The Value of Life
A student committed suicide a few weeks ago, jumping from the top of the building where I was working. Dropping past our office windows, a crumpled body ended up on the road a few floors below: the immediacy of what had just happened made the young man’s death up close and personal. The same three thoughts swirled around the offices: the horror of the event; the inability to grasp what could have led him to kill himself; and the unimaginable grief his family would experience. Just next to the door I used each day to enter and leave the building, a small shrine developed, a collection of flowers in bouquets, some others loosely added to the pile, a couple of cards and a small note. These testimonies to a life suddenly ended are always sad, but this was even more so, a small collection, almost hidden away in a corner next to the entrance.
On average, two people commit suicide every day in Melbourne. Most appear to be the result of ‘mood disorders’ or various forms of mental disease; a much smaller number are associated with the presence of drugs, alcohol or other substances in the individuals’ blood. [i] Although I have no way of knowing the extent, all these deaths represent more than just an individual’s demise, they are a loss to the community, a contribution unrealised. Despite that, most of the time suicides go largely unnoticed: a man throws himself in front of a commuter train, a woman hangs herself. A brief mention in the newspaper, often not even that, a death invisible to most of us.
In Western law, a human life is ‘priceless’: humans can’t be bought at any price, the corollary of making any kind of slavery illegal. It took a long time to ensure people were priceless in law, however, and there are many jurisdictions where this is still not the case. It is more than just a matter of rights, of course. A human being is an extraordinary thing, a unique combination of capabilities, potentialities and various limitations. By committing suicide, that student’s life was incomplete, unfulfilled, and the same is true for those whose lives are brought short in other ways, killed in a traffic accident, or shot by a fanatic. I’ve quoted it before, but John Donne had it expressed perfectly: “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind”.
Outside legal concerns, there are actuaries, the statisticians of mortality risk. An actuary is a mathematician who deals with the measurement and management of risk and uncertainty, events that “affect both sides of the balance sheet and require asset management, liability management, and valuation skills”. [ii] True to their profession, they have developed a measuring stick for the value of a life, focussing on the cost of reducing the average number of deaths by one. Economists have jumped on to this concept, and they have focussed on determining the value of a statistical life (VSL). As I read about this, I was informed the VSL is very different from the value of an actual life. It is the value placed on changes in the likelihood of death, not the price someone would pay to avoid certain death. Only economists would think like this!
In practice, various organisations have determined a figure for VSL. In Australia and New Zealand it is around $4m. In the USA, three groups have made their separate determinations: $9.1m by the Environmental Protection Agency; $7.9m by the Food and Drug Administration; and $9.6m by the Federal Department of Transportation. For the sake of further discussion, let’s pick a figure in the middle: $6m. On that basis, we can take this exercise a bit further. The world’s population today is a little over 7.5bn. Multiply that number by the $6m per person, and we come up with a total figure for the value of humanity in the region of $45,000 quadrillions (as you might know, a quadrillion is a thousand billion). Quite clearly, the world’s population is worth a lot, and it would cost a huge sum to save everyone.
All this calculating is obviously silly. First, on empirical grounds many countries have much lower figures for the value of life. Several European countries have released VSL figures, and they seem to come in at around $2m. Going further afield, one study in India came up with a figure of $1m. [iii] A commentator in Nigeria recently concluded that “Nigerian life would be worth next to nothing”. [iv] Unless we choose to accept one country’s valuation over all the others, the worth of the world’s population is almost impossible to measure (although I fear offering such a challenge is going to inspire an actuary or economist to have a go). More to the point, that sort of calculation would only make sense if we were contemplating the extinction of the human race, and that is quite clearly a ridiculous idea, isn’t it?
