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In 1896 a georgia couple suing for damages inthe accidentaldeath of their two year old was told that since the child had made no real economiccontribution to the family, therewas no liability for damages. in contrast, lessthan a century later, in 1979, the parents of a three year old sued in New York foraccidental-death damages and wonan award of $750,000. thetransformation in social values implicit in juxta- posing these two incidents is thesubject of viviana  zelizer'sexcellent book, <i>pricing the priceless child</i>. during the nineteenth century, sheargues, the concept of the"useful" child who contributed to the family economy gave way gradually to thepresent-day notion of the"useless" child who, though producing no income for, and indeed extremely costly to,its parents, is yet consideredemotionally "priceless." well established among segments of the middle and upperclasses by the mid-1800's, thisnew view of childhood spread through- outsociety in the iate-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries as reformers introducedchild-labor regulations andcompulsory education laws predicated in part on the assumption that a child's emotionalvalue made child labor taboo. for zelizer the origins of thistransformation were  many andcomplex. the gradual erosion of children's productivevalue in a maturing industrial economy, thedecline in birth and death rates, especially in child mortality, and the development of thecompanionate family (a family inwhich members were united by explicit bonds of love rather than duty) were all factors critical in changing the assessment ofchildren's worth. yet"expulsion of children from the 'cash nexus,'... although clearly shaped by profoundchanges in the economic,occupational, and family structures," zelizer  maintains. "was also part of acultural process 'of sacralization' of children's lives. " protectingchildren from the crass businessworld became enormously important for late-nineteenth-centurymiddle-class Americans, she suggests;this sacralization was a way of resisting what they perceived as the relentlesscorruption of human values by the marketplace. instressing the cultural determinants of a child's worth. zelizer takes issue withpractitioners of the new "sociologicaleconomics," who have analyzed such traditionally sociological topics ascrime, marriage, education, and health solely in terms of their economicdeterminants. allowing only a small role for cultural forces in the form of individual"preferences," these sociologists tendto view all human behavior as directed primarily by the principle of maximizing economicgain. zelizer is highly criticalof this approach, and emphasizes instead theopposite phenomenon: the power of social values to
transform price. as children became morevaluable in emotional terms, sheargues, their "exchange" or " surrender" value on themarket, that is, the conversion of theirintangible worth into cash terms, became much greater.
1.   itcan be inferred from the passage that accidental-death damage awards in Americaduring the nineteenth century tended to be based principally on the
(a) earnings of the person at time of death
(b) wealth of the party causing the death