Chamath @ 01:34:30Inconclusive
healtheconomy
Roughly 20 years after the Covid-19 pandemic (i.e., in the 2040s), the dominant retrospective assessment will be that pandemic-era learning loss among children was the largest long-term cost of the crisis, outweighing other social and economic costs when historians and policymakers look back.
This is really the accounting of the cost. And we are, as we've said before, learning loss in our kids is going to be the single biggest thing we look back in 20 years coming out of this pandemic and realize was the biggest price we paid for this.View on YouTube
Explanation
The prediction is explicitly about how people will evaluate the pandemic 20 years after it ("we look back in 20 years"). As of now (2025), we are only a few years past the peak COVID-19 period (2020–2021), so the 20-year horizon has clearly not elapsed. Because the claim concerns what future historians and policymakers will regard as the “single biggest” cost—something inherently about long-run retrospective consensus—it simply cannot be verified or falsified yet. Therefore, it is too early to determine whether this prediction is right or wrong.