For example, in the EU cash payments represent 65 per cent of total retail transactions. See Schmiedel, H., Kostova, G. and Ruttenberg, W. “The social and private costs of retail payment instruments: a European perspective”, European Central Bank Occasional Paper, no. 137, 2017.
When the public asks whether economists did all they could have to understand those threats, in part they are asking whether our profession did enough over the years to test ideas and assumptions that turned out in some cases to have been mistaken or misplaced.