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September 04, 2004
Placing a dollar amount on life
I always find studies that say "this problem costs the economy X billion dollars" Cost accountants must have way too much time on their hands.
The New York Times > Health > Sick of Work: Always on the Job, Employees Pay With Health
If everyone quit their stressful job, wouldn't that cost billions of dollars too? These studies always point out a cost, but they ignore the fact that just doing business has a lot of cost built into it. It is quite difficult to know where the baseline should start.
Computer viruses are another example. They always say it costs x billion dollars to deal with this virus... The problem with these figures is that it treats the employees and equipment as if they where variable costs, when they are not. You are going to pay the Security guy weather he is eradicating a virus or doing something else. Unless you lay him off whenever there is no virus, it is not really costing you any money. It is a hassle, and there are probably more productive things that your staff could be spending their time on, but there is no guarantee that the other activities will make your company any more money either.
The truth is that most cost is infrastructure... It is the cost of doing business. If you drive in a car, you will eventually experience and accident. If you go to work, you will eventually experience stress. If you buy something, eventually it will break. You can't say how much any one of these things cost, because if they didn't happen, something else would.
I think that putting a dollar amount on each and every facet of our lives causes us to make bad decisions. We ignore the spiritual and emotional side of the world, and make decisions based on imaginary figures. We try too much to make all of our decisions objective, when we actually live in an unquantifiable sea of simultaneous experiences.
Posted by jreighley at September 4, 2004 09:56 PM
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