Patrik Svensson
IF YOU had to put a price on your life, could you do it? What would it be? Where would you even start?
We may think valuing human life this way is the stuff of darkest history, now confined to the malevolent underworld of human trafficking. We look with shame to an era when a human being could legally be bought and sold, their worth tied solely to the profit their work would yield. In the mid-19th century, before slavery was abolished in the southern states of the US, a “prime male field hand” could be purchased for about $1100 – roughly $30,000 in today’s money. Other human beings were bought and sold for far less.
Our repulsion at the idea of putting a monetary value on people is consistent with the modern principle, outlined in documents such as the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that all human lives are equal – and, we like to believe, equally priceless.
Yet we routinely trample on those exalted ideals. The scientific literature and the news are both rife with examples of how unequally we value life – young over old, those like us over those who are different, the identified victim over the faceless masses.
Putting a price on life: Keeping me alive has cost $1.6 million…and counting
We don’t just value lives differently in a moral sense, but in real money. It is how we divvy up limited resources – from deciding how much to invest in building safer roads to setting compensation for families of soldiers and civilians killed in war, or those who were wrongfully imprisoned. And depending on who is doing the pricing and…
