The $1.33 Billion Question

What is the value of one life? I found myself thinking about that when I returned from areas of Southeast Texas devastated by Hurricane Ike. It was about the same time the odds turned in favor of the house in what some commentators have called “casino capitalism.”

Because of the economic meltdown, news of the storm and the search for its victims was swept to the back pages of the national dailies and disappeared almost entirely from television. At the time, there were still more than 400 people reported missing.

In its place, headlines like this: “Wall Street Woes take Shine off Lavish NY Lifestyles” (Reuters). To be fair, Ike was still in the news, but a Google news search for Sept. 15-17 returns more than twice as many stories containing the phrase “Wall Street” than the phrase “Hurricane Ike.”

And the disparity has only grown over the past few weeks.

Among other things, “news” is about capturing the largest possible audience, because larger audiences mean more advertising revenue. Of course this serves other purposes – newspapers and television stations want to report news their readers and viewers care about, that is relevant to them. But the end result is the same.

So, I get that: most Americans care more about stocks and bonds and market liquidity and the mortgage crisis than they do about a natural disaster in one corner of distant Texas. The bottom line, for many, is the bottom line.

So, in financial terms, what is the value of one life? I found an interesting article in the New York Times, in which one Chicago economist placed an average value of $4 million on each life. That figure represents lost earnings, pain and suffering, lost experiences and more.

If we use $4 million as an average, four Southeast Texas counties currently have a collective $1.33 billion problem. It’s not a $700 billion bailout of Wall Street, and it’s not the $10 billion or so the United States spends on the war in Iraq each month, but it ain’t chump change, either.

On Bolivar Peninsula alone, more than 50 people are still unaccounted for. That’s more than one percent of the peninsula’s entire population. In the small towns of the Peninsula – Gilchrist, Caplen, Crystal Beach, Port Bolivar – a substantially greater percentage of each town’s population is simply gone.

Everyone who lived there knows someone who no longer does.

Of course, some of the currently-unaccounted for will turn up safe, if not entirely well, in distant cities or in hospitals or care facilities across Texas. But it’s a safe bet that many – a majority, even -- of the 333 people currently listed as missing after Hurricane Ike are dead.

This weekend in Chambers County, deputies, Texas game wardens, members of the Texas Task Force 1 search team and dogs trained in human remains detection will make a major push to try to begin answering that $1.33 billion question.

I’ll be there, and I’m pretty sure I won’t be thinking of the losses in economic terms. Neither will the people sifting through the rubble that once was Gilchrest and Crystal Beach and Caplen.

More likely we’ll all be thinking about the anguished mothers, fathers, children and other loved ones of those still missing, hoping for an answer to where they are now, even if that answer is not the one they most want to receive.