Obviously, recent events, and indeed, much of the pandemic, has demonstrated to me that those in power, be it political or economic, do not value the lives of citizens and workers at anything close to that. We're sitting at 819K deaths, and 1M is going to get here by next summer.Epidemiologists said shutting down the economy could save 1 to 2 million lives. So 1 million lives saved at $10 million each, that's $10 trillion. That's about half of the U.S. GDP in a year.
Back in 2008, Time says it's only $129k. Still too high, I think.
As a society, we are making movers to keep the economy going in the short term, quarterly to yearly, and willingly sacrificing lives that would generate more in economic benefits what would have remained in their lifetime.
And that's not even getting into the populace's view of the value of people. We have people that are willing to let people die rather than face a tax increase to prevent it.
I don't really have an endpoint to this rant, other than to say that we have failed as a society to value anything of a community except what we can extract from it.