How Much is a Dollar?

Money serves a vital role in our lives. With legal tender, a small scrap of paper and a promise becomes sufficient to pay for all our groceries. We also use it as a relative marker such as Brent Crude Oil being at $109 a barrel. Then there’s the value of our everyday work, such as the purchasing power parity per capita ranging from $100k/a to $0.5k/a depending upon your country of residence. We even put a value on life, which can go up to $6M. You’d think that with this fantastically utile item then our lives would be completely in order.

Let’s check to see if things are in order. First, let’s look at human worth of $6M. If we work to the value of $100k/a then we need to work for 60 years to equal that amount. If we work at $0.5k/a then we need to work 12000 years for the same goal. Now the average global life expectancy is 67 years. This doesn’t look to be in order.

Let’s look another way. Each life is worth $6M. Now take the value of oil and the energy content of oil. This results in an assessed human worth of 3.4e14J of energy. If a person works for 45 years then they’d have to work 7.5e12J each year to cover this worth. That’s 2e10J/day. However, the daily dietary energy consumption is 1.6e7J/day. How can we eat so little and be worth so much? Why does the value of a dollar seem so at odds with everyday issues?
DOLLAR FLOWER