The Value of Human Life

The general consensus exists that human life is priceless. This principle has guided human action in all matters of life, and made murder so abominable worldwide, or so I had thought. The EPA has provided us with a statistic: a human life is worth around $6.9 million of today’s dollars. This “value of a statistical life” is about $0.9 million less than the previous, five year old estimate.

The number sounds big, but when one takes inflation into account it’s really not that much. Mega-corporations deal in millions of US dollars every day, as does the US government, and economists do categorize labor as a form of capital, so this number could be simplified as an equation of how much profit an average worker contributes, combined with how much is invested in education, training, salary, etc. But it’s not that simple.

At first the number struck me as offensive. I know that I, my friend, my family, everyone I know is worth more than this. But after I looked behind the headline declaring the EPA had told me what my life was worth, I developed an understanding of why this statistic came about, although I don’t feel much better.

For eons humans have engaged in risk analysis as they go about their daily lives. Individually, this can be a matter of deciding what to eat, or to smoke or not, or if its worth j-walking to get to the store thirty seconds faster. In economic terms, it’s a cost/benefit analysis. When this endeavor is undergone by large bodies where the consequences of their actions impact large numbers of people the complications increase exponentially.

In this sense, the government is not attempting to ascribe a monetary value to the moral value of human life, rather they are attempting to identify how much society is willing to pay to assume risk. This judgment obviously has moral implications, and there are those accusing the Bush administration of devaluing this statistic for their own gain.

What is most disconcerting about this then becomes how people value each other. Has the capitalist system expanded beyond economics and politics and into our very consciousness of how all of life should be valued? Well, yes.

Not only, to be cliché, is the personal political, but how a society organizes itself is a direct reflection of its moral values. I’m not saying it’s right or justified, but it is a tool. Here’s an example, taken from an AP article by Seth Borenstein:

…a hypothetical regulation that costs $18 billion to enforce but will prevent 2,500 deaths. At $7.8 million per person (the old figure), the lifesaving benefits outweigh the costs. But at $6.9 million per person, the rule costs more than the lives it saves, so it may not be adopted.

This example also illustrates how the small number can be interpreted as a manipulative technique to curb government spending. Interestingly, different groups within the government are able to calculate their own figures. Such inconsistency certainly leaves the door open to those who wish to choose the number that best suits their purposes, or distance yourself from a group that uses another number, or— you get the idea.

Ultimately, the motive behind the change is little more than speculation, as only adjustments for inflation can be accurately verified.

And to further complicate things, I leave you with this quote from the aforementioned article:

[The] EPA took portions of each [of two studies] and essentially split the difference — a decision two of the agency's advisory boards faulted or questioned.

Really now? (See, I told you I was priceless.)

A rose by any other name...

So I found myself reading this, and thinking somewhat anthropological thoughts about planets.

For those of you who've been living under a cosmic rock for the past two years, our beloved Pluto is no longer deemed worthy of planetary status and was forced to join the ranks of a new category: dwarf planets. (Read more here.)

And it's all because scientists don't like things that aren't neat. It can't be two things at once because it just can't, or, as in this case, it can't overlap Neptune's orbit. Humans have a natural need to organize the world around them, and so are born categories, and sub categories, and sub sub categories, and committees of experts to decide where to draw the boundaries, and committees to pick and verify the experts, and... you get my point. It is my opinion that scientists take this to the extreme, potentially ignoring things that don't fit into their preconceived notions of how things work.

Back to Pluto.

According to the articles cited above, there hadn't been a consensus on what defines a planet; it was a missing category. After much haggling between experts, they came to a consensus.

Now there are several celestial bodies that are impacted by this, and we of the general public were perfectly content, nay, eager to welcome these as planets. Instead we were dealt a traumatic blow as helpless little Pluto was plucked from solar system models in classrooms and science fairs across the world. This prompted outrage, and even a facebook group titled "When I was your age, Pluto was a planet" to spread the word.

I guess they thought that calling it a dwarf planet would keep us happy. But now they wont even allow us to have that. The media is praising this as an elevation in Pluto's status, but it isn't. Changing the label on something doesn't change what it is, just how you think about it, and as it's still less than a planet, I, personally, cannot accept it. The new word boys and girls is: plutoid.

One astronomy claims "the action makes Pluto more important... instead of being a "puny" outer planet, Pluto is now a "prototype of a new type of fascinating objects." Or is it: same object, new category? A rearrangement? I certainly think so.

Legitimizing Four Years of Study

I wrote this shortly after commencement:

There is a debate in anthropology about if the discipline should be a science, or part of the humanities. At first, I wanted it to be a science because I wanted the legitimacy and authority afforded science in today's Western hegemony. But I also didn't want it to be a science because then it would be narrow minded and restrictive, perhaps isolated, ignoring the ideological and ethical concerns that must be debated to ensure it's applications are "good" and "right" (think atom bomb for a "bad" and "wrong" case study in applied science).

So then I decided that it should be in the humanities because my professor said it was, and I liked her, and it seemed easier for me, for the way my mind works, just shy of an excuse for why I struggled to explain anthropology and its concepts. Everyone had accepted a certain ambiguity in the humanities; it was ok to be engaged in lengthy discourses that went round and round-- the process was respected, not just the end result.