In the same week as the young man committed suicide from our building, the Australian Public Television network (the ABC) broadcast a documentary: Climate Change: The Facts with David Attenborough. It was about another suicide, a slow-motion demise in this case, as we bring about the destruction of the human world as we know it. Attenborough made what scientists see happening very clear: we are slowly strangling ourselves. If we don’t take decisive action quickly, we’re almost certainly ensuring a nasty end to humankind. Like the suicide at work, what is happening seems to be taking place without too many people paying enough attention, all too easily ignored in this case as the first victims are likely to be far away from the comfortable worlds of Australian, Europe and North America. For now, we are insulated from the human impact of this slow-motion act of suicide, largely impervious to the consequences of our actions in this process. Thoughtlessly strangling yourself is a strange way to commit suicide. It must be a kind of mental illness.
Are we committing suicide? A vivid example of what we choose to hear about but then ignore concerns water. Many parts of the world are beginning to run out of drinkable water, but not us. We read about water shortages, but don’t grasp how we are contributing to the problem. It might be a challenge ‘over there’, but we can still turn on the tap and the water flows. However, there is a major problem, and, according to the World Resources Institute, previously unimaginable water crises are becoming commonplace. The Institute has identified seventeen countries, home to one-quarter of the world’s population, which are facing “extremely high” levels of baseline water stress, ones “where irrigated agriculture, industries and municipalities withdraw more than 80% of their available supply on average every year. In those seventeen countries, fluctuations like droughts or increased water withdrawals can be catastrophic. Another forty-four countries, home to one-third of the world’s people, face “high” levels of stress, where on average more than 40% of available supply is withdrawn every year”. [v]
There was a dramatic illustration of this last year, when Cape Town came close to ‘Zero Day’, a day the city would have no water. Today, reservoirs in Chennai (India’s sixth largest city) are nearly empty. The countries with extremely high baseline stress are mainly in the Middle East, but also include Israel (second most vulnerable) and India and Pakistan (13th and 14th on the list). Several European countries are identified as having ‘High’ levels of baseline stress, while Australia and South Africa are rated at ‘Medium High’. Only Medium High for South Africa, but specific areas can be at a much greater risk, as was the case with Cape Town in early 2018.
Shortages of water are increasing for two reasons. The first is climate change. Climate change is affecting weather patterns, and we are all aware there is a slow but steady increase in global temperatures. July 2019 was the hottest month on record. However, while heat is a challenge, the important shifts are in a variety of factors influencing our climate, from ocean currents to prevailing winds to the extent and ferocity of typhoons and hurricanes. While these changes are affecting the weather worldwide, it is becoming clear that the most severe effects are most often felt first in the equatorial regions, in the countries between the two tropics. At the same time, while average temperatures increase, some areas face colder than usual winters, needing more power to offset these changes. As this happens, our ability to shift to renewable sources is slowed as we are forced to hang on to coal fired power stations to ensure there is enough supply. Already, in some regions electricity shortages are becoming common. But power generation can increase the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and that accelerates climate change. It’s a vicious circle. Increased temperatures are having other effects. Evidence the permafrost in northern parts of Russia is melting is a new concern: as it melts, the permafrost releases trapped methane, and that is a far more powerful source of climate change than carbon dioxide.
If climate change is one reason why access to drinkable water is becoming limited, the second reason is population pressure. In 1900 the world’s population was 1.6bn; by 1960 it had doubled to 3bn; it had doubled again by 1999. Overall, population growth continues. Although the rate is slowing, in the world’s poorest countries the growth rate remains high. At the same time, people have been moving: in 1900, a little over 16% of the world’s population lived in cities, leaving 83% in rural areas. Now 56% live in cities, and the percentage is expected to increase to 68% by 2050. [vi] More people living more densely, putting increased pressure on resources, like potable water, as well as a further growth in demand for energy. David Attenborough made it clear: we have about another ten years before we reach a tipping point, when these changes will have irreversible consequences – we won’t be able to get back to the way things were.
