3 ms·

I think that if we have to choose between letting hundreds of thousands of additional people die, or having a healthy economy, we utterly failed our priorities

• 650 4y ago
  "Every one percent unemployment goes up, 40,000 people die" – this comes from the film The Big Short.
  • aschearer 4y ago
    Not sure if you're being serious with these numbers, but we've had 1,000,000 covid deaths in the U.S. So we'd need 25% unemployment to match... And people are still dying from covid.
  • pessimizer 4y ago
    Unemployment is historically low.
• JoshuaDavid 4y ago
  If a society makes the choice that they'd rather be a bit wealthier, at the cost of having slightly lower life expectancy, that certainly does say something about the society in question. I don't think I would describe a society that knowingly and intentionally made that decision as having "utterly failed", though. US society has failed the "knowingly and intentionally" side of that, and also mostly the "trade" side of that (vaccines being the exception -- we actually did succeed at trading a pretty small amount of money for much-better-than-baseline outcomes there). But the problem wasn't that we chose to trade life for money, the problem was that we failed to have and act upon coherent priorities at all.