How much is a rescue worth?
If they’d had a GoFundMe campaign to finance the rescue of that boys’ soccer team in Thailand, how much would it have raised? They say “the whole world was watching,” but that’s not really true. Many in the world still don’t have means to watch. Others who can are nevertheless oblivious to the news. But, at minimum, a couple of billion people must have been watching the drama that finally ended Tuesday as all the boys and their coach were freed from the cave they were trapped in. Lots of those spectators would have been willing to contribute at least something to help. Many probably would have given quite a bit.
The expenditure to save the boys and their coach must have been pretty large: pumping water out of a mountain, damming entrances to it, provisioning tunnels with oxygen and other supplies, bringing in helicopters and ambulances, and, the biggest expenditure of all, dozens of divers risking their own lives to first find the team and then get it out. It would be hard to total all that up.
True, some of that spending would have taken place anyway. The Thai army and police presumably are on permanent standby. (That’s what standing armies do.) But in other cases the overtime and danger pay, if they were fully accounted for, would be enormous. Of course, all the volunteers — including the former Thai navy SEAL who died in the effort — donated this value.
Both what the actual cost is and what a GoFundMe campaign would have brought in are, for now, guesswork. But in both cases “huge” seems a reasonable estimate. And with unique, identifiable human beings at risk, especially young ones with long lives in front of them, we all feel that’s perfectly reasonable.
Now consider a GoFundMe campaign to put an air conditioner in the home of every Quebecer over the age of 50 so they will be less at risk during the province’s next severe heat wave. The province’s ministry of health attributes 54 deaths to the one-week scorcher we’ve just been through here in Quebec, although in only two cases, apparently, were there actual symptoms of heat stroke or an elevated body temperature. In the rest of the cases the heat seems to have accelerated death from other causes. (In Ontario, where it was just as hot, no deaths were attributed to the heat, in part because Ontario makes such attributions only after a coroner’s investigation. Quebec health officials make a quicker determination after consulting attending paramedics and physicians.)
So far as I can tell, StatCan’s latest numbers on air conditioning are for 2009, when 74 per cent of Ontario’s households but only 42 per cent of Quebec’s reported having it. I know what you’re thinking: Despite equalization?! (The highest rate of air conditioning was in Manitoba at 80 per cent and the lowest in Atlantic Canada at 19 per cent. The national average was 50 per cent.)
Most people’s reaction to the Thai rescue is: spend whatever it takes. But on Free A/C for Quebecers, I bet there would be questions. Just how severe is the problem, really? How many deaths were truly caused by the heat? How old were the folks affected? (Don’t write in to complain: I say this as an older folk myself.) How much longer were they expecting to live, on average? What would this all-new Medic-Air program cost? How often do we have killer heat waves? Also: Are there other, cheaper ways of dealing with the problem?
Like moving people to designated cooling stations — many schools are empty in the summer, those not occupied by refugee claimants, that is — for one blazing-hot week that happens every fifth or sixth year? (Actually, Quebec’s last heat wave this deep was in 1973.)
What people are doing here is intuitively balancing costs and benefits. Yes, we’re likely to save lives. But it will cost. And maybe cost a lot. Retrofitting all buildings so the interior temperature can’t exceed a designated legal maximum, as some activists propose, would be very expensive, possibly costing in the hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more. Would it really be worth it?
A sub-discipline of economics specializes in this question of what’s a saved life worth, though the term it uses is the “value of a statistical life” — that is, the value we place on the loss of life of one person whose identity we don’t at the moment know.
The acknowledged world leader in the field is Kip Viscusi of Vanderbilt University. He infers people’s valuation of life by examining how big a wage premium risky jobs pay. His current best estimate of the value of a single statistical life is US$10 million, or $13 million Canadian.
My guess is GoFundMe would have brought in a lot more than US$130 million to save the 12 Thai boys and their soccer coach. But to equip other caves in other parts of the world to reduce expected deaths from caving by exactly one person? Does US$10 million seem too much or too little?
ON FREE A/C FOR QUEBECERS, I BET THERE WOULD BE QUESTIONS.