Economic historians quibble over the exact consequences of the Black Death, though they agree that the sudden depopulation had a dis-inflationary impact.

(Bloomberg Opinion) — All upheavals leave their marks. Some fade away, some linger. Following the Black Death, the plague that’s believed to have killed 60% of Europe’s population in the second half of the 14th century, the realization that life is short, played a big role in shaping interest rates in late medieval Europe, stretching all the way to the Enlightenment.

Could we witness very long-term effects from the present contagion?

The coronavirus pathogen isn’t as deadly as bubonic plague, and our toolkit for dealing with pandemics is far better stacked than when the pestilence reached the harbor of Messina on the northeastern coast of Sicily in late 1347. But while the dislocation caused by the respiratory disease has had a catastrophic impact on commodity and asset prices, a recovery may not close the chapter. The coronavirus, too, could leave a durable imprint.

Economic historians quibble over the exact consequences of the Black Death, though they agree that the sudden depopulation had a dis-inflationary impact. Workers’ productivity shot up because previous generations were eking out little extra output from finite land. Now they were gone; the Malthusian trap, in which growth was constrained by limited food supply, had sprung open.