Why the Flu Isn’t Just Your Problem
Positive externalities, vaccines, and the limits of individualism
If you have kids heading back to school, or you’re stepping into a classroom yourself, this is a season to pay attention.
The 2025–2026 flu season has been unusually severe and stubborn. Cases rose early, hospitalizations surged, and activity has remained high well into January instead of fading after the holidays. Health officials are especially concerned about this year’s strain, which tends to hit older adults harder, but children have been a major transmission channel, carrying the virus home and into the broader community.
In short: this isn’t just “a bad cold year.” It’s a reminder that infectious disease is a shared problem, even when the consequences feel personal.
The Economics
In a recent Decode Econ post, we discussed negative externalities as the costs of a decision that spill over to others.
The flu vaccine is a classic positive externality.
When you get vaccinated, you reduce your risk of getting sick. But you also reduce the chance of infecting classmates, coworkers, grandparents, and immunocompromised neighbors. Economically speaking, your private decision creates social benefits. In a perfectly functioning market, everyone around you would be willing to chip in to encourage that behavior.
That’s why vaccines are often free or heavily subsidized. Lowering the price is a way to align private incentives with social benefits.
Here’s the problem: incentives for vaccination work better when people care about the social payoff.
That assumption has weakened to the point that even discussions of vaccines are often filtered through political identity rather than public health or economic reasoning.
Individualism Meets Public Health
A 2023 Time essay by Richard Weissbourd and Senator Chris Murphy argues that the U.S. has tilted too far toward individualism, away from shared responsibility and collective obligation. Their argument echoes a warning first raised by Alexis de Tocqueville nearly two centuries ago.
Tocqueville admired America’s drive and ambition, but he worried that unchecked individualism would erode community, weaken civic norms, and undermine the common good. For much of U.S. history, that tension was balanced. Personal success coexisted with strong institutions, shared sacrifice, and social trust.
Over the past few decades, that balance has shifted.
Americans increasingly prioritize personal choice, comfort, and identity over communal outcomes. Participation in civic and religious institutions has declined. Media and social platforms have fragmented the shared reality. Loneliness has risen. Trust has fallen.
Seen through that lens, vaccine hesitancy isn’t just about misinformation or access. It’s about how people weigh their preferences against everyone else’s risk.
When individualism dominates, positive externalities break down. People become less responsive to incentives designed to promote social outcomes because the “social” part no longer carries much weight.
Tensions Between Individualism and Collectivism
That tension showed up recently in a line from Zohran Mamdani’s inaugural address, where he pledged to replace what he called “the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” The backlash was intense.
Critics heard not a call for cooperation, but a familiar framing that treats individual agency as a moral failure and centralized solutions as inherently humane. Economically, that framing misses the point. The real challenge isn’t choosing between individualism and collectivism; it’s how societies solve coordination problems without coercion.
Markets, vaccines, and public health work best when individuals retain agency and share norms that encourage pro-social behavior. When trust erodes, societies tend to swing between two failures:
hyper-individualism- where people opt out of collective responsibility entirely
heavy-handed collectivism, where cooperation is forced rather than chosen.
Neither produces durable “warmth.” Both undermine the incentives and institutions that enable cooperation.
The Bottom Line
The flu season isn’t just a public health story. It’s an economics story about how societies coordinate behavior.
Vaccines work best when people recognize that their choices affect others. But as individualism rises, policies that rely on shared responsibility become harder to sustain, even when they’re efficient, cheap, and effective.
Economics doesn’t say individualism is bad. It says tradeoffs are real.
A society that maximizes personal choice may lose some capacity to solve collective problems. And flu season is one small, visible reminder of that cost.
I am willing to pay you to get vaccinated, so I don’t get sick!
Why Is the Government Going After the Fed?
Federal prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation into Jerome Powell, focused on his June testimony before Congress about the Federal Reserve’s $2.5 billion renovation of its Washington, DC headquarters.
Help Decode Econ
You can help us reach more people by sharing Decode Econ with your friends, family, and students. Track your progress using our referral link and earn giveaways. Watch this video to learn how to get your own referral link.
The Weber-Fechner Law comes into play by exploiting "distance effect". It's a cognitive bias where people only see the numbers as they relate to the smallest area around them. Using vaccines as a factor, if someone in their immediate circle requires them to buy-in, in most cases they do. But the same cannot be said as the perceived distance between them and the area of concern increases.
Herd Immunity requires herd buy-in to the solution.
Working specifically with Mandami's stated collective goal of free transport. It requires buy-in not only from State level but also Federal. It's an easy sell to those who directly benefit, but explaining that to a person in Ithica who has differing needs of Government is much harder.
*Politics is centered on creating "enemies" and not many workable solutions. There is a degree of personal accountability for personal actions that rarely gets addressed while some group is being called out for "harming" another. That singular acceptance is the only path forward when colective good is the goal. But as Economists we all recognize the increased number of individual variables makes it that much harder to predict an outcome.
The post has been needed since covid. So thank you for making it. The insanity is the level to which some people push the individualism. For some problems we are reaching tipping points where forced collectivism will not stop the worse effects of some of the wicked problems. Pollution being one of them. I use to think it was a education problem now I see it is something else. Some people choose what facts to believe in now a days. It is insightful that the loneliness crisis arose during the same time. I do not know what the solutions are. I do know that at a certain point no matter what people think certain problems are going to hit us all.