Curated and produced by ESRC’s Rebuilding Macroeconomics Financial Crisis, nationalism and COVID-19 are all socio-economic pandemics in the last decade. Each one starts in a small corner of our world, then spreads across continents in a very short space of time. Each one is a surprise, and each one catches us unprepared. If we are to be prepared for the next pandemic or crisis, we need a different approach to economics. It has to be possible to generate cascading systemic events within our models. We argue that this requires making the importance of social interaction central to economic models. Social foundations determine the rules of the game, how we interact with others and the ultimately the resilience of the economy.
