WWhat do hitmen charge? In search of an answer, Jenny Kleeman says, she went to great lengths to obtain the contact details of “some of Britain’s most notorious murderers” so she could write to them in prison about “their pricing structure”. Later, she found a flamboyant, reformed American assassin who was willing to talk.
How much do people insure their lives for? Kleeman reflects on the stories of a man who faked his own death for insurance; his son, who was stunned when “the father he had mourned for eight months” suddenly showed up at his door; and the fraud investigators who “hunt for the undead.” Her lively and disturbing book ultimately explores twelve different ways we judge ‘the price of (a) life’, through bizarre and poignant individual stories interwoven with the reflections of more detached analysts. She speaks to gay men who pay for IVF and surrogacy to have a genetically related baby; families involved in hostage negotiations; trafficked Filipino women who worked as domestic workers; and “body brokers” who sell cadavers and organs for medical research.
However, prices often prove elusive. Insurers, we learn, do not try to put a value on someone’s life based on something like the income that would be lost to their families, but rely solely on “calculating the probability that someone will die.” So even poor people can insure their lives for almost anything they want, although the amount is of course reflected in the premiums. The peace process in Northern Ireland, Kleeman writes, lowered the price of hiring a hit man by saturating the “market” with “men who had access to firearms and had used them regularly.”
Equally disturbing are the anomalies that arise in cases where we can actually compare. The life of Sara Zelenak, an Australian victim of the 2017 London Bridge terrorist attack, was found to be worth “a small fraction of the others who died in the same atrocity… just seconds before.” This is partly because different countries have very different compensation scales. More importantly, people whose children were hit by the terrorists’ van could bring substantial claims against Hertz, while the relatives of the six people stabbed to death had no one to take to court. I could have done a little less about Zelenak’s distraught parents and have no idea why Kleeman felt she had to inform them that other families had received much more money. But the dishonesty still leaves a very unpleasant taste.
A chapter on the NHS tells the story of a little boy with motor neurone disease who, after an emotional television appeal from his mother, was given “a single dose of a life-saving drug costing £1,798 million”. How were these enormous expenditures justified? Judgments are based on so-called QALYs: the quality-adjusted life years that a particular intervention is estimated to provide to a patient. Each QALY is estimated to be between £20,000 and £30,000, a figure that the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) describes as “probably the right range at the moment”, although it is apparently based on something as arbitrary as “the costs of dialysis in the late 1990s”.
It could be adapted for very rare conditions to encourage pharmaceutical companies to research it. And during the recent pandemic, according to one statistician, the price of the 3 million years of life estimated to have been saved by a lockdown that required an additional £550 billion in government borrowing came to around £180,000 – far more than Nice would be willing to pay in other circumstances pay.
If the results of all this seem inconsistent, we can seek help from the effective altruism movement. Kleeman visits the foundations founded by billionaires in California and the Oxford philosopher who inspired them. They all reject charitable donations based on personal or emotional factors, claiming, for example, that there is “more value” in saving many African children from malaria than trying to help people closer to home, even if they live on the streets. blocks away from your office. One researcher in the field, Kleeman notes, devotes a podcast to “thinking about the optimal age to save someone’s life.” He also gives her a complicated argument – based on what even he admits are “quite subjective” factors – as to why he values the life of an eight-year-old not only over someone older in age, but also over a younger child who doesn’t is. yet “a functioning agent in the world.” She is understandably unimpressed by this kind of ‘ruthless logic’.
Once we assign (explicitly or implicitly) comparative values to different lives, she concludes, the results tend to feel “brutally uneven” or “brutally standardized.” The price of life forces us to ask some very uncomfortable questions about whether we can do better.
The price of life: looking for our worth and who decides by Jenny Kleeman is published by Picador (£18.99). In support of the Guardian And Observer Order your copy via Guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply