CDC. Collecting and disseminating information is expensive and requires pre-established networks to connect information to media, local public health offices, and the public. Once these information networks are established, it is cost-efficient for the CDC to reuse them for each health emergency- much like reusing municipal electrical grids rather than each utility company installing its own. Other examples include railroads, gas or water utilities, or even social media platforms, whose value increases by bringing more consumers together in the same format. These kinds of goods are sometimes called natural monopolies because having only one producer- one centralized source of information, one company setting up electrical lines- could theoretically lead to lower costs per person.
Read more about improving information delivery in the U.S. and timely applications to mpox in a recent article I wrote for Discourse Magazine.