In my Questions! app, one question is as follows:
Do you think of Y2K as more of a disaster that was avoided, or a disaster that was never there at all?
I was speaking with someone the other day, and they mentioned Covid. They suggested that in the future people will look back and think a lot of what happened was an over-reaction and much ado about nothing.
This reminded me immediately of Y2K, and the different perspectives people can have about it. As time goes on, I suspect most people think it was a storm in a teacup. I don’t think there are many people who strongly believe it was a huge threat that we averted by managing the risk well.
It breaks my heart to think that as time goes past, we’ll think that Covid was a molehill made into a mountain. In a lot of ways, we experienced the best case scenario! And that is because we took steps to minimise and mitigate the negative outcomes.
As I type this in August 2023, the WHO says there have been just under 7 million deaths due to Covid. New Zealand has had 3,000 deaths. The top three death counts by country are the US (over 1.12 million deaths), Brazil (over 700,000), and India (over 500,000).
The economic fallout has varied. Some industries, companies, and people, have been impacted significantly. Some of these effects have been negative, some have been positive. But in aggregate, the fallout hasn’t been as bad as I thought it could be. Supply chains weren’t routed. Unemployment hasn’t gone through the roof. We aren’t in anything resembling a great depression. In a lot of ways, this is pretty close to a best-case scenario.
It could be easy to say that this is because Covid was never really an issue in the first place. But there’s also a strong argument that the impact of Covid could have been much worse, and the steps we took were successful.
Personally, I think Covid could have been much worse – if not for many of the actions that we took as individuals, organisations, and nations. I’m not saying that all actions were good, and I will concede that there’s room for good faith debate with a lot of the measures that were taken.
It’s hard to run the counterfactual. But on net, I have a high degree of confidence things have worked out much better than if we’d done nothing, and that cure was much better than the disease.
I suspect it’s the same with Y2K. If resources hadn’t been dedicated to the risks, then we’d have seen some really negative outcomes. Am I sure of this? No. But even if there was a reasonable possibility of this happening, it was worth it. We can debate about the level of resources spent, and how they were directed. But there was a hazard, and steps were taken to stop and reduce the negative fallout.
It’s a little like insurance. Usually, the most likely scenario is that you’ll pay a lot more in premiums than you get back from the policy. However, that’s also the best case – because nothing has gone wrong!