Earlier this week I heard a Morning Edition story on mandating annual flu vaccinations for elementary school children. There is some evidence that in addition to protecting the children themselves such a program may reduce the outbreak of flu in the population at large. In the story one dissenting interviewee said a decision should only consider the impact on the children themselves without regard to the potential benefit to the broader population.

To me that just seems to be bad thinking. We can’t compartmentalize complex issues by looking at a single tree. We must look at the whole forest.

In January Robert Reich made the same point commenting on the upcoming presidential election: Look for the candidate that can connect the dots. Foreign policy is connected to energy policy which is connected to trade policy which is immigration policy and so on. Good candidates, he argues, are ones who see the connections and offer solutions with the entire forest in view.

There’s a lesson I’m re-learning the hard way. I took my share of economics courses at university. (I was an economics major after all.) One of the basic assumptions about competitive markets is that they capture all costs, including the often overlooked opportunity cost. Put simply opportunity cost is what you lose by choosing one thing over another. A simple example, if I sit on the couch and watch the ABC special on the British monarchy, one opportunity cost is that I cannot spend those two hours reading or playing guitar. Just a hypothetical, of course.

But here’s another often overlooked aspect of opportunity cost, the cost of inaction. In economic terms doing nothing is as much of a choice as doing something. Failing to consider the question, “What is the cost if I wait or do nothing?” can be just as expensive as acting unwisely.