Personal Consumption and Single Persons

After examining the competing perspectives regarding single person consumption, this paper makes an effort to improve the quantification of economic losses in cases involving the wrongful death of single persons. I show a new disaggregation of the Consumer Expenditure Survey microdata source which is then used to calculate various economic loss measures warranted by legal jurisdiction and economic thought. Traditional personal consumption methodology computes economic losses as the decedent's earnings multiplied by one minus a personal consumption rate. This paper adds a new method of computing economic losses as the decedent's earnings multiplied by the percent of survivors' or estate's benefit from those earnings. Significant differences result between the methods and in the personal consumption amounts between males and females and wage-earners and non-wage earners of retirement age. It was also discovered that some single-person maintenance consumption results may be applicable to married persons.