{"id":7753,"date":"2009-11-01T21:30:15","date_gmt":"2009-11-02T02:30:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/?p=7753"},"modified":"2009-11-01T21:30:15","modified_gmt":"2009-11-02T02:30:15","slug":"the-statisticization-of-death-from-stalin-to-the-box","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/2009\/11\/the-statisticization-of-death-from-stalin-to-the-box\/","title":{"rendered":"The “Statisticization” of Death: From Stalin to “The Box”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"stalin\"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, \u201cA single death is a tragedy; the death of thousands is a statistic.\u201d\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Today, the \u201cstatisticization\u201d 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.\u00a0 This procedure is championed by legal economists such as Cass Sunstein and Kip Viscusi, and the mathematics involved can be difficult to penetrate.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Viewing multiple lives in the statistical abstract, as Stalin may have done, perhaps seems to us less stomach-turning.\u00a0\u00a0This concept is really nothing new: over two hundred years ago, Adam Smith theorized that sympathy was attenuated by distance.<\/p>\n

I am not uncomfortable with cost-benefit analysis as a regulatory instrument, so long as it remains one tool in the regulator\u2019s box and not a be-all, end-all directive that cannot be countermanded.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

I can envision some situations in which a regulator could reject or overrule its result.\u00a0 For example, consider a scenario in which we could avert potentially catastrophic consequences of global warming if each nation on earth donated\u00a0fifty percent\u00a0of its GDP each year to a prevention fund; or, perhaps, if it accepted a\u00a0fifty percent\u00a0reduction in its citizens\u2019 standard of living.\u00a0 A strict cost-benefit analysis might sanction these measures; Richard Posner recently estimated the cost of the extinction of the human race due to global warming at about $600 trillion dollars.\u00a0 But a national regulator would have no difficulty coming up with defensible reasons to reject them.\u00a0 Sunstein himself recently seemed to admit that cost-benefit analysis has some<\/em> limit when he wrote that \u201cit does not tell regulators all that they need to know; but without it, they will know far too little.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite my tenuous comfort with the use of cost-benefit analysis to put a price on lives, I am left to wonder whether reducing the value of life to a statistic carries a moral price of its own.\u00a0 This week\u2019s release of the movie \u201cThe Box\u201d is apropos.\u00a0 In this new Warner Brothers flick, a cash-strapped suburban couple receives a box from a mysterious stranger with the message that pushing a button in the box will have two effects: it will cause them to receive $1 million dollars, and it will cause someone to die somewhere in the world.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know how the movie ends, but the fact that these types of dilemmas still make good theater makes it clear that we as a society have not fully resolved our qualms over these matters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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, \u201cA single death is a tragedy; the death of thousands is a statistic.\u201d\u00a0 Whether or not the quote is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":70,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ocean_post_layout":"","ocean_both_sidebars_style":"","ocean_both_sidebars_content_width":0,"ocean_both_sidebars_sidebars_width":0,"ocean_sidebar":"","ocean_second_sidebar":"","ocean_disable_margins":"enable","ocean_add_body_class":"","ocean_shortcode_before_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_after_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_before_header":"","ocean_shortcode_after_header":"","ocean_has_shortcode":"","ocean_shortcode_after_title":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_bottom":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_bottom":"","ocean_display_top_bar":"default","ocean_display_header":"default","ocean_header_style":"","ocean_center_header_left_menu":"","ocean_custom_header_template":"","ocean_custom_logo":0,"ocean_custom_retina_logo":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_height":0,"ocean_header_custom_menu":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_family":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_subset":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_size":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_unit":"px","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_line_height":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_unit":"","ocean_menu_typo_spacing":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_unit":"","ocean_menu_link_color":"","ocean_menu_link_color_hover":"","ocean_menu_link_color_active":"","ocean_menu_link_background":"","ocean_menu_link_hover_background":"","ocean_menu_link_active_background":"","ocean_menu_social_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_links_color":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_color":"","ocean_disable_title":"default","ocean_disable_heading":"default","ocean_post_title":"","ocean_post_subheading":"","ocean_post_title_style":"","ocean_post_title_background_color":"","ocean_post_title_background":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_image_position":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_attachment":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_repeat":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_size":"","ocean_post_title_height":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay":0.5,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay_color":"","ocean_disable_breadcrumbs":"default","ocean_breadcrumbs_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_separator_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_hover_color":"","ocean_display_footer_widgets":"default","ocean_display_footer_bottom":"default","ocean_custom_footer_template":"","ocean_post_oembed":"","ocean_post_self_hosted_media":"","ocean_post_video_embed":"","ocean_link_format":"","ocean_link_format_target":"self","ocean_quote_format":"","ocean_quote_format_link":"post","ocean_gallery_link_images":"on","ocean_gallery_id":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/70"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7753"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7753\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}