Economists are good at put price tags on any things. Below is an another interesting example.
Question - if money could buy happiness, how much would it take to bring it back after the death of a partner, child or spouse?
Answer - it would take $220,000 annually to raise someone's happiness to pre-death levels after a spouse dies, $118,000 for a child, $28,000 for a parent, $16,000 for a friend and only $2,000 for a sibling.
Calculation - economists reviewed data collected from 10,000 Britons tracked by the British Household Panel Survey, begun in 1991, which records major life events and includes questions designed to gauge overall mental health. Economists then identified the amount of money, on average, that raised a person's mental health score by the same amount that a loved one's death lowered it.
No need to think above numbers are results of a weired, gruesome exercise. Economists say they hope it will provide legal courts with a way to more fairly award damages.
2 comments:
This is a very interesting, but very sad statistic, and I suppose in its way it dates back to the old concept of weregeld paid as compensation to the family of a person murdered or accidentally killed. One of the sad things about our legal system is the seeking of huge monetary settlements for undefinable losses: jury awards of staggering amounts are common. From my perspective, the loss of my wife, children, or grandchildren could never be repaid in dollars, and I find it mildly offensive to think that someone needed to define guidelines that put a price tag on emotional loss. But I guess that's life in the age of litigation.
Is the money used to pay for cloning the lost loved one?
Post a Comment