I keep thinking about the ideas in the original Star Trek, where money is no longer used.
I see films from the USA where people donate blood to make money. I’m not sure if it still goes on, but it does raise an interesting idea. How much is a pint of blood worth? How much would you pay to buy a pint? How much would you charge for a pint?
One of the figures we used in work was the value of life. You have a dangerous corner on a road and you look at what you can do to make it safer, what that will cost and how many lives (or injuries) you would save. That way you justify things like crash barriers. As an aside I remember one meeting discussing the issue, where the transport department described how they worked out the value of life, only to hear the HSE representative say “we treble that value because we think it works better”.
I saw an advert about PPI plus this week – another round of compensation. It struck me how many different ways we have of getting compensation. One of the systems I see advertised regularly is the medical error compensation. That was why I started thinking about paying for blood donations. So how much is your nose worth?
Over and over we see things translated into a money value. We do it more and more. Maybe because it is a language we all speak? How far do we push this concept? Do we put a monetary value on friendship, or on love?
Looking forward to finding a way to live life without putting a money value on everything.