I've been on a Youtube binge and I'm in awe at the sheer amount of manpower and resources that government organizations/law enforcement agencies are willing to dedicate to help try to find missing people. Flying aircraft, deploying boats, for days, weeks, maybe months, combining the efforts of dozens to hundreds of people. Perhaps naively, I'm wondering how the economics of all this works out, especially when it concerns people with a very low chance of being recovered, and/or people with a low economic value, such as children. Please don't misunderstand, obviously it is very much worth it to spend millions of dollars even for a 0.1% chance at recovering someone alive, especially someone's child. But what makes these organizations able and willing to dedicate so much resources to these search and rescue operations, when so many other aspects of life as we know it are subject to utilitarian cost-cutting?