Anthropology has many names and definitions, and it's literal translation: the study of man, necessitates further discussion. The shortest of these (although I cannot recall to whom to attribute it) is "the study of common sense;" it is also the one that got the most giggles in my anthropology theory course.

Ultimately, the debate stems from one of anthropology's favorite activities: problemitization. In a sort of post-modern thought, anything that exists can be problemitized, even existence, except that is generally left to the philosophers, from whom anthropology has been drawing of late. (Anthropology has a habit of sampling other fields, but it does go both ways; the ethnography is ours.) Other anthropology thinkers have decided perception and conception of existence is culturally specific. Either way it is assumed.

One cannot help but assume some things, and must put parameters on discourses and debates, to keep them from getting out of hand, like what Geertz's thick description skirted. I have no doubt that this monologue will become contextually reasonable, if it is not already, as I cannot remove myself from my own cultural lens and historical setting.

For now, I will leave it at this: anthropology is both and neither. It's still developing. It can never be a science in the same sense as physical sciences because it deals with living people in situations that cannot be identically reproduced, making experimentation impossible. I feel inadequate to elaborate beyond this, having only a BA in the subject, and that only barely earned.

What if I were I to do it again? I don't really know. Possibly major in rhetoric, double minor in anthropology and creative writing. I love words, but not the way a linguist does, more like an artist with an emphasis on what words can do when put in the right order.

I knew it!

See mom, there are unicorns!

Thoughts on Language and Communication

I just read this Economist article all about "Homo mobilis" and how the youth (my?) culture is both distorting language, but also initiating a sort of cultural evolution.

Indeed, languages have always been evolving, and an attempt to force people into a set grammar and spelling is bound to lead, eventually, to some sort of rebellion. It's part of life. The
reforms of one generation become the chains of the next (or at least, that's how they're perceived by the younger crowd). As an anthropology student, this strikes me as given. Cultures change. It's what they do. Yes, each parent tries to indoctrinate their children with their interpretations of what it means to be human, but the process is never wholly complete.

In regards to language, I may be a bit more indoctrinated than my peers. Perhaps more accurately, I'm on the fence. I feel both the nostalgia for a time when the distinction between "their" and "they're" was universally understood, when people took the time to think through what they wanted to say before committing it to paper. But I also share the bricoleur mentality, and the attention span of what we may call the Google generation. It's an odd balancing act that I don't feel I've been handling well; it's a desire to be what I'm not, by virtue of my birthday.

This emphasis on defining identity is a normal part of growing up. They say it happens in the teen years, but I challenge that and say that it's more stressful now, as I prepare to graduate from university and enter that most frightening of places: the real world. Am I ready? I guess I won't know until I get there.

A few months ago I got a job offer via e-mail. A professor at a small, humanitarian college in San Fransisco found my resume on CalJobs and asked me if I'd like to be his research assistant. Sounds great right? Well, it would be if he had bothered to send me a decent e-mail. As a wise person who I shared this with the other day said, "He's not qualified to be your boss." Perhaps an understanding of what he did wrong will be one of my strongest points when they ask, "why should we hire you over the other applicants?" Because (unlike this professor) I know how to capitalize the beginning of each sentence, use proper grammar, and treat every e-mail as though it were a letter.

Sure, between close friends and family I will be a bit lax in these areas, but that's because we're close, comfortable enough that we can be a bit informal. It's about knowing your audience.

But in the digital age communication goes beyond e-mail. Texting and instant messaging and (what really bothers me) Facebooking and its cohorts are even more problematic. My solution: avoid Facebook, only im friends and family, and, unless in a hurry, use proper spelling and all in a text. Of course this also raises issues about what constitutes a hurry.

Our society increasingly emphasizes the metaphor of time as money. We only have a limited amount of time, so we must spend it wisely. I could tie this into a Christian worldview of linear time, as opposed to how much of the rest of the world sees time as circular, but that's another essay. I only wish to highlight that we use our time, money, and energy for what we value, so regardless of how you see the world, you choose to do what you feel is important, be it instant gratification for the self or an arduous ordeal for someone else, or anything in between. We attach some value to every potential action and choose accordingly.

So am I being hypocritical at all by expressing this in a blog that (to my knowledge) only my mother reads? Maybe. It has taken me about twenty minutes to write this much, so I would like to think that it's at least somewhat carefully thought out. I would also like to think that my blog could become a public space in which to debate various issues, but for that I'd need a bigger readership, and to post more frequently.

The web has made us more interconnected. But it has also limited our abilities to communicate. I personally love writing both online and on paper because I get the chance to think and revise to communicate and present myself how I want to. I hate phones, not because I have to talk, but because I can't see who I'm talking to. It's eerie; it's a disembodied voice that only I can hear... Face to face you can look in their eyes, see how they're feeling, read their body language, really fully interact.

This posting is also partly inspired by the latest South Park episode, which if you've not seen, you must (even you Mom). It's a wonderful satire of our internet addiction. Watch it here.

link for last post

Sorry, still figuring out the new technology.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6196795

when failure is an option

Yet another reason to love Jon Carroll:



And really, one who doesn't enjoy learning is a very boring person.