graydon: (Default)
graydon ([personal profile] graydon) wrote in [personal profile] jsburbidge 2021-04-24 03:39 am (UTC)

Minimize the cost (to me, and the other important people) is certainly the dominant construction of cost, yeah.

There's a view that common law, torts, and capitalism would all work if only all the costs were on the books. (It still wouldn't; you can't run a system on nothing but feedback.) It remains instructive to look at what costs are ignored and what costs are minimized or suppressed.

It looks to me as though you can only think like that if you think the system is inherently invincible and thus permanent. Which might be another way to slice the successful versus unsuccessful public health responses; if you know it can fail, you react differently.


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