What measure is used to guage the impact of a human beings death?

Answer 1

There are a lot of ways to guage a person's impact in death, but the question is where are you coming from? For insurance purposes when a death is caused by another person it might be their age, their income, their value to their family, the potential, the current state of affairs, and also the pain and suffering they went through and how much either the judge or jury wants to punish the person who caused the death. It is said that a family of a person who died in 9/11 will receive well over a million dollars, average. The family of a soldier who dies in Iraq will receive $5,000-$10,000!!! Why the difference? Good question. Who set up that guage?

But what about in history, how does one guage a person's value or impact when let's say a huge number of people die? How much does it change the society they lived in or the region of their community. When 10-12 million Africans were forcibly removed from Africa, what effect did that have on the continent? There are some who believe it set the entire continent back a hundred to two hundred years. Now that is impact! Other times in history, sad to say, when a person or family or village dies or is destroyed, there is very little impact. Why? Now that is the stuff of a Ph.D. dissertation.