| Originally posted to Reddit. See Thread |
This was posted as a response to the question, "You have 3 wishes, but every word you say for your wishes, you become 10 years older. How old are you?"
In my area right now the minimum wage is $10.10 with an average workweek of 35.26 hours, resulting in a gross annual income of about $18,500 for a minimum-wage worker. For each word of your wish, the result should be worth at least $185,000 just to adjust for lost wages. Obviously if you make more at your current job you'll need to inflate this number accordingly.
This doesn't account for the expected growth of a person's income over time. If we assume an annual pay raise of 3.1% we can determine that the same minimum-wage worker actually loses, on the
yth year, 18500 * 1.031y, or $25,130 on the 10th year. During the first decade the wishmaker actually loses a total of about $220,000.
That's only the fiscal losses for working time, and is fairly conservative in that it assumes no major growths such as promotions, education, or chance opportunities.
Estimating the value of the lost non-working time is a bit harder.
Using the available US statistical data to quantify the value of a human life, a human life is valued at about $9.6 million. In the United States the average life expectancy is about 79 years. From this we can gather that a single year is worth about $122,000 and ten years is worth $1,220,000.
This is a slightly better figure than we would get if we assumed a minimum working wage for all lost hours in the decade (about $1.05 million) so we'll go with this number instead.
For your wish to break even fiscally, the very first word of your wish needs to add $1.22 million in value to the result of the wish.
But if your wish simply replaces the $1.22 million you didn't make in your lost ten years then there was really no point in making it anyway. For you to be bothered to make such a wish the subsequent ten years, or longer, needs to be significantly better than they would have been if you hadn't given up a decade of your life.
An easy benchmark to accomplish this would be to say "the next ten years needs to be better than those years and the lost years combined". Using the figures from before, the second year is worth about $298,390 in working hours or $1.43 million in total hours (better than the US statistics at $1.22 million, because of the assumed growth in income). The value of the first word of your wish needs to be at least $1.43 million for the decade following the lost years, plus $1.22 million for the lost years themselves, for a total of $2.65 million at a minimum.
To wish for any amount of money takes several words. "I wish for one Xillion dollars" is six words, or sixty years. Fortunately we can use any prefix we like in place of the "X" to inflate the number to an order of magnitude that will draw a profit. Unfortunately, in order break even on sixty years valued at minimum wage for every hour lived (about $15.5 billion) the word would need to be "trillion". Fortunately 1 trillion is so much bigger than 15.5 billion that we can safely ignore the demand for a higher quality of life in the following years and assume that the extra $984.5 billion covers it.
One could say that to reasonably make even a single wish they would need to wish for at least a trillion dollars, or something else worth that much.
Most people value their time at considerably more than $10.10 per hour, especially when they consider quality time with kids, vacations, and quiet mornings on the front porch. In reality whatever amount one makes at work is probably the lowest number one could use for the value of their time.