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Going out with a bang
Dec. 20th, 2007 09:42 amOr, paradise on £2740 a day.
The worst thing about living in London is that every so often some beardy pops out of the woodwork shouting about infidels, and the next thing you know there's a loud bang, public transport has stopped running and you're twenty minutes late home from work.
Apparently the recent attempted bombings in both London and Glasgow cost the economy over £250m in lost productivity, and, let's face it, they were particularly crap attempts foiled by late night partygoers and a single Scotsman. It's worrying just how expensive even a single inept lunatic can be.
A lot has been made of the whole '72 virgins in paradise' philosophy adhered to and cited as the motivation of many suicide bombers and so I got me to wondering. I'm not sure that 72 virgins could be counted as a good thing - I mean, Jewel Staite gets that at every Firefly convention she attends but I doubt she thinks she's gone to her eternal reward.
However, given how much these social irritants cost, what exactly are the economics of virginity? First up; how much does a virgin actually cost? The best free-market example I could find of this was Rose Reid, a Bristol student who auctioned her virginity on eBay and was offered £10,000, so let us assume we can procude virginity at the going rate of £10,000 (and probably cheaper through if you really wanted to go looking with far-eastern contacts), so that's £720,000 for your basic paradise setup. Now that's not all - these virgins of paradise become virgins again every morning. There is, however, a medical procedure (and you don't even necessarily need an operation - there's a trick mentioned in Fanny Hill, where the same virgin can be sold many times) which can replicate virginity. A Hymen restoration operation (hymenoplasty) will set you back about £500 from a plastic surgeon, so assuming a steady rate of deflowering of 3 a week in paradise each one of your virgins will require this procedure 2.16 times a year at a cost of about £80,000 in total.
Of course, paradise isn't just eternal virgins. You've got to have the other add-ons to make the scene genuinely paradise-like. Tinkling fountains, airy courts and all the sherbert you can eat, for example. Let's say £200,000 to set that up.
So to replicate paradise on earth would cost approximately £1,000,000 per annum per potential suidice bomber. Given that there have only been a dozen or so attempts, we could set up a paradise theme park for disaffected fundamentalists for a mere £12m a year - a significant saving to the economy.
However, state sponsored paradise for the nutter population might not go down very well with all the other self-interest groups out there; we'd see protests from Catholics and Buddhists angry at being left out, and Wiccans and atheists would start detonating themselves in public protests in the hope of getting some of that action so we can't very well restrict paradise in that way. So what better way to give people access to paradise through the tried-and-tested mechanism of market forces? By starting their own company and working hard, pretty much anyone in our society can come to afford their own paradise on earth. I mean, a million quid a year isn't that much in the grand scheme of things. Osama bin Laden, with his (estimated) fortune of £150,000,000, could afford to supply a years worth of paradise for every man, woman and child in both Iraq and Afghanistan without all the mess and inconvenience of war. Of course, he doesn't, and neither do we.
But paradise on earth - it's in our grasp if we're prepared to work for it. I'm surprised more people don't - I mean, the staff at Goldman Sachs figured it out years ago.
The worst thing about living in London is that every so often some beardy pops out of the woodwork shouting about infidels, and the next thing you know there's a loud bang, public transport has stopped running and you're twenty minutes late home from work.
Apparently the recent attempted bombings in both London and Glasgow cost the economy over £250m in lost productivity, and, let's face it, they were particularly crap attempts foiled by late night partygoers and a single Scotsman. It's worrying just how expensive even a single inept lunatic can be.
A lot has been made of the whole '72 virgins in paradise' philosophy adhered to and cited as the motivation of many suicide bombers and so I got me to wondering. I'm not sure that 72 virgins could be counted as a good thing - I mean, Jewel Staite gets that at every Firefly convention she attends but I doubt she thinks she's gone to her eternal reward.
However, given how much these social irritants cost, what exactly are the economics of virginity? First up; how much does a virgin actually cost? The best free-market example I could find of this was Rose Reid, a Bristol student who auctioned her virginity on eBay and was offered £10,000, so let us assume we can procude virginity at the going rate of £10,000 (and probably cheaper through if you really wanted to go looking with far-eastern contacts), so that's £720,000 for your basic paradise setup. Now that's not all - these virgins of paradise become virgins again every morning. There is, however, a medical procedure (and you don't even necessarily need an operation - there's a trick mentioned in Fanny Hill, where the same virgin can be sold many times) which can replicate virginity. A Hymen restoration operation (hymenoplasty) will set you back about £500 from a plastic surgeon, so assuming a steady rate of deflowering of 3 a week in paradise each one of your virgins will require this procedure 2.16 times a year at a cost of about £80,000 in total.
Of course, paradise isn't just eternal virgins. You've got to have the other add-ons to make the scene genuinely paradise-like. Tinkling fountains, airy courts and all the sherbert you can eat, for example. Let's say £200,000 to set that up.
So to replicate paradise on earth would cost approximately £1,000,000 per annum per potential suidice bomber. Given that there have only been a dozen or so attempts, we could set up a paradise theme park for disaffected fundamentalists for a mere £12m a year - a significant saving to the economy.
However, state sponsored paradise for the nutter population might not go down very well with all the other self-interest groups out there; we'd see protests from Catholics and Buddhists angry at being left out, and Wiccans and atheists would start detonating themselves in public protests in the hope of getting some of that action so we can't very well restrict paradise in that way. So what better way to give people access to paradise through the tried-and-tested mechanism of market forces? By starting their own company and working hard, pretty much anyone in our society can come to afford their own paradise on earth. I mean, a million quid a year isn't that much in the grand scheme of things. Osama bin Laden, with his (estimated) fortune of £150,000,000, could afford to supply a years worth of paradise for every man, woman and child in both Iraq and Afghanistan without all the mess and inconvenience of war. Of course, he doesn't, and neither do we.
But paradise on earth - it's in our grasp if we're prepared to work for it. I'm surprised more people don't - I mean, the staff at Goldman Sachs figured it out years ago.
