Re: Need recommendations: bad historical romances

In article <YB0vf.18304$Uf7.17114@trnddc01>, lclough <clough@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

> David Friedman wrote:
> > In article <IsLFGu.CJx@xxxxxxxxxxx>, whheydt@xxxxxxxxxxx (Wilson Heydt)
> > wrote:
> >
> >
> >>If you have life insurance, you have put a value on your own life.
> >>
> >
> >
> > The amount of life insurance you have depends on how much need you think
> > your survivors will have for money. That's connected with the value of
> > your life to them, although not identical to it. But it says nothing at
> > all about the value of your life to you.
> >
>
> There was a great study earlier this year, in which people were
> presented with a list of comic characters and asked whether they
> should buy life insurance. Should Fred Flintstone have life
> insurance? Yes, because Wilma and Pebbles depend upon his
> income from the rock quarry. Batman? No, because Bruce Wayne
> is a millionaire -- any dependents or employees (Dick Grayson,
> Alfred) can be left bequests in his will. Just because Batman
> leads a far more dangerous life than Fred Flintstone does not
> mean he needs insurance. What about Spider-Man? An open
> question -- it depends on whether Aunt May or Mary Jane need his
> financial support, and that depends on whether Aunt May is Iron
> Man (or is it the Silver Surfer?) this week.

The issues touched on here are actually relevant in my field for making
sense of tort law. Suppose someone's culpable negligence results in your
death and he has to pay damages to your heirs.

The payment of the damages serves two purposes. One is insurance--your
heirs now have money to make up for the loss of your support. The other
is deterrence--the fact that culpable negligence may result in paying
damages gives people an incentive to be careful in situations where
their carelessness might result in someone else dying. There is no
reason to expect that the optimal rule for calculating damages for the
first purpose will give the same value as the rule for calculating them
for the second--for essentially the same reason that the amount of life
insurance you buy isn't a measure of the value of your life. Even if you
have no dependents and no need for life insurance, your life is still
valuable to you, and so we would like to give other people an incentive
to avoid acts that might result in your death.

Anyone curious as to my resolution of the problem can find it in Chapter
9 of my _Law's Order_. A draft is webbed at:

http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Laws_Order_draft/laws_order_ch_9.htm

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