How much does a life cost?
Last week we we’re discussing about how total costs are assessed in chemical process industries and how they estimate the costs for damages and other matters which are not easily quantifiable more so to convert their values into money currencies. With this topic in mind, I suddenly wondered: How much does a life cost?
So I decided to search about how a life is given a corresponding value in the Philippines. I would like to write about three things in particular: 1) The costs of sustaining life in the country (or simply the cost of living), 2) the cost a family would have to spend in the case of a family member’s death and 3) the cost of compensation given when an employee in a Philippine company dies by whatever means the law would actually require compensation.
While it’s not really easy to calculate an averaged cost of living for an individual Filipino, I found the following site useful in understanding how much it would generally cost to live in the Philippines. You can check Numbeo to get information about the cost of living in any country. Based on the data given in the site, goods in the Philippines are more than 60% cheaper than in New York and that an average person in the country can only buy about 50% of what an average New Yorker can buy. Okay. So this site does not really tell us how much living in the Philippines is but if you’ve got time and you’d want to calculate it for yourself, this site provides an estimate for the cost of consumer goods, transportation, rent and other matters that would make you spend money and so you’d get an idea how much it would cost to live in the Philippines. As for me, I think I am spending an average of 80 to 100 thousand pesos in a year. Well, that’s from the perspective of a student so it might still vary a lot.
As for the cost of dying, I found a blog about the amount of money spent on coffins, funerals and lots if a traditional burial is preferred. The blog is called Pesos and Sense. I did not have enough time to explore what else this blog could offer so I just looked at the cost of dying in the Philippines. Based on the blog post that is dated October 2013, the general expenses for someone’s death could range from 10 thousand pesos up to a million pesos a year. That includes the funeral and the lots for burial. I have noticed that cremation seems to be the cheapest method if we were to look at the expenses in the long run.
And the most interesting part in answering my original question is the point where I had to look at Chan Robles Virtual Law Library. Here I was able to get information with regards to how compensations are made for employees who die while employed in a Philippine-registered company as well as government offices. This is quite a long read and it is very technical but it is very interesting. The law does not give exact values for the amount of compensation but it tells of percentages of the deceased person’s wage as the basis of compensation. Beneficiaries are also determined and based on their relationship with the deceased person, the percentage for the compensation also varies. For more detailed information, please look through the manuscript of this republic act.
Looking through those three aspects of costs in relation to life does not give a good basis on how to assess the cost of life. As for how companies give compensations, the calculations are quite vague.
It also just came up to my mind right now: Insurances also give a price tag to our lives, to a lost arm, a lost eye or whatever. What possible basis do they have? If I will still have time next week, maybe I will write about that.