CGTN Europe's brand new podcast The Answers Project seeks to solve some of the world's most burning ethical, scientific and philosophical questions. In this episode, journalists Stephen Cole and Mhairi Beveridge discuss one simple question: How much is a life worth? 

Nothing makes us gauge something's worth more than the thought of losing it. As the COVID-19 pandemic threatened to kill millions upon millions around the world, the value of human life itself was suddenly in question. How many people could humankind afford to save, or to lose?

While the world awaited a vaccine, and the science suggested firmly that the best defense was a lockdown which threatened to devastate economies, governments were pushed ever more firmly towards to placing a value on human life. 

This balance led to unpalatable questions. Should we sacrifice the weak to save the economy? Or should we sacrifice the economy, with all the long-term damage that would wreak, knowing that it could hike the death toll to levels previously unseen outside times of war and plague?

 

 

While arguments raged, many leaders were unwilling to tackle such impossible quandaries in public. But not all of them. On Tuesday May 5, 2020, the then U.S. President Donald Trump – touring an Arizona mask factory, while remaining maskless himself – said: "We can't keep our country closed. We have to open our country." Answering the obvious question, he continued: "Will some people be badly affected? Yes."

At a news conference the very same day, New York state governor Andrew Cuomo had a hugely different take on it. "The question comes back to how much is a human life worth? That's the real discussion that no one is admitting openly or freely. But we should."

 

 

Cuomo added: "To me, I say a human life is priceless. Our reopening plan doesn't have a trade-off. Our reopening plan says you monitor the data, you monitor the transmission rate, you monitor the hospitalization rate, you monitor the death rate. 

"But it is a conversation that we should have, openly. A hard conversation, painful conversation, controversial conversation. Yes, all of the above. But it's also the right conversation."

 

Risk and probability

While ethically, many may believe that life is priceless, governments have to make decisions that save or cost lives. Without mathematical models based on risk and probability, governments would make subjective choices favoring one group over another.

Policymakers and economists have been wrestling with this for as long as there have been policymakers and economists. With finite financial resources, estimates must be made as to how best to spend money in order to protect or save lives.

Until the 1980s, they looked at the cost of death – the medical costs of people being ill and dying, and then the loss of earnings after they died – and in the U.S. they came up with a figure of around $300,000 dollars per human life. That dial moved when W Kip Viscusi, a professor at Vanderbilt Law School in Tennessee, was approached by Ronald Reagan's government. 

 

 

"The Occupational Safety and Health Administration proposed the Hazard Communication regulation, so for the first time, dangerous chemicals would be labeled in the workplace, which seems like a reasonable thing to do," Viscusi tells CGTN Europe. 

"But they calculated the benefits of the regulation and calculated the costs were greater than the benefits. And the reason was, they said that your life is only worth what you make, so it's just based on the future earnings of a worker."

At $300,000 per worker, that wasn't high enough to add life-saving warnings to chemicals. Viscusi could see why – "We don't spend an unlimited amount on safety in any context" – but unlike most people, he found himself in a position to change things. 

"After the regulation was rejected, they appealed it and I was asked to resolve the dispute. I concluded the Office of Management and Budget was right on everything except one thing: You have to change the number of how much a death is worth."

 

 

Viscusi literally changed the government's estimation of human worth. Instead of earning potential, he calculated how much a typical worker would pay to stay safe – to live in a more expensive but safer neighborhood, to drive a safer but pricier car, to avoid a riskier but better-remunerated job. He came up with the figure of $3 million in 1992, which updates to around $10m in today's money. 

"If you increase the benefits of the regulation by a factor of 10, the benefits then exceed the costs. A couple of days after my report arrived in support of the regulation, they issued it. That was the turning point in the United States for adopting this different approach, for valuing risks to life."

Since then, many countries have adopted Viscusi's system or similarly reevaluated the worth of human life – but not all. 

"It takes a while to get out of the mindset that lives are only worth the value of your income. But we do know that the higher the number you place on what lives are worth, the more stringent the safety regulations are, the more stringent the environmental regulations will be and the number of lives that are lost will go down."

 

Isn't life priceless?

There are many who would argue that human life cannot be given a monetary value, like Christian theologian Anthony G Reddie, Director of the Oxford Centre for Religion and Culture.

"Life is incalculable, certainly in monetary or commercial terms," Reddie tells CGTN Europe. "Life is a gift from God: we can prolong life, we can sustain life, and with good development and with our social arrangements, we can even enhance life. What we can't do is create in the first place. 

"Therefore, any attempt to try to make calculations and some sort of determination as to one life and its value against another life is always problematic. I understand that people have to do it for various reasons, but I fundamentally believe that life is so precious that it is beyond any type of measure."

