What is the opportunity cost of your turkey?

I’m not one to oppose attention being paid to environmental conservation.  However, one must admit that the movement to “green” all facets of life often looks suspiciously less like a serious social movement to decrease consumption than a feature on “Stuff White People Like.”  So it’s refreshing to read a post like this, from The Atlantic’s Daniel Akst.

The local turkey tasted quite good, but I’ve enjoyed many a Thanksgiving with the store-bought variety, and it seemed to me not just painful but profligate to spend all that additional money in this way. So this year we’re going to buy the supermarket turkey and find a soup kitchen or homeless shelter to which we can donate $50.

What is so often missing from calls to save the environment by spending more is a discussion of the opportunity cost.  A serious discussion of the ethical value of any environmental decision should also consider that there’s real value in the money the well-off are able to spend on organic apples; one might well consider just how many mosquito nets a trip to Whole Foods could buy.

-John

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  3. Do two wrongs make a right?

November 20, 2009 · Filed Under John

Comments

One Response to “What is the opportunity cost of your turkey?”

  1. Todd on November 23rd, 2009 9:07 pm

    The problem is that this often creates a false dichotomy: either I spend $20 on a store-bought turkey and donate $50 to a food shelter or I spend $70 on a free-range local organic turkey. The problem is that most individuals who would even begin to engage in this calculus are not counting every dollar. But when it comes to doing the right thing, they begin to do so. No one said that they had to budget $50 to do good on Thanksgiving, and that that $50 could either go to a human or a turkey. Even if one had a tight budget for the meal, I wonder how many bottles of wine or pies or hors d’oeuvres these same people gave up.

    I agree that people waste a ton of money at Whole Foods, and that money could better be spent on other positives. But people probably waste more on driving, cable, expensive clothing, etc. Yet somehow this is never lessened in order to buy mosquito nets for Ghanaians.

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