The lesson of Y2K, which badly failed with COVID, is that successfully anticipating and heading off a serious crisis means people insisting it was never a problem and stupid/wasteful to worry about. It's frustrating, and undermines efforts to preempt crises, but that's what success looks like.

Yup. The Prevention Paradox at work.

And now people think ozone hole was a conspiracy theory despite it being fixed through global cooperation

It's probably no coincidence that there wasn't social media leading up to y2k. We would have had BigY2K conspiracies...

This is innate human thinking. A loss that is avoided in not counted because it never happened. This manifests itself daily throughout all aspects of human behavior.

See also 'the success of vaccination programs.'

We do counterfactuals so poorly. I have a buddy whose wife got vaccinated while he didn’t. They both got sick and felt as bad as each other, so she took from it that vaccines don’t work, rather than consider how bad it would have been if she hadn’t been vaccinated.

Even with the terribly bungled COVID response, it would have been SO MUCH worse if it hadn’t been for the economic assistance and public health measures that were actually taken!

Agree, says the former PMO Director for JPM Lat Am Y2K regional project.