and Development Program. He is a world expert in the fields of economic epidemiology and social network analysis whose comments on the Covid-19 pandemic appeared in major media outlets such as the Associated Press, Reuters, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, ABCnews.com, Crain’s New York Business, and many others.
Tassier applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Rich Flee and the Poor Take the Bus: How Our Unequal Society Fails Us during Outbreaks, and reported the following:
Page 99 of The Rich Flee and the Poor Take the Bus contains a transition between two sections of Chapter 4, “Bridges of Disease.” The top of the page, concludes a description of a 17th century Black death quarantine in Eyam, a small English village. The quarantine successfully prevented a plague outbreak from spreading outside of Eyam and into other nearby villages. The bottom of the page begins to describe a clever experiment by social psychologist Stanley Milgrom from the 1960s. Milgrom chose a group of random people out of two phone books – one from Wichita, Kansas and the other from Omaha, Nebraska. He then mailed individual postcards to the selected people and asked them to attempt to contact a specific banker in Boston, Massachusetts. The recipients were asked to mail their postcard to a personal friend whom they believed to be socially closer to the Boston banker. These second recipients were asked to do the same, and onward, until someone received the postcard that knew the banker personally. This person then mailed the postcard directly to the banker. Milgrom counted the number of mailings that it took to reach the Boston banker from the original recipients. On average the postcards arrived to the banker in five to six mailings. Milgrom’s experiment helped to create the “six-degrees of separation” and “it’s a small world” memes that are familiar today. The paths connecting people from the American heartland to Boston are then used in later pages to describe similar paths that allow epidemics to spread throughout society.Visit Troy Tassier's website.
In some ways the Page 99 Test works well despite there being different ideas at the top and bottom of the page. The Rich Flee and the Poor Take the Bus, alternates between historical examples of real-world epidemic outbreaks, like the one in Eyam, and descriptions of behavior and patterns of social connections (friends, relatives, co-workers, and others) that determine how epidemic outbreaks spread in today’s world. Ultimately, however, the Page 99 Test fails to get to the heart of the book. Our day-to-day interactions often lead to impoverished and socially marginalized people being harmed most frequently during epidemic outbreaks. The reader will not be able to connect the Eyam quarantine or Milgrom’s experiment to the book’s central topics of social and economic inequality by reading only page 99.
However, the material on page 98, when combined with page 99, offers an example that is closer to the book’s more general theme. The Black death quarantine in Eyam only succeeded because of the financial support of the Earl of Devonshire. He provided the Eyam villagers with food and other goods that allowed them to survive their quarantine. Without this support the quarantine would have failed and this Black death outbreak would have spread more widely. Interactions like these between epidemics and economics help to determine epidemic outcomes in the past as well as today.
While there is an element of chance in epidemic outcomes, there is also a great regularity that exists across time. Marginalized and disadvantaged groups of people most often bear the brunt of physical and financial turmoil during epidemic outbreaks. The Rich Flee and the Poor Take the Bus describes the many entangled ways that our social world and our financial circumstances intermix with biology and medicine to determine who is most effected by epidemic outbreaks and why. It also offers suggestions for how to better protect all of society when future epidemic outbreaks occur by thinking about epidemics in social and economic terms in addition to more conventional ideas from biology and medicine.
--Marshal Zeringue
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