In the latest episode of CBS Sunday morning is a 7+ minute segment on recovering bits of bodies from a military transport airplane that crashed in Alaska in 1952.
Probably most viewers will get out of it what the CBS producers wanted them to: how neat it is and important it is to the relatives to recover these bits of bodies. I don’t challenge their values; different people have different values. My own are quite different. When I arrived in Toronto in November 2018 to visit my sister and learned that she had died 2 days earlier, I had the option of going to the morgue and seeing her body. I chose not to. To me, that body wasn’t her.
What I got out of the segment was very different. It was an indicator of how wealthy we are. Various people with various values of time, some of them probably pretty high, go out each year to help recover possessions and parts of bodies. The cost of that in time value alone has to be huge. Which means the value is even huger, or they wouldn’t do it. (Unless, of course, they’re subsidized by the government but my sense is that subsidies, if any, are small.) So why is the value so high? Because we’re so wealthy. These kinds of activities are what economists call “normal goods.” We want more of them as our wealth increases.
Note: The pic above is of the C-124 Globemaster, the type of plane that went down in Alaska.
READER COMMENTS
john hare
Nov 18 2022 at 8:05pm
Anytime I happen to remember previous decades, I notice how wealthy I live compared to back then. Four people riding to a jobsite in a single cab pickup was common and I can remember the last time I was crowded. People with normal jobs owning recreational boats that cost more than most houses used to, even allowing for inflation. I remember dinner often being pinto beans as the only course.
Or in shorter form, I don’t have enough time to count the ways.
Mark Brophy
Nov 18 2022 at 9:58pm
I think the government might be footing the bill. I don’t think we’re rich enough to waste so much money.
john hare
Nov 19 2022 at 3:06am
And the government couldn’t foot the bill either if we weren’t wealthy enough to pay the taxes.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Nov 19 2022 at 9:17am
True.
And we could be so much richer with higher immigration, fewer restrictions on international trade, lower federal deficits (or deficits only in the amount of investments with NPV>0), and more cost-benefit based regulation!
Robin Corkery
Nov 20 2022 at 1:29pm
Employers who pay foreign invaders with limited education and low IQs
substandard wages are richer. The rest of Americans, from whose checking
accounts come the withdrawals required to finance the benefits provided by
our welfare state, not so much.
Comments are closed.