The observations in the tweet below suggest another question: Why would the sacrifices necessary to make progress against both future pandemics and the climate crisis be much less painful than many believe? 1/ 
Progress against these challenges will of course require massive investment in renewable energy and similar outlays for hospital surge capacity and medical research. But experience in the current pandemic shows why these expenditures need not require painful sacrifices. 2/
This experience supports a robust finding from the large literature on the determinants of human well-being: Beyond a point that has long since been passed in the West, further increases in many forms of private consumption serve only to raise that bar that defines adequate. 3/
If all prosperous families spent less on those forms of consumption, rapid adaptation would quickly eliminate any fleeting feelings of deprivation. Vast sums would be freed up for much needed investment. But mere knowledge of that fact would not prompt any change in behavior. 4/
That’s because our individual and collective interests are in conflict, just as in hockey players’ decisions about whether to wear helmets. Left to decide individually, they invariably skate without them. Yet they strongly favor rules requiring helmets. Why this difference? 5/
Skating without a helmet confers a competitive advantage, enabling players to see and hear better. But if one team skates without helmets, opponents invariably follow suit. Neither side gains advantage, yet all face greater risk of injury. And hence the attraction of the rule. 6/
Note that a simple nudge (such as a sign in the locker room warning that not wearing helmets entails risk of serious injury) won’t do. Hockey players need a mandate. 7/
The helmet rule poses a profound challenge to entrenched beliefs about the meaning of freedom. Does the rule constitute “tyranny of the majority”? Or would denial of the right to enact it be more sensibly be viewed as “tyranny of the individual”? 8/
John Stuart Mill, the patron saint of individual liberty, wrote that the only justification for constraining individual freedom is to prevent undue harm to others. Restraints like the ones embodied in the helmet rule clearly satisfy Mill’s harm principle. 9/
Objecting that the rule violates the individual player’s right to choose makes no more sense than objecting that a military arms control agreement violates each country’s right to build as many bombs as it chooses. Of course! That’s the whole point! 10/
That a bareheaded skater did not intend to harm others does not undercut the legitimacy of the helmet rule. The harm itself is what counts. And many forms of private consumption also cause harm to others, even though no harm was intended. 11/
Because better schools are located in more expensive neighborhoods, for example, most parents bid vigorously for housing in those neighborhoods. But such bidding serves only to bid up housing prices. Half of all students still attend bottom-half schools, the same as before. 12/
It was no family’s intention to make it more expensive for others to send their children to good schools. Similarly, families that spent lavishly on wedding receptions did not intend to harm others. Yet that’s why the average wedding now costs three times as much as in 1980. 13/
Someone who spends less while others spend as before will feel deprived. To escape the pain from reduced spending on private consumption, we must act in unison. But mere exhortations to do that will have little impact. As with helmets and social distancing, we need a mandate. 14/
That satisfaction from private consumption is so heavily context-dependent implies that resources for much-needed public investment are available essentially for free. Higher taxes on prosperous people could pay for that investment without requiring any painful sacrifices. 15/
Erroneously believing that higher taxes would make it harder to buy life’s special extras, voters resist. But special things are inherently in short supply. To get them, we must outbid others who want them. And when taxes go up, relative bidding power is completely unchanged. 16/
Under a more progressive tax structure, the same penthouse apartments with sweeping views of Central Park would end up in exactly the same hands as before. The threat of being outbid by oligarchs from abroad could be parried by simple transaction levies on foreign buyers. 17/
Since the time of Reagan and Thatcher, our policy choices have been heavily shaped by the view, erroneously attributed to Adam Smith, that markets harness unfettered self-interested individuals to produce the greatest good for society as a whole. 18/
Markets often do achieve that remarkable feat. But as Smith knew, not always. And in modern, high-income societies, the interests of individual consumers are often squarely at odds with broader societal interests—perhaps nowhere more so than in the climate and health domains. 19/
As the current pandemic recedes, we will face a choice between starkly different futures: The resource allocation in Society A below is essentially the status quo. Society B is where we could be under policies that steered our resources to alternative uses. 20/
Experience under the COVID-19 pandemic supports independent evidence that people would be both happier and healthier under B than under A, and that the tax revenue to finance the investments necessary to sustain B would not require painful sacrifices from anyone. 21/
A thought experiment: Imagine that, despite having seen the experience and evidence weighing against your choice, you opt for Society B, the status quo. Over time, you know that the research findings on the determinants of human flourishing will become much more widely known. 22/
You also know that if we continue with our current policies, your grandchildren are likely to inhabit a planet teeming with climate refugees and besieged by frequent pandemics. If they ask you to explain your choice to stick with our current policies, how would you respond? 23/
