The Dollar Value of One Human Life

I was sitting in a language arts meeting for American Literature, and lost my cool for a second.  "Wait, what?  We aren't teaching Huckleberry Finn anymore? It is the definitive AMERICAN novel! Our students are now going to go their entire lives without being exposed to Mark Twain! Disgusting!"

Eventually I settled down. I know the novel has "issues" and is difficult to teach because of the N-word. Good material should be hard to teach. Twain intended it that way.

But I think I was upset because it eliminated one of the most effective lessons I ever taught. I call it the Value of One Human Life, presentation.

You see, teenagers are especially prone to believing that life doesn't have purpose or meaning. They embrace depressions and negative news, defend ideas like suicide, and have no sense of history as to what real suffering looks like. So when they hear news of huge death tolls, or civilians in Syria dying of chemical weapons, they (like many of us adults) shrug and say, "eh. Whatever. This stuff happens all the time."

In relation to chemical weapons, NO IT DOESN'T!  And no, death, despite CNN's front page being plastered with 1000 Ways To Die, should still be shocking news. Unfortunately, we have become desensitized to the value of life.  Death, and especially killings, should always rock our worlds. But with 7 billion people on earth, killings have become entirely too common, and we have become entirely too lackadaisical to horrific news.

My favorite moment in Huckleberry Finn is when he announces, "All right, then, I'll go to hell." Huck thinks that by aiding a slave, Jim, on his voyage to freedom (and reconnection with his family), that he is breaking a moral, Godly, rule.  The genius of Twain, is that he used, as comedian Louis CK labeled Huck a "dirty little homeless white-trash creep" to show the moral imbalance of what society says is RIGHT and what we all know in our hearts is RIGHT.  Huck is not a good little societal boy, and yet he exudes goodness and mercy and love in the Godly sense; but not as much as Jim.  Jim, despite being ignorant of education, and being a sub-human slave, is the most perfect example of humanity in the whole novel (allegorically, he sacrifices his freedom to save Tom Sawyer)

When Huck's two creepy con-artist passengers announce that they sold Jim down-the-river for 40 dollars in a desperate plan to escape being tarred and feathered...Huck breaks down and thinks:
"After all this long journey, and after all we'd done for them scoundrels, here it was all come to nothing, everything all busted up and ruined, because they could have the heart to serve Jim such a trick as that, and make him a slave again all his life, and amongst strangers, too, for forty dirty dollars."  
40 dirty dollars.  A man, a good man's freedom, for $40? Using all kinds of historical methods, I've come to conclude that $40 in the 1860s is worth about $3200 in today's standards, but still...

Obviously, Twain was using this as a message of the inhumanity of buying and selling lives. Thankfully, today, we as a nation have a clearer understanding of how important life is, right?

In 1860, a "Prime Male" slave sold for about $1500 at auction (for the same price one could buy between 300-500 acres of land). Obviously, even as they were thought as a subspecies of humanity, slave owners paid a hefty premium for a lifetime of slave labor.  Most metrics value those slaves as having over $100,000 in today's value at auction.

Surely, you jest, an American life is worth more than that today? And you are correct. Most insurance institutes value life between $50,000-120,000 per year of life left.  So if your life was unjustly taken away at say, 30, and the average life of a male is 73, you would multiply the years taken away by those numbers.  In my example, the number is between $2.5 - $5 million dollars.  The D.O.T. has valued life at over 6 million, as have the payouts by airlines after a crash.  Almost all American institutions know that life is worth well over a million dollars, and just under 10 million.

So as you can see the average life has a ton of value.  At my current salary, I will barely crack a million in earned income over the next 26 years.  Yet, according to government and private sector analysis, I am worth another 4 million dollars? I knew my blog would eventually pay off (if only in death value).

So great. We as Americans have value beyond just our backbones. Obviously, as a capitalistic nation, we would probably value our lives as being worth more than other nations. But as the beacons of freedom and the light of the world that Reagan said America is, we must conclude that ALL the world's people have value.

Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of non-American civilians have died in our last few wars.  Most estimates have the civilian death toll in the Iraq war alone at around 100,000 lives. If America were to pay out American life value for these deaths, we taxpayers would have had to shell out another 500 billion dollars (the physical war only cost $757 billion).

