While discussing with other Allied leaders the potential deaths of tens of thousands of Allied soldiers during the planned invasion of France during World War II, former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin is said to have remarked, “A single death is a tragedy; the death of thousands is a statistic.”  Whether or not the quote is apocryphal (some attribute it to the writer Erich Maria Remarque), it seems to me that we increasingly find ourselves in the perhaps unenviable position of revealing more than a kernel of truth to the sentiment.

Today, the “statisticization” of death has been reduced to a regulatory art form as part of analyses that agencies undertake to determine whether the cost of a regulation is justified by its benefits, including the number of lives it might save.  This procedure is championed by legal economists such as Cass Sunstein and Kip Viscusi, and the mathematics involved can be difficult to penetrate.  The density and abstraction of the calculations is probably for the better, because few of us could rationally and openly assign a numerical value to our own life or to the lives of our friends and family.  Viewing multiple lives in the statistical abstract, as Stalin may have done, perhaps seems to us less stomach-turning.  This concept is really nothing new: over two hundred years ago, Adam Smith theorized that sympathy was attenuated by distance.

I am not uncomfortable with cost-benefit analysis as a regulatory instrument, so long as it remains one tool in the regulator’s box and not a be-all, end-all directive that cannot be countermanded.