I’m pretty sure your first “good” point is wrong. Sometimes those two things go together, sometimes not. Thought experiment: You have a deadly disease, but there are pills you can take that will keep you alive. They’re really expensive. New information: Oops, you need twice as many as we thought. Does that indicate that you’re better off? Nope. (It might mean that the pill-makers are going to be better off, but that’s not particularly good news in this context.)
Uh, but in this case we have relatively stable figures on how many people die from various things, so the new information is necessarily of the form “more difficult to fix a known problem” rather than “problem is less bad than we thought”.
I’m pretty sure your first “good” point is wrong. Sometimes those two things go together, sometimes not. Thought experiment: You have a deadly disease, but there are pills you can take that will keep you alive. They’re really expensive. New information: Oops, you need twice as many as we thought. Does that indicate that you’re better off? Nope. (It might mean that the pill-makers are going to be better off, but that’s not particularly good news in this context.)
Ceteris paribus. Of course you can construct examples where welfare remains the same with higher costs. On net though this is highly unlikely.
Uh, but in this case we have relatively stable figures on how many people die from various things, so the new information is necessarily of the form “more difficult to fix a known problem” rather than “problem is less bad than we thought”.
Ah, I see. So bad news :(