the true cost

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

the full economic, social, health, and environmental cost of a product, service, decision, or policy, including the externalities, long-term consequences, and hidden burdens that are typically not reflected in the market price or short-term accounting; the true cost of cheap fast food includes healthcare costs from diet-related disease, environmental costs of industrial agriculture, and social costs of poorly paid food workers; the true cost of underinvesting in public health includes the far larger expenditures required to treat preventable disease; the concept is central to full-cost accounting, natural capital accounting, and the economics of externalities, and challenges the tendency of conventional markets and political systems to prioritise immediate, visible costs over deferred, distributed, or invisible ones