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发帖数: 7508 | 1 意大利200万， 中国人15万， 阿富汗人3千。
The Value of a Dead Afghan: Revealed and Relative
by Marc W. Herold
Departments of Economics and Women's Studies
Whittemore School of Business & Economics
University of New Hampshire
POSTED JULY 21, 2002 --
On May 7, 1999, a U.S. B-52 bomber dropped three JDAM bombs upon the Chinese
Embassy in Belgrade. Three young Chinese journalists were killed and 27
other persons in the embassy were wounded. Four months later, the United
States agreed to pay $4.5 million in damages to the families of the deceased
and to the injured. This amounts to about $150,000 per victim. When a U.S.
marine jet hit aerial tramway cables in Italy not too long ago, the U.S.
gave close to $2 million to each Italian victim.
On July 1, 2002, a U.S. AC-130 gunship attacked and strafed four villages in
the Deh Rawud district of Uruzagan, killing more than 60 innocent Afghans
and wounding about 120 others.1 The American troops which occupied the
villages offered tents and blankets as compensation. A week later, the U.S.-
installed and backed Karzai regime offered the Afghan wedding victims $18,
500 in compensation, or about $100 per victim -- the payments were $200 on
behalf of each individual killed and $75 for each wounded person, using
Afghan regime figures of 48 killed and 118 wounded.2 Note might be taken
that the wedding party victims were Pashtuns [from the same ethno-linguistic
group as Karzai, though Karzai does not speak Pashto]. What does seem
certain is that the villagers of Uruzgan will now receive a permanent U.S.
Special Forces base in their area (as compensation) and the compliant U.S.
mainstream media "spins" this as a way of better protecting innocent Afghans
from U.S. firepower.
I agree fully with those who argue that attaching a monetary value to a life
is an immoral and sordid endeavor and this essay in no way should be
interpreted as support for such efforts. I merely wish to show that by the
extremely conservative standards of mainstream economics -- and many in
Karzai's closest entourage are well-versed in such thinking having been
employees of the World Bank and other pillars of international capitalism3 -
- the compensation offered by the Karzai regime is paltry and insulting,
even far below what should be given using the discounted future earnings
approach.
Other figures for compensation have been put forth, for example Global
Exchange argues for $10,000 for each family which lost kin -- a very modest
amount of about one-fifteenth of that paid the Chinese victims in Belgrade.
By Karzai's accounting standards, the life of a dead Afghan is 'worth' only
one-seven hundredth of that of a dead Chinese, one-ten thousandth of a dead
Italian and one-thirty thousandth of a dead American -- if her/his life is '
worth' $6,000,000 on average, as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
has calculated.
The point is sometimes made that cross-country comparisons of monetary
values should be made in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms.4 To do this in
the Afghan case -- that is to make $18,500 in Afghanistan match an
equivalent dollar amount in terms of purchasing power in the United States,
would amount to about multiplying the $18,500 figure by five. But in
fairness, then we should also translate into U.S. terms the numbers of
Afghan civilian deaths from bombing -- estimated at 3,100- 3,600, or in U.S.
terms, given a U.S. population 10 times as large, 31,000 - 36,000.
Economists, lawyers and moral philosophers have struggled to assess the '
value of life.' I shall dwell on the attempts by mainstream economists to do
this and apply such reasoning insofar as is possible to Afghanistan.
Naturally, mainstream economists seek to determine a 'fair' monetary value.
Different approaches have been advanced. Recent work argues that the
calculation of the value of human life should begin by asking individuals
how much they would be willing to extend their life for a finite period of
time. This allegedly circumvents the impossible question of evaluating
possible death in monetary terms, and rather asking a person to assess the
utility of additional years of life which she/he does know. According to a
model of Allan Feldman, the amount people are willing to pay to extend their
life for a fixed period of time is then roughly equivalent to what the
person would spend on personal consumption during that time [note the
powerful Western bias here which privileges consumption as the end-all of
living].5 Another approach calculates the value of a human life by examining
how much an individual is willing to pay to reduce the risk of death by say
a certain specified percentage.
The dominant 'model' in practice, however, remains not the neoclassical
economists' 'willingness to pay' perspective, but rather the simple old
discounted future earnings model which focuses upon human beings as a
machine generating a stream of income into the future. What could the
deceased have earned? Naturally, such a valuation model contains numerous
problems as well: Someone who is 65 years or older or is retired is worth
nothing; compensation only encompasses foregone discounted earnings and
omits dependents' pain and suffering, etc. Feldman, who proposes the '
willingness to pay' valuation, criticizes the human capital approach because
it does not correctly assess what people are willing to pay to avoid death |
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