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.