[znnajdla]

Nope, this is bullshit. Some things you simply cannot put a price on, and therefore are not amenable to cost benefit analysis. What’s the cost of a human life? The cost of sovereignty and freedom and independence? The cost of wanting to live the lifestyle we want, such as eating meat even when there are alternatives? The cost of beauty and love? Financializers simply ignore all of the things they cannot put a price on and lose all of the above.

[pas]

Trade offs are still real even if you decide to run away from them.

Finance is a service that facilitates a form of this. The questions you ask all require context.

For example we have a rough estimate of how much the Iranian regime spent on chasing the dream of nuclear deterrence. About 2 trillion dollars. This is the trade off they went with. This is the money that they did not put into desalination plants, for example. And similarly, just to again see how important context is. They decided to make themselves more sanction-proof, which means growing a lot of food in a very arid region, which requires a lot of water. Again, even though a bushel of wheat on the global market is cheaper than growing their own, they decided the risk of getting cut off was not worth it.

Also I'm not saying "sell 'em all; let the market sort it out", quite the opposite. But without even having a way to put prices on things we can't even talk about what and how much to tax, and what we are collectively then spending that public money on, and then see how much sense that makes.

[znnajdla]

No. I'm not willing to put a cost on: freedom, sovereignty, or life, and I'm not willing to consider "tradeoffs" to these things. These are simply things I'd rather die than live without, no matter the cost. And encouraging people to think about the cost of these things is actively harmful. Spreadsheets are the tools used by financiers to enslave people.