Economic theory facing COVID-19: From Adam Smith to John Maynard Keynes

Although announced and/or expected by some experts in the field, the Covid appeared in November 2019 in China and was declared as a “pandemic” in March 2020 by the World Health Organization. It surprised the whole world by its scale, its speed of propagation, its insolence, its statelessness, its disrespect for the development levels of countries, and above all its cruelty. It has plunged the world into a state of lethargy and hibernation rarely seen in contemporary times and has forced life to retreat from its usual spaces of deployment. In such a disjointed context of terror, and if one agrees with Robbins (1932, p. 15) that “Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses”, it may be useful to wonder about the force of laws, rules and other theorems set forth by such a science in the face of a pandemic whose severity index is only equal to that of influenza of 1918-1921. To do this, we use an analytical methodology in the sense that by briefly taking up the ideas of the first six of the twelve seminal thinkers identified by Yueh (2019) (Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, Alfred Marshall, Irving Fisher, John Maynard Keynes), we attempt to discuss the resistance of their ideas (or the permanence of the relevance of their results) in the light of the pandemic. The result indicates that not all ideas are invariable.