Quote :

"Maybe value should be assigned according to expected productivity/contribution to society."

Yes because that's easy to estimate in the present

1/31/2011 10:54:17 PM

so.... I got less money for being "fat," short, and donating to charity/volunteering

but I got more money for having green eyes, having big boobs, and having a good sense of humor

k.

(ps my worth was ~$1.5 million >_> )

1/31/2011 11:16:38 PM

1/31/2011 11:17:17 PM

1.92M

1/31/2011 11:26:52 PM

That IQ test thing said I was at 150, but I know I'm not that smart, I must have gotten the ones right that I guessed at. I think that inflated me too much, because it says I'm worth $2,751,530

1/31/2011 11:36:42 PM

^^^^^

I hear you, but to be fair, that's how companies and commodities are valued.

1/31/2011 11:50:23 PM

Quote :

"What's the cost of replacing a smile, Shaggy? How about a hug? "

well im glad you asked. here at lockheed we're at the forefront of artificial affection robotics. the new hugtron 5000 is capable of delivering an whopping 30 hps with a mhbf of 1trillion hugs.

Whether on the battlefield at home or abroad, the hugtron 5000 is the tool for the job. at $10,000,000 per unit its sure to be at the top of next years military budgets world wide.

1/31/2011 11:55:46 PM

about $9,021

...world GDP divided by world population

2/1/2011 12:34:46 AM

There are many different models for this with a wide range of methodologies and applications, but they mostly come from economics. Supplanter hit on two of them, the first being the value of a statistical life. There have been hundreds of papers published on measuring this in different clever ways, and the usual accepted value based on all of them is around $4-6 million. Like Supplanter said, most of the papers hinge on what people are willing to pay for a reduction in risk, and then inverting it to get the value of a life saved. The good studies are pretty sophisticated in how they actually measure the willingness to pay, but that's the basic idea.

In health economics, the analogous concept is quality-adjusted life years. It's based on measuring the quality of life with different impairments or diseases, then converting that to fully healthy years of life, then looking at how much it costs to treat someone to keep them alive at that quality of life. It can be tough to value life from an individual standpoint because people are irrationally clingy and hopeful about life when faced with shitty situations, and when they also have insurance and don't bear the full cost of treatment, but governments and insurers make these valuations all the time when deciding whether to cover certain procedures. I believe the standard for approval by the NHS in Britain is that they'll pay for treatments that cost up to $100K per QALY. You could discount that forward over an entire lifetime to get a value of a statistical life that way.

guitarzan hit on the other main way. Valuing life based on expected productivity is the human capital model, and it's largely fallen out of vogue in the literature not because of difficulties calculating it, but because of the concept that people are only worthwhile for the economic value of their output.

Anyway, the military probably has to use some other numbers, both for political reasons and because the value of a statistical soldier is probably much different than the value of a statistical average joe. No idea what that number is.

2/1/2011 12:35:24 AM