What’s the true cost of Donald Trump? All the crises around the world that we’ve no time to fix | Jonathan Freedland
Apr 11, 2025
The US president adores the attention, but while leaders struggle to mitigate the damage he causes, other emergencies are getting worseWe’re all having to master a vocabulary that was once the preserve of specialists. Now everyone needs to know their tariffs from their treasuries, their levies fro
m their yields. But there’s one more term from the realm of economics that urgently needs to enter our lexicon. Given what Donald Trump is doing to the world economy – and the world – we need to talk about opportunity cost.Put simply, opportunity cost is the value of opportunity lost. It’s the benefit you could have had if you had chosen a different path. For an economist, the opportunity cost of the Mars bar you bought is the Twix you didn’t.Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist Continue reading... ...read more read less