Can a person's worth to society be quantified?

[RI]

Of course it can--anything can be quantified--but you'd need almost God-like knowledge to do it properly. Without near-perfect information, such a metric would be inherently biased and borderline useless except in highly restricted contexts. So, pretty much what Dibble said.

I'm not sure what the ends to assigning such a number would be though. There are far too many negative uses that I can concieve of whereas there are many fewer positive ones.

Edit: Also, the equations you would have to use would be so interreliant and so multiplicitous that they might not be able to be solved adequately. You'd probably need really complicated vectors and partial differential equations. Not something I'd want to try.

[RI]

Of course it can--anything can be quantified

I think hyper-rationalism like this is misguided.  Some things aren't quantitative, and to try to make you are asking for distortion and neglect of something important.    A person's worth to society is a fuzzy concept outside of a particular tradition about it.  You can limit your definition of worth to things that can be quantified, and limit your definition of society to some discrete, static entity in a transactional relation to an individual.  But that just answers the question with a tautology. The only thing you are measuring then is the extent of your own model.

Did you read the rest of my post?

[RI]

Of course it can--anything can be quantified

I think hyper-rationalism like this is misguided.  Some things aren't quantitative, and to try to make you are asking for distortion and neglect of something important.    A person's worth to society is a fuzzy concept outside of a particular tradition about it.  You can limit your definition of worth to things that can be quantified, and limit your definition of society to some discrete, static entity in a transactional relation to an individual.  But that just answers the question with a tautology. The only thing you are measuring then is the extent of your own model.

Did you read the rest of my post?

I certainly did at least and still think it is wrong (misguided, really).

My point is that it is hypothetically possible to quantify anything in the general sense of the term, but that it's effectively impossible to do so with any accuracy without omniscience (ie extremely detailed and accurate data), which doesn't exist for humanity. In that sense, I agree with shua's post. However, I disagree with the notion that unquantifiable things exist; I believe that some things are insufficiently quantifiable to an objective standard, but that doesn't mean you can't, through some process, assign such a value. To me, saying you can't quantify something at all says that you aren't trying hard enough. If that's misguided, so be it, but it's generally a moot point anyway.