The Price We Pay (as of August 17, 2005)
According to the Department of Defense, the number of Americans (soldiers and military-related civilians) who have been killed in Iraq as of August 17, 2005 is 1,854. The number of Americans wounded who were able to return to duty within 72 hours is 7,262, and the number of wounded who could not be returned to duty is 6,759 (for a total of 14,021 wounded).
So how much are the lives of the dead soldiers worth today, in cold dollars and cents? By my calculations, approximately $175,000,000.
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In an effort to be transparent, here is the methodology I used to reach that number:
Federal statutes in various places (covering railroad workers, sailors, longshoremen and various other groups) set a death benefit compensation scheme of 50% of wages to the surviving spouse and 16.67% to surviving children, or 66.67% of wages. I therefore assumed that that amount -- 66.67% of wages -- times life expectency, reduced to present value, would roughly approximate what the dead person's life is worth by the standards of their employer, the Federal government. I am not saying that this is how the military death benefits are actually calculated or awarded, just that this is an objective measure that the government uses elsewhere.
In any event, I assumed that the average enlisted soldier serving in Iraq is an E-6 with fewer than 12 years of service, and that the average combat-duty officer is an O-4 with fewer than 12 years of service. My hypothetical enlisted soldier makes between $43,000 and $54,000 (approximately) [link], and the hypothetical officer makes between $69,000 and $95,000 (approximately) [link]. For purposes of my calculations, I chose the midpoint in each hypothetical salary grade, and then averaged the two salaries to get one hypothetical salary amount, $65,250. I then multiplied that number by 2/3, to get $43,717.50.
I then assumed an average life expectency of approximately 77 years (it's actually slightly higher than that). [link] I also assumed that my average soldier was 28 years old when he died, meaning he had a life expectency of 49 additional years. (Various websites have noted that the average age of casualties in Iraq is between 27 and 29. See, for example, this link to a post by war historian James Dunnigan [link].) Multiplying that times $43,717.50, I derived a total life value of $2,010,982.
Because that amount would be paid out as an annuity, I reduced the total down to present value. I assumed that the payments would be indexed for inflation at a 4% inflation rate. Applying the present value calculation, I determined that the net present value for each dead soldier's life would be approximately $95,000. I then multiplied that number by the number of dead to arrive at the amount of $175,000,000.
(Please note that because of the number of assumptions in my analysis, I have rounded some numbers in this description, although all calcuations were done in Excel, so they were correct to whatever number of decimal places were needed.)
posted by Daniel at 6:57 AM
5 Comments:
Some moral thinkers insist on the infinite value of each person's life. It says in the Koran somewhere that, if you take one innocent life, it is as if you extinguished all of humanity (but, of course, some interpret "innocent" in a peculiar way). Most people howeven, accept that, in the actual conduct of our lives, we cannot infinitely value human lives. If we did, we could never take such chances as driving or flying, and we would have to devote all our resources to futile attempts to preserve the lives of nearly dead people. Given your accounting, at $175 million, the cost of the lives of US soldiers have been a tiny part of the approximately $200 billion (200 thousand million)we have spent. All those soldiers cost us less than 10% of one B-2 bomber (at $2B a copy). Yet, the actuarial accounting may be only retrospective. What I mean is that we will pay much less after a person dies to his estate than we will spend prospectively to lessen his danger. We feel the pilot rightly bails out of a billion dollar plane to save his life, even if he had a slight chance of saving the plane if he tried longer to control it.
I agree that in the context of total war spending, $175 million is inconsequential. Even if you were to include the cost of training the soldiers, or the cost to the military of losing their experience, the number wouldn't get much more consequential. Which, if you think about it, is somewhat disturbing in its own right.
I applaud your attention to the war, but at the same time, I wonder at the fact that it seems everyone keeps breaking down bits and pieces of the war, and not looking at an overall picture of what's going on... you've measured the "net worth" of the people whose lives we've lost, you've looked at the fact that the war can be calculated and people can be "figured up"... but what most people fail to realize is, the actual soldiers fighting and dying in this war are there for a reason, whether it's a good one or not... all have joined the military of their own FREE will, and for better or worse, they are all doing the job they signed for... what most people don't understand is, about the only thing the "military higher-ups" can be guilty of is, using the people they have to do the job they've sworn to do, protect our country... and as far as this war goes, what people DO NOT truly want to believe is, if we were not over in Iraq and Afghanistan for these people to target, they'd be targeting innocent people all over the world. And the fact that they actually ARE targeting innocents in Iraq is only validating the point. For anyone to believe that this war has been fought in vain, or that it's a "waste of taxpayer's dollars" is to ignore this simple fact: If we weren't over in another country, fighting these people "on their own side of the world", then they'd find a way over here. I think 9/11 proved it. I think that the effort they've put into the insurgency proves it. And I think we need to understand that, while no one wants war, (especially those of us, like MYSELF, who are going over AGAIN soon to actually FIGHT the war), it is actually the lesser evil when the option of terrorists attacking on our own soil still exists. And with all the crap about whether or not Saddam was going to attack anyone or not being pointless, the point IS that there are those out there who WILL, if given the chance, KILL anyone they believe to be their enemy. And that's us. I'd rather be sent overseas to fight an enemy on their own soil, than to sit and wait for someone to come over here and kill my family and friends. And if you think that's a small possibility, you haven't been paying attention to the world at large, have you??
Peace to you and all you Love....
Yes, it is somewhat disturbing. If we could get a bigger bang for the buck by "buying" a thousand dead soldiers instead of buying one tank, it would make economic sense to do so, but be a monstrous bargain. Any commander who did that should lose his job. But Eisenhower "spent" about 6,000 soldier's lives on a practice for the D-Day invasion, and somehow that's OK.
In another, much lesser, way, it's disturbing that blogs are now attracting spam ads.
To Julio's comment about missing the bigger picture -- my point in calculating a value for the lost lives was not to suggest that there is some great cost/benefit analysis that justifies or doesn't justify the war. And it was not meant to detract from the fact that the soldiers in Iraq volunteered and in most cases understood the risks and rewards. I think that the point of quantifying the cost is to bring the war home to ordinary Americans, who haven't been asked to sacrifice much of anything, and who aren't confronted with the costs of a war being waged, rightly or wrongly, in their names. The purpose of this post and previous posts tallying the dead is to give some idea of what the numbers -- which, by themselves are meaningless -- might translate into.
As for fighting them there versus fighting them here, I don't buy that logic. If that logic held true, how would you explain the bombings in Bali, Madrid and London?
As to Bruce's comment, I agree, it's sad that spam has reached the blogosphere.
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