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Pastimes : The New Qualcomm - write what you like thread. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: carranza2 who wrote (6189)	4/14/2003 8:09:33 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 12245

Carranza, being an engineer, I prefer measurable things. The most accurate way I can think of to value human life is 'hourly rate' as determined by the person themselves. By that I mean, how much will they spend to conduct some marginal activity, such as an extra minute yakking on the Globalstar phone, once they've conducted the central purpose of their call? How much pay will they accept to give up another hour of leisure? It's not an accurate figure and it varies from time to time and during their life. But it's as accurate as I can come up with. For a community, one could pretty much divide the GNP up among the population, more or less. One could adjust for zero-value people who are having their life-support systems turned off or who are in prison and for day old babies who aren't really worth as much as a 30 year old fully-developed in full production. I've always had a fairly good idea of what I'm worth. Not everyone agrees with my figure. The guy figuring out how much we spend to protect life from harm is making it too difficult. Too much is multifunctional, such as the probability of a tyre getting a puncture is related to the wear resistance of the tyre and the safety aspect can't be separated in such a study, though the tyre people would have an idea. Especially since the Ford SUV rollover dramas got headlines and lawsuits. I used to argue in BP Oil for volatility controls to reduce numbers of people burned alive, but didn't make much headway. Fires are mostly a function of car design, but volatility control can help. Similarly, I wanted benzene controls when there were none. You'd never separate out all those costs in valuing people. "Hourly rate" is the best one! Hourly rate is also an excellent way to estimate optimum pricing of products such as Globalstar minutes where maximum profit is achieved by getting people to make those hourly rate marginal calls, just to pass the time. Note that 'hourly rate' doesn't mean the person's current pay rate, though it's usually closely correlated. The value of the person is more like the cost of the person to the company [including all overheads and stuff] x 2. So, a person on $20 an hour is costing the company something like $40 an hour and is generating revenue at $60 an hour. So the value of the person would be something like $120,000 per year [2000 hours per year] capitalized. That would mean something like capital value of $3 million. Which is sort of in keeping with the roading death value in New Zealand [how much the roading authorities think it's worth to avoid road deaths in any location - meaning they'll spend $20 million on a bridge to save travel time, fuel cost, wear and tear and a life every 4 years]. Mqurice