Surely there should be a simple answer to this question?  Well, there’s not!  But a very good estimate was put forward by Rhett Allain (Associate Professor of Physics at Southeastern Louisiana University) in an article in Wired magazine.

Prof Allain took publicly available data (kit prices and number of pieces per kit, available on the LEGO online store) and sorted all the info by theme (Star Wars™, Friends™, etc).  After crunching and graphing the data (and really, readers, if you haven’t already, you need to go back up and click the link to see the chart that the Prof produced!) he provides an answer – a single piece of LEGO® in a kit costs 10.4 US cents, on average.

He goes on to use this data to estimate the price of a LEGO® set with no pieces (US$7.34) and the LEGO® kit offering the most value (he recommends the Trevi Fountain, with 731 pieces for just US$49.99 – a set with this many pieces should cost about US$83!).

He concludes his article with homework!  If you’ve got a LEGO®-mad budding mathematician in the house, throw a few of these at him or her – I especially like this one:

I heard someone say that there are enough Lego bricks for everyone on the Earth to have 75 bricks. If these bricks were then sold (at a reasonable value) to some alien (off world) traders, how much would they have to pay for all the Earth’s Lego bricks?

Anyone? 🙂