Seasons of
Love
Five hundred,
twenty-five thousand, six hundred minutes
Five hundred, twenty-five thousand moments so dear
Five hundred, twenty-five thousand, six hundred minutes
How do measure, measure a year?
If that question
isn’t hard enough, How do you measure a Human Life?
How about Love? While that is a great, and musical, answer,
it does not fit into an economist’s Cost-Benefit Analysis. In order to properly
do such an analysis, such as computing the cost of the release of a ton of
carbon, it is necessary to measure the value of the lives lost, deaths, as a
result of that release. And deaths do result from the release of a ton of
carbon. The problem is that cost varies depending on the country while the release
of carbon causes world-wide deaths. The cost a life/death in the Untied States should
not be 9 times the cost of a life/death in India or 55 times the cost of a
life/death in Somalia. The problem is that these costs are computed on the lifetime
earnings of a human, and those earnings, the life expectancy, and number of
earning years, varies from county to county. What would be desirable is to have
a single cost for a human life regardless of country since those deaths may
occur in an any country.
Rather than focusing on the earnings, which can be highly variable,
perhaps it is wiser to focus on the consumption. The problem again is that the
life expectancy varies, and the living standard varies from country to country.
However, there is a world-wide poverty standard, which is the amount necessary
to keep a human alive (e.g. food and housing).
The World Bank places the extreme poverty rate at $2.15
per day in 2022 US Dollars. This equates to $784.75 per year. The Bible states
that human life span, not life expectancy, is supposed to be four score, 80 years.
People can live longer than this, but they can also die early than this. For this calculation, we
need a life span, not a life expectancy. 80 years seems like a reasonable standard.
This means that the minimum cost to maintain a human life is arguably $63,000. This also means that the difference in wages, earning years, or life expectancy in different
countries has been ignored. $63K may seem too low to those of us in the United States,
but that is from our frame of reference. That same $63K may be a fortune to a member
of an indigenous tribe in the Amazon jungle.
Calculations done where the deaths are limited to a single county,
for example seat belt laws, may apply different values for a life, but $63K is certainly
better than assuming that a life elsewhere in the world has no value. That way there
are no shithole countries, even if there are shithole people making that statement.
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