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 abo

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.