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I think it is pretty hard to compute the cost, because what's the counterfactual? Even if you don't force a shutdown people may still opt to isolate themselves and businesses may opt to close, and the degree to which they do so is probably dependent on the dynamics of the pandemic, so you're going to be pretty sensitive to modeling errors.

So if you know of 10 different events which may occur with probability 10% each, you would prepare for exactly one of them?

I think it's clear that there are some events that may be rare but which are cheaper to plan ahead for than to deal with after the fact, and vice versa (e.g. for many people self insuring against minor losses like appliance failures makes sense).

But we can all aspire to be a >1 developer, even if we're not one currently. I don't necessarily think that contentment with being below average is universally bad (maybe it's perfectly rational given one's preferences for leisure vs. work, for example), but I'd hope that most <1 developers are juniors who hope to improve over time.

But writing code is only a small part of a software engineer's job (at least that's true everywhere I've worked), so selecting people who have opted to dedicate their lives to only that portion might be a worse idea than hiring better-rounded candidates, when it comes to building real software systems that need to be liked by users.

I would certainly dispute that programming time is necessarily slowed down. Ironically, I find myself thinking much harder about types in a dynamic language, precisely because there's no compiler there to do the rote work for me. Lately I've been using pandas dataframes quite a bit, and the number of hours I've wasted due to problems with types is mindboggling.

I think most do... Can you point to some that don't?

While it may be true that 50% of papers are wrong in some fields, the papers that are wrong are probably not the most highly publicized ones or the ones in the most prestigious journals (and when those papers are wrong the incentive to publish corrective papers is high), so this probably isn't quite as big a problem as it's made out to be.

I've more often heard "inherent complexity" called "essential complexity".

No, see Brownback's Kansas tax cuts for just one recent example showing that (at least in our current tax regime) lowering rates brings in less revenue.