The really important things in life don’t involve money. A birth or a death reminds one of that truth. I write this in early predawn, unable to sleep in the stunned disbelief following a call a few hours ago telling us my wife’s only sister had died unexpectedly.
There is no merchandise, no service I could buy right now that would offset the pain of the loss of this dear relative. Nor could I name a dollar amount with which to compare it in the way natural research economists query citizens using the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness to put a dollar figure on the value of recreation there.
Still, some economics lessons apply, including the insight that one cannot make objective comparisons of pain or pleasure between individuals. I am grieving a beloved sister-in-law I had known for 11 years. I know my wife’s pain is even greater. But who feels more pain, my wife and her brother, who lost a sister; my brother-in law and nephew, who lost a wife and mother; or my mother-in-law, who lost a child? The question is unanswerable.
You simply cannot measure this on any numerical scale that is accurate across different individuals. Nor can you measure little things, like the relative pleasure the orange I am munching right now would give to some other person.
But humans react in remarkably similar ways to loss. When Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who was in line to become monarch of the enormously rich Austro-Hungarian empire, was shot with his wife in Sarejevo in 1914, his dying plea to his wife, “Sophie, don’t die, stay alive for our children,” was no different than what a Minnesota farm couple injured in a car accident might say to each other.
While human grief and joy transcend wealth and time, greater resources can help ease some things.
Our family grieves, but in a day or two we will be in Denver sharing our pain and memories.
When my grandparents left the Netherlands more than a century ago, they never again experienced personal contact, either in pain or joy, with any of their siblings, parents or other relatives. News of deaths would arrive weeks late via letters brought by steamship and railroad. Transatlantic cables were out of the question for people of their economic station.
So if philosopher John Rawls applied his criteria for distinguishing just societies by asking me, “Would you rather live in the U.S. of 1904 or that of 2008 if you didn’t know what position in society would be yours?” I would choose today.
The fact that the death of children has become steadily less common would also influence me in that choice. My grandparents buried two young children a century ago. My aunt lost four.
Finally, while any death is painful, we recognize that the loss to society does vary. In the past five years, I lost my mother, her sister and my older half-sister and half-brother. All were in their 80s or 90s. I’ll miss them, but society loses more when a 46-year old skilled bookstore manager with a son about to graduate from high school passes on than when an elderly person who has lived a full life does.
The death of my father, a talented welder and factory foreman with two small kids at age 51, was a greater loss to society than that of his own father, frail in his late 70s, just a year earlier. Similarly, in contemporary Africa, the death by AIDS of millions in their 20s or 30s is a greater economic loss to society than a similar loss of elderly people.
© 2008 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.