In 1896 a Georgia couple suing for damages in theaccidental death of their two year old wa

In 1896 a Georgia couple suing for damages in the

accidental death of their two year old was told that since

the child had made no real economic contribution to the

family, there was no liability for damages. In contrast,

(5) less than a century later, in 1979, the parents of a three

year old sued in New York for accidental-death damages

and won an award of $750,000.

The transformation in social values implicit in juxta-

posing these two incidents is the subject of Viviana

(10) Zelizer’s excellent book, Pricing the Priceless Child.

During the nineteenth century, she argues, the concept

of the “useful” child who contributed to the family

economy gave way gradually to the present-day notion

of the “useless” child who, though producing no income

(15) for, and indeed extremely costly to, its parents, is yet

considered emotionally “priceless.” Well established

among segments of the middle and upper classes by the

mid-1800’s, this new view of childhood spread through-

out society in the iate-nineteenth and early-twentieth

(20) centuries as reformers introduced child-labor regulations

and compulsory education laws predicated in part on the

assumption that a child’s emotional value made child

labor taboo.

For Zelizer the origins of this transformation were

(25) many and complex. The gradual erosion of children’s

productive value in a maturing industrial economy,

the decline in birth and death rates, especially in child

mortality, and the development of the companionate

family (a family in which members were united by

(30) explicit bonds of love rather than duty) were all factors

critical in changing the assessment of children’s worth.

Yet “expulsion of children from the ‘cash nexus,’...

although clearly shaped by profound changes in the

economic, occupational, and family structures,” Zelizer

(35) maintains. “was also part of a cultural process ‘of sacral-

ization’ of children’s lives. ” Protecting children from the

crass business world became enormously important for

late-nineteenth-century middle-class Americans, she

suggests; this sacralization was a way of resisting what

(40) they perceived as the relentless corruption of human

values by the marketplace.

In stressing the cultural determinants of a child’s

worth. Zelizer takes issue with practitioners of the new

“sociological economics,” who have analyzed such tradi-

(45) tionally sociological topics as crime, marriage, educa-

tion, and health solely in terms of their economic deter-

minants. Allowing only a small role for cultural forces

in the form. of individual “preferences,” these sociologists

tend to view all human behavior. as directed primarily by

(50) the principle of maximizing economic gain. Zelizer is

highly critical of this approach, and emphasizes instead

the opposite phenomenon: the power of social values to

transform. price. As children became more valuable in

emotional terms, she argues, their “exchange” or “ sur-

(55) render” value on the market, that is, the conversion of

their intangible worth into cash terms, became much

greater.

It can be inferred from the passage that accidental-death damage awards in America during 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

C．degree of culpability of the party causing the death

D．amount of money that had been spent on the person killed

E．amount of suffering endured by the family of the person killed