The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [19]
CHAPTER TWO
The Price of Life
ONE OF PEOPLE’S most deeply ingrained convictions is that the price of life is incalculable. An old Jewish teaching holds that if one were to put a single life on one scale and the rest of the world on the other, the scales would be equally balanced. The French novelist Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wondered why “we always act as if something had an even greater price than life” when, self-evidently, “human life is priceless.”
I’m not quite sure how this belief came to solidify. It might have been favored by evolution as a spur to avoid predators. Yet while true in the sense that each of us would probably accept parting with all of our worldly possessions in order to avoid certain death, this narrowest of definitions fails to account for the continuous pricing and repricing of life that has taken place since life first crawled out of the primeval swamp. More than a single price, life has a menu.
Government is impossible without a grasp of what the lives of the governed are worth. The guidelines of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, last updated in 1999, value a life at about $7.5 million in 2010 money. Britain’s Department of the Environment says each year of life in good health is worth £29,000. A World Bank study in 2007 about the cost estimated that a citizen of India was worth about $3,162 a year, which amounts to a little under $95,000 for an entire life.
Indeed, we are all ready to accept that life has a price tag as long as it’s not our own. The ethicist and philosopher Peter Singer suggested a nifty exercise to prove the point: ask yourself how much you would be willing to pay, through insurance premiums say, so the health-care system would cover a treatment to extend the life of a stranger by one year. Would you pay $1 million? $10 million? The moment you say no you have put a ceiling on the price of that person’s life. Unsurprisingly, prices like this one tend to be controversial.
PAYING FOR THE DEAD
Consider the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, which Congress approved to compensate the injured and the families of those who died in the terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001. Moved by generosity, mixed in with concern that victims and their relatives would bury United and American Airlines in lawsuits, Congress established the fund with an unlimited budget. Conscious of cost, however, it set tight criteria for payments, to be based on the “economic and non-economic” loss to a victim’s family. This principle set victims’ lives along a scale of values. It gave them a price.
Appointed to run the fund was Kenneth Feinberg, a lawyer and former chief of staff of Democratic senator Edward Kennedy, who had an impressive track record as a mediator in tough cases. In 1984 Feinberg brokered the $180 million settlement paid by the manufacturers of the defoliant Agent Orange to some 250,000 Vietnam veterans who had been sickened by exposure to the toxic chemical that was sprayed on Vietnamese fields. He was one of three lawyers who determined the $16 million price paid by the government to the heirs of Abraham Zapruder for the original 26.6-second film he took of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. Years after he had completed his work for the compensation fund, he was tapped by President Obama to become the White House’s “pay czar” and set compensation limits for top executives at the big banks that were bailed out by taxpayers following the financial crisis of 2009. In 2010, he was appointed to administer the $20 billion fund created by oil giant BP to try to repair the damage caused by millions of barrels of oil released