From a story I wrote earlier this year on suicide:
Jamie Holter, a spokesperson for WSDOT, stood on the bridge with us [the Aurora Bridge in Seattle, one of the most popular suicide-jump sites in the United States], also wearing a hard hat and orange safety vest. She said the project [a suicide fence on the bridge] will cost $4.6 million, down from its original, prerecession budget of $8.1 million. I mentioned a 1995 study I’d just read about the economic cost of killing oneself: The direct cost of an attempted suicide—hospital fees, autopsy and investigation costs—is $5,310. The direct cost of a completed suicide is $2,098.
“Did the state do any kind of cost-benefit analysis to figure out when the barrier would start paying for itself?” I asked.
“Uh… no,” Holter answered. “I don’t think the state calculated the value of a human life.”
Since that moment on the bridge, I’ve wondered what the cost of a human life (or death) would be on the open market—not guessed at by academics, not jiggered around by crafty insurance companies. Just in a pure, rude, capitalist sense.
Not your life of course, nor the life of anyone you love. But the life of a stranger, life qua life.
A recent email exchange with a friend of mine, who’s working in a certain country in Europe for a certain American government agency, may have answered it:
I just got on good authority that a Russian hit costs 400 Euros here. And that may be as good a value-of-life indicator as anything.
D.
How good is the authority?
Brendan
Good authority, but not nothing like a price catalog. Lots of mob people send their families here to be safe, but really—this is going on, what people say.
D.
So there you have it, folks. Four hundred euros. Or, at the exchange rate of the moment, $507.92. Less than my monthly rent.
I guess life is cheap after all.
For that price, why would anyone do it themselves?
That’s not the value of a life, that’s the price of a low-risk professional hit.
As for the value of a life, judges and juries deliver verdicts every day assessing the various kinds of economic value lost by wrongful deaths.
agree with #2: that’s not the value of life, that’s the price of death. the value of life, if you most monetize it, would be more equal to the cost to purchase another human.
So you’re saying it would make sense to give anyone who wants to jump off the bridge, an all expenses paid trip to Europe.
That’s like saying the value of a watermelon is the cost to pay someone to smash it with a mallet. Something people actually pay to do. Thus negative value. Thus reductio ad absurdum.
@ #3 are value and price the same thing ?
i like the idea that the monetary worth of a human life can be based on the current value of its chemical makeup. although i couldn’t readily find the current market prices on the innernets, last time i checked it was between $70 and $80.
of course the price goes waaaay up if you sell fresh body parts after death.. the innernets quote the epa with an estimate of 7.2 million dollars – down from 8.04 million from last year.
They did a study in Japan, figuring out the amount in taxes and wages lost due to the persons committing suicide: http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=…
parting out a body on e-bay could get you thousands just for the kidneys… in a crude capitalist sense.
@7 I think that is a better means to value the cost/benefit of suicide, adding in the loss of productivity of that person’s family and friends and other like factors.
For others trotting out the value of the chemical makeup of a body, or what you could get for parts on the black market – that’s not the value of life, that’s the value of death, and those are two separate matters altogether.
Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it.
Publilius Syrus
(~100 BC)
How much will you pay me Not to kill you?
jesus christ, brendan you did it again–you reversed the cost for attempted suicide with the cost of completed suicide, even when the commenters pointed out your mistake last time. think about it: what fucking autopsy costs would be associated with an unsuccessful suicide attempt? investigation costs when you could just ask the suicide attempter what happened? huh!?
how does an attempted suicide need an autopsy and a completed suicide not need one?
Car collisions kill more young people, children, and teenagers than all other sources COMBINED.
A bit hypocritical for the WSDOT to say a human life is priceless. Their correct answer is “a small fraction of my salary.”
@ 11. I’m a slow learner.
Well, pretty much every year *one* person commits suicide by jumping off the I-5 overpass, but apparently one life a year isn’t worth the cost of a suicide fence across that busy commuter path.
You all sound like a pack of right wingnuts making funny about dead Iraqi and the Katrina dead. Really, what price can you put on the pain the suicide suffered in life, or the pain of his family and loved ones?
Stuff it up your asses, high colonic style.