As a taxpayer, I guess you can say we are lucky we don't pay those costs.  So what is a foreign life worth, a life that dies because of an American mistake?  The answer? Between $1000 - $7500.  That's right. We as Americans (inflation adjusted) pay less for lives killed by mistaken drones or errant bullets than slave owners payed as rewards for runaway slaves pre-Civil War.
“It’s hard to digest that the value of a human life is a few thousand dollars,” said Gordon-Bray, the general in Iraq. “But you know that in their economic situation, it is the equivalent of much more, and you feel better.”
Oh, I feel so much better! We've come a long way, baby!  Thank God we have evolutionarily evolved beyond enslaving people we think are subhuman, to trying to kill bad guys with radio controlled airplanes. It's glum that we accidentally make mistakes and kill the wrong guy, or girl, or wedding, or kids, or destroy a historical monument.


Twain would have to rewrite (and replace Jim) his novel in this regard, "...and to indiscriminately mutilate Ahmad, and by infidel video game operators, for 13 dirty, damn, dollars."

And yet, do I really want American troops on the ground in these nations risking their lives for nations that will not appreciate our sacrifices? No I do not. Many nations, dramatically less so than America, have not learned the value of life. The fact that somebody in Syria used chemical weapons on civilians only exasperates a desperate situation. The Syrian civil war is ugly, and America, despite our supposed high moral ground,  has no place to intervene. They understandably distrust how much we value their lives. American intervention would only be a lose/lose situation.

Every nation needs it's own Abraham Lincolns and Mark Twains, who will unpopular-ily stand up for the morally right choices. Because life, whether it is unborn and impoverished, different or beautiful, atheist or Muslim, Christian or criminal, popular or minority, healthy or sickly, has value (even if the living being doesn't recognize its own worth).

So go out today and feel like a million bucks. You're worth it. No, wait, you're worth five times that. Hopefully we can convince people in our nation and nations much more desperate than ours, that they have value and meaning in this world as well. Because if we are an evolving species, it would be nice to see some actual positive change in humanity beyond dollar value worth.

21 comments:

  1. I'm getting so old, with so few remaining years left, that my life lost a few hundred $ of value in just the time it took to read your article. But it was worth it.

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    1. Oddly, I feel richer and younger for having read your comment. Thanks Dan.

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  2. Wow, no more Huckleberry Finn? I weep for future generations. It really ticks me off that Americans get caught up in stupid bureaucratic PC BS, without taking into account that that was historical reality. Would we not study the Holocaust just because of dirty names people called the Jews?
    Sorry, I'm a little peeved today. The thing in Syria just makes my irritation with America right now worse. The worldwide value of human lives just reeks of capitalistic greed, which I'm getting very tired of looking at every time I search for low-wage jobs.
    I shouldn't comment when I'm angry (sorry), but anyway, thank you for writing about a hard topic we need to look at. I don't think people think enough about the implications of our actions as a nation.

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    1. I completely understand where you are coming from. Every part of your comment I agree with. Keep plugging away Natalie, you're almost there (If I was a publisher, I'd give you a million dollar book deal). Then you'd be worth like, 6 million bucks.

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  3. Every high school student should definitely read Huck. . .so many lessons. Heck, every adult should re-read Huck.

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    1. Yes. Yes. Yes. And if ambitious, they should read his non-fiction rants. The man was/is a genius.

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  4. When I retire, I hope you take over Honors 9 and work with Social Studies and Art to bring your truth to life. Keep up the good work, Mr. Plumb.

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    1. We still need rock solid veterans in the trenches. Idealistic newbies are good for interesting new curriculum, but most of their ideas aren't applicable. Veterans keep education honest and functioning.

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  5. It pains me to admit that I did not read Huck Fin in school. Or rather, I don't remember it. One if the two. However I recently started to read it again and am finding it entertaining.

    So if I am worth a few million dollars, who am I worth that to? Worth is only as much as someone is willing to give. Though I do agree with your sentiments. Frankly, we shouldn't have been in any wars since WWII.

    I think the lack of lifes value goes even deeper. It is often what I blame many of todays problems on. The college athlete who was killed because some punks were bored. What the hell?! It's a sad dawn of this era. I often at the same time am greatful for my current young age and am envious of those whose life is nearing end as they will not see the things I think we are about to endure. Again.

