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We’re missing the economic fallout of the Iran war — just like we did with Covid

The cognitive trap that’s making us underestimate the Iran crisis.

In the early weeks of the Covid pandemic, in those days when public spaces emptied and hospitals filled up, I used to see this magazine cover from 2017 being passed around social media. The story was a familiar one to me, because I was the one who had written it:

The posts were all versions of the same thing: The warning signs had been there, we knew something like this was coming, why weren’t we prepared? All of which was true, and all of which I had been trying to get across in that story, which was itself the culmination of years of reporting on emerging diseases: SARS in Hong Kong in 2003, H5N1 bird flu in Indonesia in 2007, H1N1 flu in 2009. Surely I’d seen Covid coming too.

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Except I hadn’t. Through January and into February 2020, as lockdowns and cases of what would soon be called Covid-19 accumulated in China and then elsewhere, I remained surprisingly nonchalant. I assume it would burn out, much like bird flu itself or MERS or Ebola or any number of scary viruses that didn’t quite have the legs to cause global catastrophes. If you’d asked me for predictions, I probably would have said a (hopefully) more sophisticated version of what President Donald Trump said on February 25, a day before the first suspected community transmission in the United States: Covid was “going to go away.”

I was wrong, obviously. I couldn’t make myself see it — or maybe, I couldn’t make myself believe it, believe that we were about to experience sudden, transformative change. And I wasn’t alone. On February 19, 2020, just before Italy reported its first cluster of Covid cases, the S&P Index hit an all-time high, which is not the behavior of markets anticipating what actually happened next: an........

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