"Senior death discount." Why set a through-the-lookingglass threshold to lesserhood at some arbitrary age such as 70? Wouldn't a sliding scale work better, with a life valued at, say, $4.2 million at birth (corrected for inflation and factorally boosted for the well-born) and going down each year -- nay, day -- thereafter until it bottoms out at zero bucks at the actuarally computed average age of death?

I've always wondered at the legal concepts of life value used by the courts to calculate damages in wrongful death cases. The more money the person was making at the time of death is multipled by the number of years remaining unitl the statistically likely age of natural death. From this equation the jury and/or judge works out a sum.

The ethical questions raised by this concept are many. According to this school of thought, the social value (and therefore financial award) of a dynamic arms merchant pulling down $320 mill a year (plus stock options) prematurely deceased in a Cadillac Escalade rollover would be far greater than a similarly-aged mendicant Mother Teresa gassed in a Bhopal-type industrial accident.

And by the way, why do so many people feel a greater loss at the death of an infant or child whose value to the community is strictly speculative potential than they do for a senior citizen who has made a verifiable and quantifiable contribution to the community good?