The Value of a Life

Life is always beyond price to the person doing the dying, but it is also a relative thing.

The flu pandemic circa 1918 killed more people that the black death.

Was it a bigger deal than the black death? No, because the human population was a lot higher in 1918 than in 1347. The effect of losing 33%-40% of the population of Europe in the 14th century was immense.

An interesting philosophical question.

And in terms of the raw value of human life, the 1918 flu occurred during WWI, which was the first war where battlefield losses were counted in the millions. In that sense, we know that life was much cheaper in 1918, statistically, than it had ever been before.

But lifespans were rising... so in that sense the individual lives lost were more "valuable."

There will probably never be a simple, easy way to think about these things.

In the 1960s-1970s, fairly recent memory, the Vietnam war killed millions. The War between Pakistan and break-away Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) killed many more millions.

Most Americans don't know that the war in Vietnam might have killed as many Vietnamese as the Holocaust killed jews. (It's not a contest... I am talking about what millions feels like in different contexts) You can find death esitimates for Vietnam anywhere from 2-10 million. Somewhere in the 3-7 million range is likely.

The Bangladesh war was even deadlier, and I doubt most people know it even happened.

But wars are flashy things... events. If ten million people died during a drought in Bangladesh we would probably view it as less an event than the civil war there.

And the life saving side is even hazier. How many lives were saved by DDT (while killing a hell of a lot of birds)? Hard to quantify things like that, and even harder to feel the numbers.

Did Lister save more people than Hitler killed? Probably so, but saving doesn't feel the same as taking.

An aside: The idea of washing your hands before surgery arose incredibly late... the 1880s. Most people who had a bone broken in a limb by a bullet in the US Civil War lost that limb because otherwise they were likely to die of infection. It was a very high amputation war. In Iraq our (American) battelefield medicine had gotten so good that people with injuries that would have been fatal in any previous war were saved with only the loss of limbs. Like the US civil war, a high amputtaion war. One beacuse the medicine was awful. The other because the medicine was awesome.

Just some rambling thought.