Time is typically costed in the a like-wage arrangement. This works well enough, but the corrections necessary to use these calculations in judicial proceedings is complicated, and awards are often wildly undervalued or overvalued. Here we propose a cost of time using an emotional gauge.
My child decided that he wanted to change the color of his room from blue to dark grey. I wasn’t on-board with that, I didn’t look forward to both priming and then painting that dark grey when it comes time to change it back to white. Regardless, we went with the dark grey, which then dried even a little darker, and which now makes his room look like his dad is an investment banker rather than the Uncontested World’s Senior Heavyweight Unsanctioned 250 champion.
The room looks excellent, it’s calming and reassuring. It’s the color or a good pickup truck that has received regular maintenance. The pleasure that he and I will receive from this will come to several minutes per day for the next few years. The cost of having to return the wall to white will come to a few hours total. The cost of time to return the room to white from that dark grey is overwhelmed by the benefit of time that the wall is enjoyed, essentially rendering the cost of returning the wall to white, relatively negligible over the cost of painting over a light, wimpy grey, that makes my son’s room like his dad is the Uncontested World’s Senior Heavyweight Unsanctioned 250 champion, rather than an investment banker.
That’s how you price someone’s disability, someone’s dismemberment, someone’s emotional pain … let them describe the pain, let them answer your questions about the life they now have, and separate these awards from the punitive portions of the award, they have nothing to do with each other. This is understood by a good judge, perhaps not understood so well by a not-so-good judge. But it needs to be understood by the people who make and sell products.
The undeniable reality is that some of our customers will happily give us lots of money to buy things that are unhealthy for them. They will poison their pets and their children with herbicides for the joy of looking at their perfectly monocropped lawn. They will poison their bodies for the pleasure of a certain feeling that lasts from a few minutes to a few hours. But if we expect to truly do this thing differently; do things that the Boomers wouldn’t, and that the Millennials couldn’t, then we have to do good and do these things well.
If we’re willing to actually listen to the fringes of our markets rather than just the top of the bell curve, then that fringe will show us what to embrace and what to avoid. We’ll find the right choice for the right segments of our market, and then the rest of the market can follow those who have made the healthy choice. The masses are asses, they might compose our markets, but they should rarely define them, because true profitability is built on the long-haul, rather than the short-run.