What Gangnam Style represents in opportunity cost terms

Here’s a light-hearted one! What could we have had instead of 2 billion views of Gangnam Style?The Economist ponders that question.

According to the article, 2 billion views at 4:12 minutes equals more than 140m hours, or more than 16,000 years. What other achievements were forgone? It took 50m man-hours to complete the “supercarrier” USS Gerald Ford last year. Had people not been watching PSY they could have constructed three such ships. Alternatively they could have built more than four Great Pyramids of Giza, or another Wikipedia, or six Burj Khalifas in Dubai (the world’s tallest building).

The opportunity cost may have been high, but surely it was (ahem) worth it.