How to escape inflation: cryo-preservation

Context: I was reading this piece in Wired, about a photographer who shoots top-secret ‘things’. I highly recommend it: the pictures here include radioactive waste, a practice-field for the study of decomposing bodies and – seriously – a bottle of HIV. I believe I will purchase her book. I’m not expecting any alien autopsies, but it was quite strange to see such things even existing, let alone photographed with such ordinary composition.

Anyway. Amongst them is this (click for larger version):

The Cryonics Institute in Clinton Township, Michigan, currently preserves 74 legally dead human patients and 44 dead pets, charging the same price it has charged since its establishment in 1976: $28,000 with advance reservation.

And I paused. Of all the strange things in this set of photographs, a price that has remained the same since 1976 was truly the most odd. Jumping over to The Bureau of Labour Statistics’ Inflation Calculator, I found that USD28,000 in 1976 would get you USD102,031.21 in 2007. Now, the Cryonics Institute lists itself as non-profit, but that’s just crazy.

The package up for which one signs includes up-front and ongoing costs – but those, too, appear not to be indexed although they must be, surely. If they aren’t, then new cryonics clients (customers? Patients?) have to be charged more, to cross-subsidise the existing, too-expensive ones.

And what about the attendant services? Ah. Your USD28,000 gets you frozen. It doesn’t get you prepared for the freezing, and it doesn’t get you shipped to Clinton Township, Michigan, for storage.

Click the image for the larger version. So all the stand-by, transport services appear to be fully-indexed. Treatment, stabilisation, air-ambulance, etc. are all provided by Suspended Animation, though – another company entirely. Between municipal electricity, gas and water, not to mention land taxes, cleaning services, ‘parts’ (lightbulbs, paint-job, an electrician every now and then), etc., there is still no explanation for how/why the cryo-preservation service can remain the same price it was more than 20 years ago.

So, there you go. You can literally beat inflation by restricting your consumption solely to an apparently inflation-free basket of goods and services. Of course if you stay alive, you can earn money and get ahead of the entire game (for example if you’d invested your USD28,000 in 1976, you could enter cryo-preservation today with (at least) nearly USD75,000 in the bank, so there is that), so I wouldn’t recommend actually doing it.