Mass loss of money, while not as direct a cause and effect, can be far more lethal. People not going for checkups they can no longer afford. People scaling back budgets resulting in less healthy choices. People forgoing using costly medication. People moving to cheaper (and less safe) neighborhoods due to money lost. The general increase in stress with the money lost.
Far harder to measure but magnitudes greater damage.
Lives and dollars are not totally different things. How many lives will be ruined by total financial destruction? How many will commit suicide in the months and years after due to financial issues?
There are definitely people who think both of those things are true, but you could also argue that the economic damage would have been the same and also that there would have been other costs (e.g. losses to individual autonomy, lost social connections / harms to community, resulting stress and trauma, etc. etc. )
I think that is a matter of perspective. If you phrase the damage done by a storm in terms of dollars (as opposed to, say, lives lost...), then I think that opens the door for comparisons to other things that destroy wealth.
Some people will die of ancillary causes (mostly lost wealth). It will impact the poorest, and frankly dumbest, individuals who will not face a creeping inevitability.
The erosion of the idea of personal responsibility in favor of the idea social responsibility. Combined with a complete and utter disregard for the livelihoods of the millions of people impacted by these decisions.
That is before we even consider the long term health consequences of what we're doing to people. Stress kills, too.
Well calculated hit in an economic sense. As a side effect I suppose you could argue that some economic losses can lead to deaths... but that's certainly not the goal.
I'm not certain the emotional damage around the deaths would be worse than the emotional damage around the restrictions. Same with the economic damage, I'm entirely certain the the economic damaged caused by the death of a large amount of largely economically inactive persons would have been way less than the economic damage caused by forcibly shutting down large chunks of the economy.
The whole 1 vs 2 thing is just a matter of how much must the whole suffer for the benefit of the few?
Forget the economy. The damage to social infrastructure and trust is far more serious.
Groups violently turning on eachother, families splitting over political divides, lynchings... these matter a lot more than whether people have nice cars.
Can even get worse if the borrowed money only exists based on promises in the first place.
The tragedy is that that these crashes often increase inequality and concetrate power. The victims are innocent and the perpetrators are not held accountable.
It takes a lot of money to fix all the disasters they’ve created. It takes trillions of dollars out of our pockets. It’s a loss because they were greedy and stole from us to fund their lifestyles. That’s trillions of dollars that could’ve gone to paying for healthcare and college for generations. Instead it’s picking up the toxic mess that older people have left for us to deal with.
Far harder to measure but magnitudes greater damage.
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