Chairman Mao measured the success of Communist China’s Great Leap Forward by focusing exclusively on backyard steel furnace production, and by that metric deemed 1958 to have been a great success. However, subjugating the entire country to that narrow metric of economic progress meant everything that was not increasing steel production was denigrated, which caused the most devastating famine in human history in 1960 and 1961. Likewise today, countries which eschew all other objectives to focus excessive resources on managing the coronavirus case load at the expense of all other issues are destined for a similar shock when the full…

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