That’s what my Dad always says about cutting things - mainly wood for carpentry projects, but the philosophy applies to many situations.
Measure twice because cutting is hard to take back.
I have a recent obsession with weighing flour for baking. I know that a cup of all purpose flour weighs 120 grams, and yet I look that fact up at least once a week. I have memorized the recipe for my favorite bread: 298 grams of bread flour, 50 grams of sugar, 14 grams of dry milk, 1 tablespoon of yeast, 1 teaspoon of sea salt (among other things). I look it up every time. The time to look up the ingredients or do the math on converting cups to grams is minimal. The risk of a fallen cake or dense bread is well worth the very small extra step.
By that logic, bigger decisions, carrying bigger risk or bigger cost, should be well worth the extra effort of ‘measuring twice.’ And yet, that is not the case. Often, decisions are made on a cost/benefit basis.
Cost/benefit studies are based on artificial constraints such as ‘pay back in three years’ or ‘ROI > 20%.’ The constraints help decisionmakers compare across projects, but they may obscure the big picture.
The oven in my kitchen is an odd shape and size. The original owner, who built the house, owns a restaurant. Is it possible that the owner got a deal from a restaurant supplier? Did the odd-shaped oven meet a short-term goal of saving money? Perhaps. I don’t know. However, I do know that long-term, this oven will cost me more. I can’t replace it without redoing the countertop and cabinets - or spending more than five times the cost of a standard oven because there are only two or three brands that fit that space. The original cost/benefit analysis worked out for the original homeowner. The total cost of ownership shows the flaws.
The designers of the Titanic put all their effort into design. They built, they thought, an unsinkable boat. Sufficient life boats for all passengers and crew were unnecessary. Spending money on a better design makes sense, rather than planning for failure by sacrificing comfort for more life boats. The cost/benefit analysis undoubtedly supported the decisions.
Alternatively, a focus on treatment for the novel coronavirus rather than containment/prevention of spread may have cost many thousands of lives. There are good reasons to invest in vaccine and treatment research to lessen the ferocity of the disease once contracted. Those reasons didn’t have to negate the value of prevention or investment in containment actions. What did the cost/benefit analysis say? Even now, vaccines exist, but what are the cost/benefit tradeoffs involved in distribution?
Sadly, the state of Texas may be learning a similar lesson this week. The independent power grid in Texas provides cost effective power and grants Texas more autonomy than other states. Cost/benefit analyses over the past 50 years supported decisions that led to flexibility and cost savings, playing the odds that extreme temperatures might result in discomfort (extreme heat or humidity where air conditioning might rationed) but not in catastrophic failure or real danger to the public. Extreme heat and humidity occur more often in Texas than extreme cold or snow. The odds were with the cost/benefit studies. But odds are not a guarantee, and cost/benefit studies don’t measure absolute costs or benefits: they rank alternatives against the stated constraints.
