Maps are important!  They have been helping us understand and navigate our world since the beginning of human history and they are helping today as we are reminded in every news cycle.

Humankind has been making maps since the time we developed language, and perhaps before.  The earliest known map consisted of lines and symbols carved into a flat rock to depict water flow, nearby mountains, and locations of animals that lived in the area.  Archeologists discovered the 13,000-year-old map in a cave in northern Spain.  It is within the limits of imagination to think that the elements depicted on the stone were extremely important to that ancient cave dweller, and perhaps contributed to his survival.

Centuries later, around 600 BCE, the Babylonians sought to show their city within the context of a larger world.  A clay tablet, the Imago Mundi, survives from that time and shows the city of Babylonia figuratively as a circle surrounded by the larger circle of land mass, which in turn was surrounded by a “bitter river” that held seven islands.  Travelers beware, though – the sixth island is “where a horned bull dwells and attacks the newcomer.”

Listen to this entire Podcast at:

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/covid-19-reopen/

Here are some excerpts:

Steve Dubner recently called up Steve Levitt, his Freakonomics friend and co-author. He’s an economist at the University of Chicago — which, like all schools, has moved to remote teaching.

DUBNER: So, Levitt, how’s your sheltering in place going, generally?

LEVITT: Not too bad. I’m lucky I didn’t lose my job and I’m healthy. I don’t really like people that much in the first place so I don’t mind being isolated. So I know other people are really suffering, but I’ve been super lucky.

DUBNER: So let me ask you this: How useful would you say that economists have been so far during this pandemic?

LEVITT: I think economists didn’t really have a very big role in the beginning and the middle, in the sense that it was really more like a medical issue or a policy issue. But I think on the exit from quarantine, economists can be really important because the tradeoffs we’re talking about here are the kind of tradeoffs that regular people don’t think about very much, like the tradeoff between life and death versus economic activity. I think there’s also just a lot of room for economists here to be sensible guides as we think about what will work and what won’t work.