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> we are charging down that path optimizing for lives saved without giving fair consideration to other side effects This reminds me of the French economist Fre
by bharam 6y ago
> we are charging down that path optimizing for lives saved without giving fair consideration to other side effects
This reminds me of the French economist Frederic Bastiat's essay "That which is seen, and that which is not seen". The media (tv, newspapers and internet) were all hyper-focused on the number of deaths (initially) and later number of cases but always failed to take into account secondary consequences like those you mention.
Link to Bastiat's essay:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Essays_on_Political_Economy/That_Which_Is_Seen,_and_That_Which_Is_Not_Seen https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Essays_on_Political_Economy/T...
- matthewmacleod 6y agoLiterally every media outlet I have encountered has published extensive coverage of the wider economic, health, social and political impact of the virus itself and the response to it.
- bharam 6y agoI would agree with you that there is some coverage of these issues...lately. Yesterday for instance CNN ran a story about the suicide trend in Japan. However there was very little coverage of the secondary effects until late in the summer.
- cfmcdonald 6y agoIt takes time for secondary effects like that to show up. But I recall reports of large numbers of restaurant closures as far back as late spring.
- smolder 6y agoMedia outlets are too broad a category for "literally every" one to have done that.
- addicted 6y agoThe idea that the media did not focus on the second order effects is so obviously wrong it’s hilarious. And even if the media didn’t, politicians did. To the point that nearly every country in the world has passed economic and financial aid measures that probably exceed anything they’ve done in the past, certainly during peacetime, and globally the world has put more resources into mitigating the second order effects through all sorts of programs than it almost certainly ever has before. This whole narrative about how dissenters are not heard, when they are parroted the loudest is ridiculous. Even the Scientific A,Eric an article puts the great barrington declaration, with absolutely no scientific backing, with 0 footnotes and references, and a signee list that is completely unvetted, on equal footing with the John Snow memo which has vetted every signee, has references to actual papers littered through it to the point that the text in footnotes probably exceed the entire scientific content of the GBD, if not the entire GBD itself.
- throwaway201103 6y agoThey didn't have scoreboards overlayed on the news displaying number of suicides, number of business closures, number of lost jobs, number of domestic violence incidents. It was Deaths, and Cases. Every hour, on the hour. The other stuff got covered, but not nearly with the same intensity.