Thursday, June 07, 2007
Guilty displeasures
Phil Miller has a new, bizarre twist.
Phil goes through possible reasons why kids are starving in Africa without any of the reasons being due to the PowerKid's actions. Let me suggest a simpler explanation: tranasctions costs. The cost of picking up hundreds of kids' half-eaten sandwiches or left-behind green beans, packing and shipping them to Africa, and distributing them to starving children is simply too high. It destroys wealth far more than letting kids toss the food away and put an extra dime in the mission basket at church. Plus, your child is eating less which, given concerns of youth obesity, should be considered a good thing.I noticed a sign hanging in the lunch room of PowerKid, the Eldest's school recently. It was a version of the tried and true warning from mom "You better clean your plate because there's a child starving in Africa." But this one went a bit further on the guilt-o-meter:
When YOU throw away YOUR food, a child somewhere is dying because he doesn't have enough food.
Labels: economics