The problem with this of course is that hunger, poverty and climate change are constant issues so it’s very difficult to hedge an opportunity cost against them as you know that the money ‘wouldn’t have been available’ to be spent.
Additionally, re the fatalities, we don’t really know what they’d have looked like unless measures were put in place, so it’s a mute point isn’t it?
There's a lot of unknowns in this arena, including scientific models based on so many assumptions that the outputs are all over the place.
If we're currently making decisions based on a lot of unknowns and were making decisions back in March based on even more; then I'm sure pontificating on different possibilities isn't beyond the pale.
And we all know exactly what your response would have been if governments all over the world suddenly decided to invest trillions in fighting world poverty and climate change...
That's the point of an opportunity cost though isn't it? It's about the opportunity.
But to answer the point more directly if given a binary choice to save a million years of wealthy white western life or tens of millions of years of poorer non-white lives; then the latter is obviously preferable.
I think that if it hadn't swamped hospital capacity as quickly as it did then this might have been a feasible option for people with a Libertarian political stance. The problem was that all across the World hospitals just could not cope with the influx of patients.
Edit: Of course I'm talking about letting the virus run it's coarse not investing in the poor when I'm talking about Libertarians.
I'm sure after decades of research we still won't get an exact idea about what would have occurred if various different scenarios were implemented.
What we will know however is the cost and what could have been done with it.
It reminds me of a statistic (how true it is I'm unsure) that I saw stating that housing regulations to prevent deaths by fires cost (per live that the save) us over
one hundred thousand times that of preventing aids related deaths in some African countries. Likewise DoT spending on road safety is over
fifteen thousand times.
Effectively the opportunity cost of saving one UK life from fire is over 100,000 lives in another part of the world. Counter-intuitively then it could be argued that the inevitably onerous regulations that will result from Grenfell should have us infuriated at the opportunity cost of thousands of lives in other parts of the world.
An interesting theoretical debate no doubt. However one that I've realised has taken up too much of this day so I'll wish all a Merry Christmas!
