Part of the absurd fun of living after the Enlightenment is the recurring efforts to quantify the unquantifiable. At the beginning of the last century, a Massachusetts physician established to his satisfaction that the soul weighs 21 grams. And thanks to The Atlantic, I learned about this quaint 1930s metric for gauging marital satisfaction.
Two years ago Apple got a patent on sensing systems that will ultimately be able to quantify, say, the effectiveness of a karate chop. And as we all know, courts measure the unmeasurable all the time. Two weeks ago a Michigan court decided someone's mental anguish was worth $750,000.
But really all these issues pale in comparison to the question, What's my life worth? What's yours worth? It depends on whom you ask.
According to the EPA it's $9.1 million. But if you ask the Food and Drug Administration it's $7.9 million. And according to the Department of Transportation, it's $6.1 million.
Oh, well. It's not the first time the public failed to get a straight answer out of the federal government.
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