How much is a human life worth?

It is said “there are no stupid questions”. True, but there are wrong questions and stupid answers.

The first invites people to be curious and is laudable, one cannot learn unless one is asking questions. It is something that humans have a native inclination from the moment we are born, and unfortunately most of us grow out of it as we become adults.

All “stupid” questions are safe as long as the person asked knows the subject and can reframe the question if needed. If nobody knows the right answer, it is a dangerous situation and most likely it is a wrong question. When dealing with the unknown, all questions should be audited for implied unvalidated hypotheses.

Why the sun moves from east to west from dawn to sunset? It is a question that implies the hypothesis that the sun moves around the earth, which wrongly frames the reality. Such framing, locked humanity for thousands of years into a school of thought until somebody reframed the relativity of movement. Now, a former wrong question became a naive question that majority of people can answer, significantly fewer can also explain.

How much is a human life worth? Priceless! is the politically correct rhetoric of NY Governor, but it is NOT the “hard truth”

As humans, we take pride in the humanity, the good, selfless acts typically directed towards other humans with some exceptions. Still, one easily finds the counter-examples with inhuman actions against other people, other species or directly aimed at earth, water and air, the very foundation of our existence. We take excuse in the fact that these are side effects of our evolution and postpone the urgency of a solution, or even better, chose to ignore what does not belong to our immediate reality.

In the same study metioned above, one gets familiar with the concept of VSL — value of statistical life “We measure the economic value of avoided mortality from mitigation policies in each country using Viscusi and Masterman (2017)’s country-specific value of statistical life (VSL) estimates”.

As you look from this perspective, it is easy to ponder why the life of an old person in a developed country is more valueable than the life of a child in a low-income country.

From a psychopath pragmatic view the world seems to run on the rule that the value of a life of a person is equal the amount of consumption ($ spent) expected until his/her demise. It is very similar to the CLV-Customer Lifetime Value used in business. On that account, the value of an old person in his/hers last 5 years of life is very likely thousands of times the value of a newly born child in a low-income country that is expected to die at the age of 5.

There are the “lucky” few, whose lives worth more than its economic value and those may be artist, thinkers, religious leaders, politicians. For those, regardless of their economic value the society will make the extra effort to keep alive.

I was tempted to write above VIPs, still some people are important only because of their intrinsec economic value. I will always remember back in 2004, when landing in Teheran, Iran on a business trip while with P&G, that I was welcomed not in the VIP lounge but in the CIP one “commercially important persons”. I was used neither with VIP nor with CIP status but the event made me reflect on the difference between the two.

To conclude, your life may be priceless to you, family and friends. The priceless aspect of the miracle of life is no longer a relevant attribute when comparing people between them.

Nature does not run on economic models. It runs on becoming anti-fragile as Nassim Nicholas Taleb remarks in his book “Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder”

“Consider that Mother Nature is not just “safe.” It is aggressive in destroying and replacing, in selecting and reshuffling . When it comes to random events, “robust” is certainly not good enough. In the long run everything with the most minute vulnerability breaks, given the ruthlessness of time — yet our planet has been around for perhaps four billion years and, convincingly, robustness can’t just be it: you need perfect robustness for a crack not to end up crashing the system. Given the unattainability of perfect robustness, we need a mechanism by which the system regenerates itself continuously by using, rather than suffering from, random events, unpredictable shocks, stressors, and volatility”

The reality is that in low-income countries the nature will have its course with little influence of humans, fortunately the people living there are more equipped to survive the current challenge, even on accounts that population is younger .

For developed countries, we are fighting nature, apply economic models and attempt to become more resilient. Resiliency is a great human treat, but are we heading in the right direction?

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