No doubt they spend lots of money, but if net economic activity was quantizable then we wouldn't need to spend tax dollars. We could charge use fees and have the RV producers and hiking boot makers contribute in order to safeguard their business. But parks have value beyond the economic. They are valuable as cultural centerpieces. They define national identity. Without Yellowstone, the US would be less of a country. Without Central Park, New York would not be as iconic a city. These things need to be funded without regard to economic activity. They are beyond math.
References to economic activity in relation to parks can be dangerous. Once we see them as engines of economic activity, then we will seek to maximize that activity. A national forest should not be described as a source of timber fees and tourist dollars. Down that road comes drilling for oil in parks, more roads, more hotels and the inevitable conversion of wild fields into condos.
> the fact that we can only quantify a public good in USD (or any other currency) is a tragedy
Money is the way we quantify the relative value of anything vs anything else. That's all money is.
I think because it's state-run, the "value" is extremely hard to quantify, in many directions. It might be over-valued, as people who've never seen it have to pay for it, or under-valued, as money that people might've paid to visit the park has already been taken from their paycheques.
I think the GP's point (perhaps not articulated well) is that we shouldn't even try to quantify the value of public goods like this, in dollars.
For example, a smallish local park in my neighborhood is completely free and generates $0. Various entities spend some decent amount of money to maintain the park. The value is in how many people visit the park and enjoy it, which is inherently not quantifiable.
The only thing you can quantify is how many people visit the park each day or week or whatever, and, say, the average number of person-hours it is used per time period. Maybe those are useful metrics that can help inform whether or not the park's existence is justified, or as to how much money should be spent maintaining and improving it, in a very rough sense. But that's not the same thing as quantifying its value.
Maybe it is not supposed to be quantified. At least not in a monetary value.
This requirement that everything must have some currency value attached to it is a societal disease. We can extrapolate this to say that anything that increases the country GDP should be done.
I can think of many awful examples. Maybe it makes more monetary sense to uproot every last tree to extract lumber. Maybe it makes more monetary sense to just kill people with serious illnesses or disabilities instead of building more hospitals. Maybe it makes more monetary sense to just put every damn child to work in the mines or in an Amazon fulfillment center instead of sending them to school.
I can go on. As long as we can only measure the value of anything in USD, we can justify quite a lot of things that would be pretty awful for society as a whole.
> This requirement that everything must have some currency value attached to it is a societal disease
No it's not - I'm saying currency is how we measure the relative value of things. Money isn't separate to how we measure something's value; it's the thing we use to measure value. It's like saying "every object having a length value attached is a societal disease; we shouln't only attach a cm value to all objects".
> It's like saying "every object having a length value attached is a societal disease; we shouln't only attach a cm value to all objects".
That's not what the GP said, though. They said that the idea that everything needs to be valued in dollars is a societal disease. Not that everything that can be valued in dollars is a societal disease.
>> because it's state-run, the "value" is extremely hard to quantify
The value of a privately-operated park would be no less difficult to quantify. National forests are not theme parks. They have a value even if nobody ever sets foot inside.
Probably true, but I think if you offered a billion dollars for a square foot of national park, you might be able to buy that square foot. There is a value somewhere in it that's negotiable between the people who have it and the people who might want to buy some of it. A billion dollars (as an obviously extreme example) could set up a lot of conservation elsewhere in the park, or elsewhere in the country.
