A bit off your conversation, wasted money means lives lost. A direct example is, building, vehicle, and work safety tends to increase as people are more able to afford the extra costs of safety features. Those things are both cheaper and less safe in poorer countries. Another example is the 2008 world food price crisis which killed people and is partly attributed to biofuel subsidies causing food crops to be replaced with biofuel crops. There are surely much bigger and more indirect causes of loss of life like reduced future technology due to reduced research and industry as people can't afford fancy ambitious stuff.