Why can’t we see and act on this? Like lemmings, we are hurtling to the cliff edge, while agreeing things might be getting worse. As you know, it is often hard to stop an individual determined to suicide. It’s likely the young man who jumped off our building needed someone to talk to him, at least to give him a chance to rethink. In suicides, a critical issue is often a lack of connection to others. I think the same might be true about global suicide. Most of us are complicit in strangling humanity through a lack of connection to everyone else. We don’t see and feel the slum lives of people in India or South America. We don’t join with the children digging through waste in Indonesia, or picking out useful bits on scrap electronics in Pakistan. We see the stories on television, but we are sheltered, sitting on the other side of a window.
Is it already too late? Greta Thunberg is a young Swedish activist who became well-known when her actions started the school-based climate strike movement. Her model for change was based on the ‘March for Our Lives’, the movement for gun control, following the massacre at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in February 2018. She supported the idea that school children could strike for climate change, but after failing to get others to get involved, Greta decided to go ahead and strike by herself. She saw herself as a ‘messenger’, not a spokesperson or a climate scientist, (if everyone listened to the scientists and acknowledged the facts, “then we could all go back to school”). For three weeks in school hours she stood with a sign Skolstrejk för klimatet (school strike for the climate), and handed out leaflets commenting: “I am doing this because you adults are shitting on my future.” She inspired school students across the globe to take part in similar strikes. By March 2019, more than 1.6m students had held strikes in over 2000 cities. In August, she left for New York, by yacht from the UK, (to minimise carbon emissions), to attend the United Nations Climate Action Summit in September. Her actions were one among many contributions sparking the broader ‘Extinction Rebellion’ campaign. [vii]
Doing the right thing while so many others sit idly by? Fans are cheering Thunberg on and following her lead, but her fame has exposed her to vigorous opposition. “Conservative French politicians mocked Thunberg when she spoke to French lawmakers last month as a “prophetess in shorts.” Steve Milloy, a former member of President Trump’s transition team, described her last week as “a teenage puppet.” Undeterred, she told her critics, “we become the bad guys who have to tell people these uncomfortable things because no one else wants to, or dares to.” She has also vowed to ignore climate change skeptics. “Climate delayers want to shift the focus from the climate crisis to something else. I won’t worry about that. I’ll do what I need,” she told reporters at a news conference ahead of her trip. [viii] I, for one, can only hope she, and others like her, manage to put the need to respond on the political agenda. We are running out of time.
Is this the Emperor’s New Clothes all over again? We are complicit in a global suicide attempt, and when someone stands up to make clear what is happening, many people are happy to attack the speaker rather than listening to what is being said. Is the best way to prevent a suicide to pick on the person who is offering a warning? Perhaps this is inevitable in a world where social media and uncontrolled online abuse is common. Greta’s story has alarming echoes of the abuse of women online game developers five years ago: if you haven’t read about ‘gamergate’ and its consequences, you should, (the New York Times has just published a review, five years later). Then and now, it makes chilling reading. [ix] Is this the future Greta Thunberg faces?
The flowers will have been swept away from the doorway by now, the student forgotten by almost everyone, except for family and friends. Will the message from Greta Thunberg and David Attenborough also be forgotten as another drama pushes climate change back off the headlines once more? Ignoring the evidence provided by those on suicide watch, failing to exert the pressure needed to galvanise political and social action, you might draw the conclusion that humankind is, as Nigeria’s people were described, “worth next to nothing”.
[i] This data comes from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Catalogue 3303.0 Causes of Death, Australia, 2017. Latest update 26/09/2018
[ii] Wikipedia again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actuary
[iii] Shanmugam, K. R. (2001). Self-selection bias in the estimates of compensating differentials for job risks in India. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 22(3), 263–75
[iv] https://www.vanguardngr.com/2019/03/the-value-of-a-nigerian-life/
[v] https://www.wri.org/blog/2019/08/17-countries-home-one-quarter-world-population-face-extremely-high-water-stress
[vi] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapping-the-worlds-urban-population-in-2050/
[vii] See, for example, Scott Ludlam’s article on The Extinction Rebellion in The Monthly, July 2019
[viii] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/08/15/swedish-climate-activist-greta-thunberg-is-sailing-america-amid-storm-criticism/
[ix] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/15/opinion/what-is-gamergate.html
