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… is from pages 98-99 of the late UCLA economist Jack Hirshleifer [2]’s February 1966 paper “Disaster and Recovery: The Black Death in Western Europe [3],” as this paper is reprinted in Hirshleifer’s 1987 collection, Economic Behavior in Adversity [4]:
Without necessarily dismissing all the early reports as fabulous, it is evident that there is a tendency for occasional chronicles to record, even if they do not exaggerate, the extreme and unusual as opposed to the typical.
DBx: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.