The Cost of a Human Life

It was estimated that over $20 million was spent extracting the 33 miners that were trapped in the 2010 Copiapó mining accident. That's over $600,000 per life. How many millions of dollars were spent trying to devise ways to save three astronauts in the Apollo 13 mission? How many millions were spent trying to save the 47 lives that were aboard the FV Alaska Ranger? To rescue the 24 hostages held in the Iranian embassy in 1980?

If you have any semblance of a moral compass, you'll have likely told yourself by now, "there is no price for a human life."

Ostensibly, we have no problem spending an enormous sum of money to save human lives. We tell ourselves that putting a price tag on human lives is immoral. But I want us to consider this notion from another perspective.

If tomorrow we decided to start taking all the vehicles that aren't public transportation and commercial vehicles off the road, in an instant we have the opportunity to save over one million people that die from automobile accidents each year.

But we tell ourselves, "that's too much."

We ask ourselves, "How will people get to work? How many billions of dollars will we lose?"

We tell ourselves, "We can't just shut down the entirety of human civilization for the sake of a couple thousand people per day."

But when will we say enough is enough? Where do we draw the line?

Can we define one million deaths as negligible? Do we convince ourselves that those are “unavoidable” losses, as the necessary cost to run an industrialized society?

What about ten million deaths—now is it too much?

Whether we want to admit it or not, that in order to strike a balance between maintaining convenience within society and not inflicting an egregious degree of mass murder, we put a price tag on human lives.

The truth is, we do have the resources to change things if we really wanted to. If we have the capacity to produce nine million cars in a year, enough gas to fuel a hundred million of them each day, and the labor and resources needed to pave and maintain hundreds of thousands of square miles of roads and parking lots, we also have the capacity to redesign cities where people aren’t forced to drive cars to go about their life; we have the capacity to accommodate safe walking and biking, to provide convenient access to daily necessities without the need to drive, to greatly improve the efficiency of public transport in those cities, and to invest in the development and implementation of self-driving vehicles, which are infinitely safer.

But we don’t believe it’s possible, and, like many other glaring problems in our society, we turn a blind eye when we’re asked to change.

What about the countless individuals that take their own lives every day?

that are unjustly murdered each day from homicide, gang violence, and wars?

that perish from lung cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and other life-threatening conditions?

When will we together, as a society, admit that we're doing an abysmal job at looking after each other's mental health?

at ensuring every neighborhood in our nation is free of poverty, crime, and injustice?

at organizing healthcare and disseminating knowledge about what a healthy life looks like?

Instead, we like to look for cheap solutions.

Here, have a useless suicide hotline number that we'll advertise en masse to people that have already lost their faith in society because we're too lazy to actually tackle the leading root causes of suicide, to call out the bad actors among us that are responsible for deteriorating our mental health and cluttering our lives with backwards, oppressive social conventions regarding personal responsibility, work, and happiness.

Here, let's promote anti-violence demonstrations and protests instead of doing the hard work of dutifully educating each other as citizens and ensuring we all have access basic necessities in life so we don't have to have a reason to kill each other over it.

Here, let's allocate some of our money to fund cancer research programs, diabetes centers, and programs to help alcoholics and smokers because we're too infatuated with capitalism to rebuke the fast food, alcohol, and tobacco corporations that, unbridled, will addict the general populace to its death for an extra penny.

Here, let's legislate a few traffic safety laws here and there and promulgate defensive driving techniques to help drivers anticipate and be prepared for dangerous situations while we simultaneous churn out millions on top of millions more cars every year, pave ever more roads and parking lots for those cars to clog up, destroy the planet in the process, and perpetuate an overly car-centric society that makes it inhospitable and inconvenient for those that don't drive and downright life-threatening for anyone that does drive.

No, I'm not saying any of these solutions are inherently bad or unproductive by design. But all of them are band-aid solutions to treat the problems deeply ingrained in the design of our nation.

Why is it that we have no problem spending millions to rescue a few individuals that were inopportunely caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, but we're not willing to save millions in the act of ceasing to drive cars or protesting against careless urban design and the profligate greed of the automobile industry? It's because a rescue mission doesn't challenge the status quo. It's seen as a noble and brave demonstration of the human spirit.

But radically changing the way we govern our nation and design the fabric of our society? To shift our mindset to learn how to cooperate with each other as citizens? To alter the culture and norms we live and breathe by? To give up the luxuries and privileges we have accrued over decades of progress? Absurd.

We will preserve the status quo at almost any cost, even if the cost we're discussing is the human life.