Preventive Actions have Costs

If a disaster is looming over society (or a part of a society), what is the best course of action? Preventing it would be ideal, of course. But what if prevention is not an option – what then is the best course of action? This is the question Tim Harford explores in his podcast.

 

He cites the nuclear plant in Fukushima as an example. A huge tsunami hit the nuclear reactor; and the safety systems proved inadequate. The risk of nuclear fuel leaking and the resultant radiation risks to everyone in the vicinity loomed large. The Japanese authorities evacuated all villages in a certain distance of the nuclear plant. It being a rich country, the evacuees were given compensation for relocation and a continued stipend after that. Over 1,64,000 of them.

 

Sounds good, right? Except a good number of them couldn’t adjust to life in new places. Some were too old; others had no skills relevant to the new places they had to move to. A handful even committed suicide. Worst of all, as time passed, it became clear that the worst never came to pass around the nuclear plant. All those folks who underwent so much misery and unhappiness, even if not driven to suicide, was all so unnecessary. Nothing bad would have happened had they been allowed to stay put. Unfortunately, that could only be known with hindsight.

 

Another such example Harford cites are the cost of the COVID lockdowns. They led to an increase in domestic violence calls. Poorer kids suffered far greater impact due to school closures. The same question arises – was it necessary?

 

Harford points out that a big problem is that there’s not enough (any?) historical data to base such decisions on. Sure, economic costs are easy to guesstimate, but for psychological impact, there’s hardly any data. The hidden toll of evacuation or lockdowns take time to show up. In any case, how long can anyone track such actions to even collect the data? And the longer it takes, the data isn’t easy to interpret anyway – was the suicide due to the evacuation or something else?

 

Such hidden costs are hard to imagine, see, or worry about while the effect of doing nothing (radiation effects, COVID deaths and hospitalizations) are so easy to visualize. And so doing nothing is almost never an option, especially if alternative actions are available, affordable, and do’able.

 

Sadly, it seems, the authorities are damned if they do, and damned if they don’t.