The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [20]
For Feinberg, determining the noneconomic loss of the 9/11 victims was easy. He settled on $250,000 a head plus $100,000 per dependent, which he recognized as absolutely arbitrary. Measuring economic loss was more difficult. The concept of economic loss was meant to capture the forgone earnings of a dead worker, adjusted for his or her age, marital status, and number of dependents. This ensured big gaps between awards. It pitted the multimillion-dollar paycheck earned by executives at the brokerage Cantor Fitzgerald working on the 105th floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower against the $17,337 a year made by an illegal immigrant from Peru who worked as a cook at the Windows on the World restaurant five floors above them.
Senator Kennedy, his former boss, gave him some advice: “Ken, just make sure that 15 percent of the families don’t receive 85 percent of the taxpayers’ money.” But despite the suggestion, victims’ value in death reflected the inequality they experienced while alive. Bankers were deemed to be worth more than janitors and the young more than the old. Men in their thirties were priced at about $2.8 million. Men over seventy, by contrast, were deemed worth less than $600,000. The women who worked and died in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon earned, on average, less than men. That implied that their value in death—the sum total of what Mr. Feinberg estimated they would have made during their lifetimes—was also lower. The average compensation to their families amounted to about 37 percent less, on average, than men’s. The fund ultimately paid about $2 million, on average, to the next of kin of 2,880 victims who died in the attacks. But each of the families of the eight victims who earned more than $4 million a year got $6.4 million, while the cheapest victim was valued at $250,000.
This cold accounting is about as far as one can get from Saint-Exupéry’s musings about life’s unfathomable worth. The values attached to those who died in the terrorist attacks were determined as a function of their forgone economic output—what they could no longer produce because they were dead. Tort law in the United States uses such techniques to determine compensation for victims of wrongs. But to families of the victims, they represented a distortion of what was really lost.
Family members offered all sorts of personal metrics to inflate the value of their loved ones, relative to the others. One widow said her loss of a husband of thirty-six years had to be worth more than the loss of a spouse to a newlywed. Another claimed her husband’s death was worth more because he took a long time to die, as evinced by the many calls he made from his cell phone, and so suffered more than someone who died instantly. The fund to compensate families of the dead of 9/11 produced a head-on collision between family members’ notion of the value of their loved one and the collective view that while lives are very valuable they must fit within a finite budget. It was almost guaranteed to leave everybody unhappy.
In What Is Life Worth?—a memoir of his experience at the head of the fund—Feinberg suggested that if Congress were ever again to craft a compensation plan of this sort it should pay all the victims the same amount. “The family of the stockbroker and that of the dishwasher,” he wrote, “should receive the same check from the United States Treasury.” If part of the idea was to keep the rich from suing, however, this is unlikely to have worked. Indeed, the families of the ninety-six mostly wealthy victims decided not to participate in the fund at all and sued the airlines instead, hoping to get more money from the courts. Though this required paying for expensive lawyers, and it took them longer to get their money, they did get a bigger payoff. Years later, the ninety-three families that settled got an average of $5 million.
VALUING CITIZENS’ SAFETY
Courts, government regulators, and insurance companies replicate the sorts of calculations Feinberg