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    1. One of my points, although I didn't state it, was that regardless of IF people feel valuable, they HAVE tons of $ value. Even slaves (who weren't considered humans by many in the South) had more value than we place on human lives today.

      My buddy who was in the Iraq war was stating how little the government pays out when you are KIA. Yet a US civilian overseas who dies during wartime is paid much more handsomely. Value is what someone is willing to give, and we aren't aware how much we are worth.

      As for our time; yeah it is scary. I wonder if media make it worse than it is. Maybe life has always been like this, it just wasn't televised. Eh.

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  6. You know what else pisses me off over this whole ordeal? Harry Potter. Bam. Yes, J.K. Rowling made a great point in that series. Lord. Voldemort. He was known as "he who must not be named" because people were afraid if him. Fear of a name breeds fear of a thing. If the revrence given to word is fear, then fear is given to what it is in description of. This is something we all know and understand to be true.

    The same is true for the word Niger with another letter in it. :) (Since it is not my blog, I will try and be less of a color commenter) Such revrence is given to "the word that must not be said by white people" that it causes problems. Many more than it should. If a word is said without intent of hate and malice behind it, is it really a bad word? Will this be the newest addition to the currently established swear words? Why is it okay for some to say but not others?

    I'm no longer sure of the direction this rant is going so I am going to stop for the time being.

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    1. Etymology is an interesting field. THe root for that word comes from the Latin for black and I think French word is Negro. Both were fairly "harmless" but over time they came to considered offensive. Most swear words have a harsh "U" sound, because they sound so gutteral in the mid-European nations. A German uttering words with harsh U sounds, just sounds bad. Why some words are bad, and others not? Don't know. I just know when my former students through the F word around like it is every part of speech, seems both trashy and lazy. Not saying I haven't used that word (or other nasties) but I reserve them for times when the situation dictates it. Like fists, I have 'em, but they are a last resort.

      'Course crap used to be a bad word, and I say that all the time. So...

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  7. I'm glad you spoke up about this. It greatly saddens me how desensitized people are today. And war and weapons in and of themselves just sickens me. I have to keep dreaming in order to cope.

    Also, I think a protest needs to be lobbied over this banning of Huck Finn. Seriously? Even understanding their reasons, I don't *understand* their reasons. Ugh.

    P.S. Hi! I'm slowly beginning to emerge from the hole in which I've been hiding the last month. I'm looking forward to catching up on your blog.

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    1. War and killing are pretty bad. It doesn't take a PhD to know that. So why so hard for governments and people to understand? IDK.

      Huck isn't banned, just we as a department decided to teach other novels that represent American Lit. and I overreacted.

      Are you married now?

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    2. They get money from companies who profit from wa. There is also the Rothschild Bank theory that I like as well.

      May I suggest you read the book "Voluntary Islam" by Davi Barker?

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    3. Ahhh...well, at least there are a lot of great American Lit. choices out there. I'm sure you helped decide on some good alternatives.

      And nope, not married yet, which is playing a large part in my internet disappearance. I wish I was rich. Then I could hire a wedding planner so I could sit back, write, and drink mimosas all day. Six more weeks, and I'll be back again, full-force.

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    4. I want to drink mimosas all day too (I don't even know if I like 'em, it just sounds like a good life). Take your time, the internet isn't going anywhere.

      Adam: I'll look into the essays. I've done some reading about actual Islam, and it's done a lot of good in the world. Unfortunately, the extremists have made it into something a little sinister. Hopefully, guys like this Davi Barker can become the figureheads of the religion, and not the Imams we hear in Pakistan, Iran, etc. who want to bring about WWIII.

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  8. I enjoyed your commentary on the value of a life. I think, generally speaking, many folks value their activities much more than whatever someone else has going on. Their lives are "priceless" while others are "worthless".

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    1. Are you saying we are selfish? Say it aint so, Michael.

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  9. I loved this blog post. Do I have your permission to steal a few bites for my lesson plan on Huck Finn? He's in our AmLit textbook and I love teaching high schoolers the many lessons.
    Thanks for the new slant!
    Karen Hoyt

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    1. Steal away. I don't know when I will ever get to teach it again, but I'd hope that EVERY kid gets something out of the novel. There are so many good sociology lessons in the book. I did another lesson on being "sold down the river," and had lynching data for each state (it gets progressively worse the further South you go).

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