Essential Workers are Irrational Economists

Recently, I came across a NPR article that addressed the sacrifices made by essential workers during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.They went from working jobs that they initially signed up for to working with significantly higher risk to not only their personal health, but the health of their loved ones. The majority of those workers were not given proper compensation for the higher cost that their job had put on them. Ironically, many people were discovering that they would make more money from stimulus checks and unemployment benefits than they would continuing to work their jobs. Regardless, many essential workers felt that it was their duty to continue working for the betterment of society.
This is a real world example of Private Marginal Costs PMC) outweighing Social Marginal Cost (SMC). From Gruber, we learn that a way to equalize PMC and SMC is to create a subsidy for the essential workers equal to the Marginal Benefit (MB) of each “unit” of work. This subsidy never happened, yet the amount of essential work done was still at QAE. The fact that government intervention was not necessary here shows that altruism is an important incentive for many people. The motivation of altruism is something that economists sometimes overlook (not always, Mueller brings it up in chapter three). The essential workers who chose to keep working, despite the high risks and missed opportunity for government stimulus checks, chose altruism over what most economists would assume.