Valuing People

For months, people the world over have been grappling with a silent killer that invades their bodies and chokes off their ability to breathe. It is indiscriminate in gender and nationality, but more fatal to the elderly, the poor, certain ethnic minorities, and the chronically ill. In the United States, the official death toll recently passed 100,000 lives. Experts estimate the actual figure to be much higher.

A few days ago in the United States, we witnessed a handcuffed black man being choked unto death by a white man in uniform. I can’t breathe, he managed, shortly before breathing his last. The nine-minute video was oddly familiar, as though we had seen it before. And we have – over and over again. The risk of a man in the United States being killed by a police officer is 1 in 2,000. For black men, 1 in 1,000. [https://www.pnas.org/content/116/34/16793]

Be it by an infectious virus or on the knee of law enforcement, the loss of life is costly. The United States places a value of $10 million on a life [https://www.npr.org/2020/04/15/835571843/episode-991-lives-vs-the-economy]. It’s the value used to determine policy. For example, the dollar value of a seat belt law relative to the number of lives it is expected to save relies on that figure.

By this measure, America has lost a stunning $1,000,000,000,000 to COVID-19 in less than four months. It can expect to lose an additional $210,000,000,000 if one out of every 1,000 live American Black men died. These unimaginably large sums prompt a question of how and why we should allow such waste.

I can hear it already. The objections of those who say that while “a” life may be worth $10 million for statistical planning purposes, “those” lives are not worth nearly that much. To them, I’d only ask: what is “your” life worth, to you and those who love you.

For the loss of life is always tragic. Everyone has a right to live, free of disease, and free of the threat of death at the hands of another. We hold these truths to be, self-evident.

Ah, but we can do so much better.

Rest in peace, all you whose lives we failed to keep safe from harm.