MY KITCHEN, VERY EARLY — Out of the corner of my eye I spotted an article this week:
The Environmental Protection Agency set the value of a life at $9.1 million last year … [recently] the agency [had] used numbers as low as $6.8 million.
So said The New York Times.
And that is a very interesting state of affairs.
There used to be a concept in journalism of how many deaths in a third world country it took to warrant similar space to a single death in our own. An unseemly concept, I know. But one that can be shown in research.
When I was a boy in Africa you could buy a drivers licence, with the right amount of money or friends. And so The Standard and The Nation used to compete for the number of deaths they could declare in a single matatu (see photo above) accident.
This week the heart-stopping story of a US journalist who was assaulted by a crowd of men when she was separated from her crew in Egypt, is a good example of our different views on the newsworthiness of a life. There were 3.5 million people convicted of crimes in Egypt last year. And 48 people executed.
In the USA it is estimated that someone is sexually assaulted every 2 minutes.
When I first started working in the 1980s, I was in a newsroom with a researcher friend called Christophe. A lovely, peaceful guy. He used to whisper is the library stacks with a woman called Rosemary about the inequities of the world. And how businesses and governments, and people who didn’t care — like you and I — were responsible for making the world the mess that it is.
Christophe got his big break when a boss decided to approve his request to go cover a ‘peace’ conference in Libya. It turned out to be filled with radical groups, including neo-nazis. Christophe was thrown from the roof of a building. Not yet 30 years old. It took quite a while to even get his body back.
So why is the cost of life important?
Because it has a direct, if subtle, impact on all of us. The higher the value, the greater the cost of insurance. The higher the penalties for things like environmental mismanagement.
And at the same time companies like GSK spend a fortune in Africa to save lives. Or Rio Tinto [disclosure: they are a client] who invest in communities in ways that bring health and safety — as well as work — to small communities. There is no set level of investment or any really, really clear return on that investment. (And, yes, Christophe would never have accepted it as useful enough.) But the world is starting to balance out its responsibility for the cost of a human life.
Whether it’s demands for better social support mechanisms in countries where ‘consumerism’ has run the economy — like Egypt — or businesses that are finding themselves drawn into communities where they have hired smart people — like call centres in India and Ireland. There is a bigger and more global cost to supporting the 6 billion people on the planet.
In Uganda the population has doubled to 33 million in the last two decades. In the next 10 years it will double again. The US insurance industry and regulators don’t value those lives at $9 million each. Or Uganda wouldn’t be in 162nd place, of the world’s 182 national economies.
For western economies and ‘first world’ nations think of it like this: your kids have just brought home about 5 friends each. You should be prepared to feed and support them all.
/df
