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Grave Matters
Over time, the typical ten-acre swatch of cemetery ground, for example, contains enough coffin wood to construct more than forty houses, nine hundred-plus tons of casket steel, and another twenty thousand tons of vault concrete. To that add a volume of formallin sufficient to fill a small backyard swimming pool and untold gallons of pesticide and weed killer to keep the gravehard preternaturally green.
That is from the really quite interesting Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial, by Mark Harris. As you may have guessed, the book is a plea for eco-friendly burials. As for me, I would like my body to be disposed of at a profit, though I doubt if we will have seen enough sectoral deregulation by then...
Posted by Tyler Cowen on June 25, 2007 at 06:21 AM in Books | Permalink
Comments
too funny.
Posted by: sa at Jun 25, 2007 7:30:32 AM
Thinking of parting yourself out like a vehicle? Is your body a rare year or model? Are you all original yourself? How about pre-selling your body parts on eBay like warrants/options?
Posted by: kj at Jun 25, 2007 10:37:35 AM
kj, all good ideas, I was thinking of making it a media event as well...
Posted by: Tyler Cowen at Jun 25, 2007 10:39:36 AM
Donate your body to science. It just depends on if you want to increase the utility for society as a whole or just for your family.
Posted by: Macneil at Jun 25, 2007 10:57:39 AM
At a profit? The Ferengi have it all worked out.
Posted by: Bryan C at Jun 25, 2007 1:14:23 PM
Burial is one of the most fascinating areas of public policy we have. In property law, we ordinarily prohibit "dead hand" control of land--that is, a dead person cannot stipulate in their will that their house be left forever the way it is with title remaining in their dead estate.
But graveyards are a notable exception. Worse, because people's planning horizons are not indefinite, graveyards probably represent a market failure too: given that you can never use the land for anything else ever again (given most states' "consecrated graveyards" laws), is there any doubt that burial plots are underpriced by the market?
Posted by: Ian Samuel at Jun 25, 2007 2:29:48 PM
Honestly, I would just prefer to be taken to the nearest zoo, and fed to the the carnivores, but only after I am dead.
Posted by: Yancey Ward at Jun 25, 2007 3:54:47 PM
Burying all that carbon (the wood and the bodies) would seem like a good way to reduce global warming.
Posted by: y81 at Jun 25, 2007 4:32:20 PM
I can imagine a system where people auction their dead bodies to the highest bidder while they are still alive (has anyone tried this on e-bay already?), but I'd feel unsure walking around knowing there is a price on my head...after all, people respond to incentives!
Posted by: Econocator at Jul 4, 2007 11:12:04 AM
