A Terrible Calculus

It’s just math, right?

Something I wrote five years ago today:

"A terrible calculus."

I was thinking this morning of levels of acceptable risk, something that we all calculate all the time, although we probably don't realize that we're doing it. Stepping out of our house, eating that questionable leftover pizza, getting on a plane to go on vacation, driving across town, and on and on and on. All have risks.

Businesses do this, related to their products and services, Ford infamously did it with the proposed Pinto gas tanks retrofit. Which would have decreased their profits most: retrofitting all the poorly designed placement of gas tanks on all the cars or leaving them alone and paying out litigation damages for the people who died in accidents because of this? They left them alone.

The current COVD-19 pandemic, and the projected deaths if we don't shut everything down, and the projected economic damage if we do: how many deaths are acceptable? And acceptable to whom? The economists? The president, who desperately wants to be reelected at any cost? The controlling Congressional members, who have their own agendas? You? You, who want to live to see your grandchildren grow up? You who just want to live a bit longer, to not be in that category of "elderly," you know, the ones who won't get the critical care treatment if the choice involves saving you or a younger person? Sobering, right? A terrible calculus.

I don't have answers for any of these, although I tend to be more on the side of saving more people and figuring out how to recover economically. I like the thought of more people being alive to help in that recovery. But that's just me.

The thing of it is, when we talk about a 97% survival rate as being pretty good, we never think that we ourselves might be in that 3%. That's always someone else, isn't it?

#journalingalife