>Why hadn’t we stockpiled key supplies and machines, built up hospital capacity, or ensured the robustness of our supply chains? The reason, of course, is that

>Why hadn’t we stockpiled key supplies and machines, built up hospital capacity, or ensured the robustness of our supply chains? The reason, of course, is that it would have been seen as inefficient and profit-robbing. >Seen in this light, at least some inefficiency is like an insurance policy. Think about your own situation. Every year that you don’t get into a car accident and your house doesn’t burn down and you stay healthy, you could think to yourself that you have ‘wasted’ your money on various pointless insurance products, and that you’d be financially better off without all those insurance premiums to pay. This is a faulty claim. Traditional economic efficiency would say we _should_ stockpile medical supplies if it were more efficient for the markets in the long-term, which it would have been. The issue here is that _governments_ and experts didn't work together effectively (despite experts regularly noting the possibility of a pandemic, for example, Gates et al.) and the fact that our government generally isn't Keynesian. A quote (source: IMF https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2014/09/basics.htm https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2014/09/basics.ht...): >Keynes argued that governments should solve problems in the short run rather than wait for market forces to fix things over the long run, because, as he wrote, “In the long run, we are all dead.” As it relates to Global Warming, for example, we have various options. We could solve it by being "less efficient" (extracting less from the earth — and in fact, a Keynesian approach to that would be taxation to slow growth in harmful industries) but zoomed out, if we deal with global warming, we are more efficient over the long run. Moreover, we want to be _efficient_ in our development of green technologies. The trouble isn't so much efficiency, it's zeroing in on making particular processes efficient to the detriment of the whole across time and in the present moment.