> We should have some kind of dashboard tracking how many people die from terrorism, car crashes, heart disease, COVID, etc., and how much time and money we spend trying to prevent these deaths. We are just so terrible at evaluating risk, for some reason it is OK to waste everyone's time with over the top security to stop a tiny portion of terrorism deaths
The "preventing a single death is worth it" crowd has unfortunately been running the show since 9/11.
This crowd has largely driven the COVID response as well - which went well past "flatten the curve" and turned into "stop all deaths no matter the cost", ignoring all externalities and consequences along the way.
> This crowd has largely driven the COVID response as well - which went well past "flatten the curve" and turned into "stop all deaths no matter the cost", ignoring all externalities and consequences along the way.
The US has the world's highest COVID-19 death count, and is #24 out of 223 per capita with just a smidge under 2,000 deaths per million people.
If you think that's "stop[ping] all deaths no matter the cost" I'd love to hear what you think of my state of 1.8 million people with a grand total of 4 deaths.
> The US has the world's highest COVID-19 death count
This is patently false. You might mean, the highest reported death count.
The US is the 3rd largest country by population - and the two largest countries either A) Have no feasible way to count accurately or B) Deliberately don't report accurately.
> I'd love to hear what you think of my state
You're clearly not in California - where the lunacy has gone off the rails. Los Angeles bulldozed sand into skateboard parks[1] because kids were playing... despite all data at the time (and since then) has showed children are not at severe risk at all. It went well into the "prevent any death, no matter the cost" territory for most of the past year.
Shutdown all the schools - force kids to stay at home in isolation - drive up teen suicide rates... but it doesn't matter because they weren't COVID deaths and the goal was to prevent all COVID deaths. We ignored all consequences of the policies we enacted - because the goal became zero COVID deaths. Goodhart's Law[2] might come into play here.
Self driving cars is another prime example. Spending billions and billions of dollars, countless man hours of research and engineering, selling a promise and vision - negligently killing people along the way - all so we can have some future where nobody dies from a vehicle? That's just not reality. The reality is people will just die from coding errors instead - but it's the pursuit of "zero lives lost" that drives that industry and fantasy right now.
> This is patently false. You might mean, the highest reported death count.
Certainly possible that India has more deaths, but given that you've just described their death count as something which there is "no feasible way to count accurately", I'm not sure why you're so confident about the claim being patently false.
> You're clearly not in California - where the lunacy has gone off the rails.
Yes. California has had ~1,700 deaths per million people, a solid 723x more per capita than the state I live in (South Australia). So again, I don't really see how you could believe that the COVID response there is being driven by people preventing deaths at all costs. If it was, they wouldn't have such a horrific death count.
> drive up teen suicide rates
Have you got any source for this? Similar claims were made in my country last year during a lockdown (that successfully eradicated the virus), and then when the national mental health organisation released their annual reports it turned out that suicide rates actually went down drastically during lockdown.
It's bizarrely myopic. It not only ignores any cost benefit analysis, but also larger preventable causes of death and poor health outcomes. Obesity being the proverbial elephant in the room.
The "preventing a single death is worth it" crowd has unfortunately been running the show since 9/11.
This crowd has largely driven the COVID response as well - which went well past "flatten the curve" and turned into "stop all deaths no matter the cost", ignoring all externalities and consequences along the way.