Slave Prices

I think it's important to know your price as a slave. These prices are super easy to calculate.

Old slave prices are basically wergild. Your average churl was worth 200 solids (shillings, s) which at the time were gold, so this is something like $50,000. 

Modern prices are also easy. Use your standard P/E ratio of 20, a man is worth around $700,000. 

I am particularly amused at noting how a woman is worth very roughly 1/2 what a similar-class man is worth. The webpage of course has no idea they're casually disproving like all of egalitarianism, which just makes it better. This is why dowries are common and bride prices are rare.

Don't worry, the value of a womb is already factored in; that's the free market for you. Wombs are important, but I don't know if you've heard: almost every woman has one. A lot of fertile women aren't even using their wombs right now. Value is high but supply is higher.
Even in times where wombs were used like industrial machinery afraid of capital depreciation, the survival chances of the resulting child back-propagated into the value of the womb. Having more kids under Malthusianism only makes the survival of each kid less likely. Maximum human fertility is in the 5 range, meaning you only need about 1/10th of all women to stably reproduce. It's not just men that are disposable: most women are disposable too. 

On the flip side, the raw value of women is so high that it's fine for a family to have girls now. Don't have to pray for a son. Gonna be rich either way, really.

For reference, the standard cost of raising a child is something like $200,000. Room + board + other essentials + presents + labour. (I figured this once to work out how much a human brain costs, so I could compare to a comparable supercomputer. For further reference, an ant costs about 5c...and can probably drive a self-driving car if you could work out how to hook it up.) 

Here's the kicker: Capitalism makes the price of life goes up dramatically. Why is a churl worth $50,000 and a voter worth $700,000? Productivity improvements. An hour of the latter's labour produces more than ten times as much raw stuff as the former. 

Does the world look like we value individual lives more? It should. The market knows. Lives are genuinely immensely valuable. The more Capitalist the society is, the more valuable lives will become. 

What drove women into the workforce? Most likely, demand for labour. Even at a 50% discount, you can get a lot of raw value out of each woman's time. The politics is a mere slave to the prices.

Checksum: life insurance. If you get a solid term insurance plan (the only valid kind) you will likely get a quote in the $1,000,000 range, as should be expected. (A 20-year million-dollar plan will cost a healthy 30-year-old man under $40 a month. Less than your phone, probably. P.S. If you haven't read about insurable risk, you should.) 

(P.P.S. Wergild is vastly more civilized than prison and capital punishment is just wergild with fewer options.)

 

On the flip side that just makes it that much more impressive when someone in the modern world manages to be a net drain on society. Really? You squandered nearly a million dollars? And you're not even 20 yet? Look, that doesn't happen by accident. A lot of hard work goes into frittering away that much money. It's a serious accomplishment. The reward should be death, but never mind that. You gotta respect the dedication.

Ironically, at the same time women were being pulled into the workforce, lots of human capital was being destroyed and driven below the break-even point, so the actual labour force participation barely changed. It merely made the workforce more feminine, as per feminine Fascism mores. You know, more like the mode of work that's only 50% as valuable as the most efficient kind. Naturally this also depressed the birth rate, guaranteeing there would be less total stuff in the future. 

Imagine you had to pay market rate for abortions. I don't care to do net-present-value calculations, so let's just call it $300,000 plus or minus class scaling. Presumably ninjas would actually get paid for abortions.
Although an amusing thought, this would be bad. Everyone is looking forward to all the bad parents, who didn't want kids anyway, gracefully exiting the gene pool. No fuss, no muss, no ethnic cleansing. They can fornicate as much they want; be my guest. We can start charging after they're gone.

When calculating your own slave price, don't forget that at the individual level you're allowed to include intangibles and illiquid assets. Or you can imagine you wanted to leave a nest egg for your kids (or other allies) by selling yourself into slavery: how much do you have to be paid for the contract to feel like it's an even trade? Well, there you go. That's how much you're worth.