 

 

Reddie's reasons are not solely based in theology. "I'm not just a Christian theologian, I'm a black liberation theologian," he explains. "I am a diasporan African. My ancestors were born in Africa but were taken by the slave trade into the diaspora, mainly in the Caribbean and North America. 

"There was a time when people like my ancestors were seen as chattel, as commodities – and there was a literal value to us because we were not beings, we were objects that could be owned."

This expression of the monetary value of human life was not limited to the slave trade; even with abolition, some governments had to pay compensation for emancipation, as Reddie explains.  

"When slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833, a price was put on the lives of enslaved people in order for them to be set free. And that price was 20 million pounds." That's around 16.5 billion pounds, or $22.84bn, in today's money.

 

 

"So 20 million pounds was paid to the slave owners – all white Europeans. And therefore, a part of my sense of it being immoral to put a value on human life is because historically that's what has happened."

Reddie also warns that giving lives fiscal value can quickly lead to inequality. "Life in the industrial west, particularly if it's white life, is [seen as] more valuable than the life of anonymous people in faraway places. So when tragedy happens, we feel bad, but we don't feel terrible. 

"If we had that sense of every life being sacred, the scandals of hunger and starvation and war and genocide wouldn't happen, precisely because we knew that every life in every part of the world in every individual absolutely needed to be protected."

 

Why we value death more than life

That idea of distancing from disaster is part of the reason for compassion fatigue. With charities and good causes competing for limited attention and funding, the theory is that death or disaster affects us more when it's on our doorstep than in a distant place. 

Ioannis Evangelidis is an assistant professor of marketing at ESADE Business School in Barcelona, Spain, and he has studied "how people donate to victims of natural disaster" – or, as he puts it rather more bluntly, "How you can influence people when they donate." And it seems people make a very simple, but counterintuitive, calculation.

 

 

"Donation amounts and decisions are heavily influenced by the number of fatalities in the disaster," he reveals. "People are more sensitive to the number of people who die compared to the number of people who survive but need assistance. 

"That's not the right response in a way because we have all these people who survived a disaster who are homeless, injured, who need assistance – people don't react to these victims who survive."

Running the numbers, Evangelidis even came up with a figure – every extra death gathered $9,000 in donations. "Obviously, that amount is debatable – you can run different models and get different solutions. We had a 10-year dataset."

Evangelidis is scientifically dispassionate about his findings. "We often react more to one life than thousands of statistical lives – there's a lot of evidence for that in psychology. Clearly, we don't have a metric to evaluate human lives inherently, the innate ability to assign a monetary value in a rational manner."

 

 

Life insurance: A practical consideration

Sometimes we have to assess how much our own life is worth – such as when organizing life insurance. Here, circumstance matters immensely, as Joanna Scott, the policy adviser for health and protection insurance at the Association of British Insurers, tells CGTN. 

"In terms of how much coverage people should take out, every life is different," she says. "It's not necessarily about how much a life is worth, but more about what an individual wants to protect. If you have dependents, you might want to pay off the rest of your mortgage or any other debts; if you have young kids, you might want to think about their schooling or university."

For those wanting to do a quick calculation, Scott says "a typical rule of thumb is to have a policy which is 10 times your annual salary" and she notes that "People often underestimate how much life insurance they need."

Being fantastically various, people also differ in their expectations. When a survey on price comparison site Moneysupermarket.com asked users to estimate the amount of life insurance cover they thought they would need, people in the art and design industry suggested around half a million pounds ($692,000), whereas people working in childcare thought they'd only need around $20,000.

 

 

Unequal in the eyes of the law

Such decisions on life value may be intensely personal but sometimes governments are faced to make them on a wide scale.

American attorney Kenneth Feinberg specializes in alternative dispute resolution and has been called in by the U.S. government to decide compensation levels for the innocent victims of disasters like 9/11, the Boston Marathon bombings and the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion.

 

 

Feinberg is well aware of the gravity of such a task: "I am delegated the authority to value the lives of those killed or physically injured as a result of these tragedies," he tells CGTN Europe. "And I've been doing this for too long, probably about 40 years."

However, the hard part is not the mathematics. "The formula was not that difficult," he admits. "The emotion is extremely difficult – it's debilitating. But the actual formula, here in the United States and I might add in England and in most common-law countries, is relatively straightforward: What would the victim have earned over a work life but for the tragedy? 

"Now, that, of course, is very controversial, but it's been the law for 200 years. A stockbroker or a banker or a lawyer or a doctor gets much more compensation than the waiter, the busboy, the soldier, the cop, the fireman: they earn more."

For Feinberg, this is not an airy theoretical topic. "Lives are not equal in the eyes of the law," he says. "In Western countries like England, the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, lives are inherently unequal, and it is rare indeed that similar victims of a tragedy receive the same valuation. And that's just the reality of Western societies."

 

Previously on The Answers Project: Will soldiers become obsolete? • When should children start school?

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