In our society, we go through long stretches pretending that a human life is worth more than anything else in the world. But if you look at something as mundane as the decision to drive a car (as opposed to, say, walking), you can see that individuals often make decisions trading safety for efficiency. Economists, practitioners of that dismal science, quantify this effect by placing place hard, specific dollar values on human lives. To do this, they look at how much money we spend to avoid death, how much money people earn, etc.
One thing that this analysis routinely claims is that people in different parts of the world are worth different amounts of money. Economics Professor Marc Herold writes:
By Karzai's accounting standards, the life of a dead Afghan is 'worth' only one-seven hundredth of that of a dead Chinese, one-ten thousandth of a dead Italian and one-thirty thousandth of a dead American -- if her/his life is 'worth' $6,000,000 on average, as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has calculated.
It also seems true to me that over time, the value of a human life is becoming increasingly valuable, and I don't mean just because of inflation or growth of economies. We construct all kinds of new laws protecting people and tipping the scale more toward human life at the expense of efficiency. (That doesn't mean that the world is actually becoming less efficient than it used to be -- we have had huge gains in efficiency due to other changes, like new technology, but we have spent some of that efficiency gain on increased safety rather than increased income.)
Many of the complicated value-of-life factors come together in the military, where some of the most up-front decisions about sacrifice of life are made. A recent editorial in the NYTimes said:
This latest military planning fiasco seems yet another example of the Pentagon's damaging insistence that American ground forces make do with fewer troops and lighter equipment than they really need to carry out the mission they have been assigned in Iraq. This page shares the long-term goal of transforming the Army into a more mobile and agile fighting force, but not at the expense of American soldiers' lives.
I am also very curious about how soldiers' lives, particularly, have changed in value over the years. During the Civil War, Lincoln caught a lot of flak but was still re-elected even after the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans. In the World Wars, loss of many thousands of lives was largely deemed acceptable. But in Vietnam, 50,000 deaths was a huge tragedy, turning the country's political establishment on its head.
(Of course, there are many other contextual political factors that differentiate these wars. WWII was a more necessary war against a bigger, more immediate enemy, and the Civil War was to preserve the US power and coherence. It was harder to accept any deaths in Vietnam because Americans did not see that we were getting all that much in return for them.)
But I would still argue that there is another factor that complicates the matter: In between WWII and the height of the Vietnam War, a big cultural change increased the value of human life, which made it harder for the military to enter into large-scale war like it had in the past. The fact that Vietnam was the first war where people saw the horrors of war via mass communications contributed to this phenomenon -- it was harder for people to think about soldiers' deaths as honorable, symbolic gestures when they saw the actual bodies and a devastated nation.
I would like to see an analysis of economic value of a human life across nations, across professions (e.g., the military), and across time. I think that would explain a lot about how the US currently exerts its hard power worldwide.
(P.S. - You can learn all about the "Economic Value Of Human Life" by buying a pre-written term paper with that title from this site. "School sucks: download your workload.")
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Tracking a post on thinkness. Analyzing the economic value of a human life by looking at military activity makes a lot of sense. Human life does seem to be steadily increasing in value as society puts more and more expense...
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