On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Underlining the seriousness of the situation, most countries shut their schools for months to minimize the spread of the coronavirus and to prevent hospital overcrowding. Two years later, students and teachers are returning to in-person education with some trepidation about the spread of coronavirus variants.

Educators, policymakers, parents, and students have worried about the impact of school closures on learning and socialization. World Bank Group President David Malpass said that the “pandemic has brought about the largest loss of human capital in living memory and the worst education crisis in a century.” Unfortunately, this large human capital loss could translate into large labor market impacts in the future.

In many ways, the labor market impacts will be unseen. None of the currently affected students will look at their paystubs in the future and see a pandemic tax reduction. No national income account will reflect the size of the loss, even while it quietly accumulates over time. Yet the loss will be no less real for being unseen. French economist, politician, and journalist Frédéric Bastiat believed that it was one’s social responsibility to point out the unseen losses in public policy debates.

Fulfilling our social responsibility by measuring the future unseen impact of the pandemic-related school closures is not easy. Some of the main measurement difficulties come from the time lags between education shocks and their consequences—an issue identified by Alfred Marshall as long ago as 1890. The results of the education decisions today, whether made by policymakers or families, are by their nature properly measurable only after a long time, at which point often very little can be done to correct past mistakes. In other words, one needs to either be very patient or have an ingenious research design to measure the impacts.

Read the full article about the unseen consequences of COVID-19 by Mohamed Ihsan Ajwad and Simon Bilo at Brookings.