@14 – you’re not a slow learner. You’re a moron. There’s a difference.
I read somewhere that for purposes of calculating environmental violation fines, the US government pegs the value of a life at 3 million dollars. Under that standard, the suicide fence will pay for itself after 2 suicides have been prevented. Personally I’d peg the value of a life higher, in which case saving even one life will make the barrier worth it.
Government agencies actually make this calculation all the time, intentionally or not. Specifically, they calculate how much money to spend on safety improvements to save how many lives. For example, if they spend $X to install road-side barriers, that is expected to prevent some accidents resulting in Y people not dying in those accidents.
$ spent divided by lives saved = $ per life.
If the government agency has limited money (which is pretty much always) and they want to build the most effective safety measures, then this calculation actually tells us that a life equals AT LEAST as much as the $ per life in the LEAST EFFECTIVE safety measure. But if they decide that a particular safety measure is too expensive relative to the number of lives predicted to be saved, then they are implicitly deciding that the value of a saved life is less than the cost of that measure.
From college a few (ok, many) years back, I recall studies that said this value was typically a few million dollars per life.
That is not a good measure of the the “free market” value of a human life. According to your valuation mechanism, the value of a house would be the same as what you would have a pay an arsonist to burn it down sneak up to it at night and burn it down.
A more reasonable measure of the “free market” value of something is how much you have to pay to find a rightful owner willing to give it up. Under that valuation mechanism, the free market value of a human life is pretty close to infinite.
The government value of a human life, however, is considerably lower. When doing cost-benefit analysis, government agencies place monetary values on life all the time. Here is an article I found by googling “value of life” can mentions values in the range of $6.9M-$7.8M used by the EPA.
Won’t work.
Now the higher value young kids who will become CEOs will jump off the Ballard Bridge and still be dead.
If anything, you should be looking at the price of surrogate mother; a very good source says about $20,000 in South Asia. What you’ve told us is the price of a death in one European country. It’s much cheaper in Southeast Asia.
This post is the most asinine thing I’ve read in a long time. Seriously, try harder.
Reading this post a second time, I think Mudede is rubbing off on you. And that’s not a good thing.
@20-
Not quite infinite. There are, I’m sure, some people who would let you kill them in exchange for money (with the money ultimately going to their loved ones) but the price, I’m sure would be very high.
Jeez, why all the hate on BK? He wrote a short post about an interesting and disturbing concept.. Putting a value on life with cash is always fucked, but it is interesting.
I really do not understand the amount of bile that this has stirred up.
I think cash for killing is an interesting metric of life/ death value. The price to overcome the social and legal prohibitions on taking life is a significant indicator of a culture.
– 22 Cheaper in Asia? How cheap?
How much in the US?
@18 has it about right. I work in the insurance industry, and insurance companies pay for “human life” (through liability claims) all the time. I’d say that the cost of a human life these days ranges from about $1M to about $5M, depending on the person. (An elderly friendless person is worth less than a young primary breadwinner with lots of dependents, so there’s a range. And I suppose Bill Gates is worth even more, but he’s an outlier.)
BUT, you can’t just take the number of suicides off the bridge and assume that’s the value of a suicide fence. Some of those suicides will find some other way to do it. And you can’t just take the construction costs of the fence as the full cost. If it’s ugly, and thousands of people every day are looking at an ugly fence instead of a beautiful view, that’s part of the cost, too.
Nonetheless, there’s a decent chance that a fence to prevent suicides is worth building.
Seems to me we should have a harvesting site. If you really intend to commit suicide we’ll give you a “safe”, quiet place to do yourself in … in some way that allows us to use your organs.
Want to kill yourself? Fly to Seattle and slit your wrists in this sterile room. We’ll collect the blood and all of the organs right after you’ve kicked it and use them for people who actually want to live. No sense being wasteful about it and throwing all those perfectly good organs off a bridge just because you don’t want to use them anymore.
If we’re really going to say a life is only worth what someone would accept to take it then I’m sure you could find some homeless guy or meth head who would kill someone for $100 or less.
Or just run up to a Seattle cop with a knife…
Sure, but then some of the organs would be ruined.
Where’s the Repo Men when you need them?