Los Angeles, California

This is a really random thought, but bear with me. I was looking through my photos from Cambodia earlier and thinking about how the government there puts so much effort into making sure that nothing happens to affect the monuments or to disrupt tourism around Angkor Wat (they could do more, but let me ramble). The reason for this is due to the large amount of money generated by this monument — consider the following: it costs about $20 (US) per day for a pass to get into the Angkor temple complex. Assuming one thousand people visit each day (that figure is really low I think) that’s $20,000 each day generated by this complex. Now consider that $60-$250 per year is a normal salary in Cambodia, vs. about $30,000 in America. Conservatively estimating a 100x differential that means that the revenue generated for Cambodia is the equivalent of a monument in the US that generates about two million per day. Now consider that Cambodia’s population is about 1/25th of the US, so the value of Angkor to the government jumps again — equivalent of around fifty million dollars each day in the US. That’s roughly the equivalent of twenty billion dollars per year using conservative estimates and ignoring the value of hotels and other amenities in the area — the number might be several times higher. It seems like other developing countries could learn from this example — much of the Latin American rain forest is disappearing, African countries are losing battles with poachers, and the list goes on despite the fact that protection of these places might perhaps be their most valuable use.