How much is a human life worth?

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We're the show that looks at the numbers in the news and in life and today, in death.

I'm Tim Harford.

How much is a human life worth?

Not in spiritual or cultural terms, I am talking about the cold, hard cash value.

That is the question question at the heart of a book by journalist Jenny Kleeman called The Price of Life.

And it turns out that there is not just one price, there are loads of them, depending on how exactly that life is being created, traded or destroyed.

I sat down with Jenny to talk it all over.

So the book is about the price of life, all of the different ways that we put a price on life.

And you begin rather splendidly by trying to figure out the price of having someone killed.

Yes, I jumped in at the deep end there by looking at the average cost of a hitman and trying to find a hitman who would explain his prices to me.

And you have this rather lovely meal, steak, martinis, with a classic straight-out of central casting mafia hitman.

Well, tell me a little bit about him.

He's called John Elite.

He is somebody who has served time in prison for murder, for being a hitman.

He was a hitman for the Gambino family, one of the five families of New York.

So he killed people for the mob and in return, he would get, he said to me, not so much a fee per hit, but he would get opportunities.

He would get the chance to participate in a business or own a parking lot or something like that.

Opportunities would open up in exchange for the murders that he committed.

This hitman, known as the calculator, was rather coy coy about the money he made per hit, but he told Jenny he'd made something like $100 million in his career.

Oh yes, he made a lot of money and he said he didn't keep count of how many people he killed, but he probably killed about a dozen people.

So he made at least $2 million per hit.

And I mean that seems maybe not unreasonable.

Life is very valuable.

Killing somebody seems very risky.

Would hitmen normally get $2 million to kill somebody?

This is the really interesting thing that I found out is that the price of a hit, the cost of commissioning a hit, has very little to do with the value of the life taken.

It's to do with the desperation of the person being employed to take that life.

And actually, the average cost of a hit in the UK is surprisingly affordable.

I interviewed some criminologists who have looked into this, and it's around £15,000

to hire somebody to kill someone for you, which this criminologist said said to me, it's about the cost of a second-hand family-sized car.

But then again, we only know about the hitmen who are unsuccessful, the ones who get caught, we only know about their prices.

The kind of hitmen of our imaginations who, you know, turn up with silences, kill people, and then disappear into the night.

We don't really know how much they charge.

So that's the price of having somebody killed.

Let's take a different perspective.

So you have been killed in an accident, perhaps, or you've been killed in some criminal act.

And we hear tell of compensation payments.

I realise I'm really unsure who pays these compensation payments and on what basis and how big are they?

Well, it all depends how your life is taken.

I looked at, for example, what happens if you're killed in a terrorist attack, the compensation that your family gets.

And it is quite extraordinary, the discrepancy between different amounts depending on which country you come from and also how your life is taken.

I looked at the London Bridge terror attack in 2017 where three terrorists drove a van across London Bridge.

They ran over people with the van, they got out of the van and then went into Borough Market where they stabbed people.

And there were eight people who were killed.

They all came from different countries and their families got vastly different amounts of compensation depending on where they came from.

But perhaps the most shocking thing that I discovered is that the families of the two people who were killed by the van on the bridge were able to sue the insurers of Hertz, the rental company that provided the van to the terrorists.

And those two families would have got about £1.5 million each.

That's nearly two million dollars.

Whereas the families of the six people who were killed with knives by the same people a matter of seconds later, there was no one to sue.

You can't sue knife manufacturers when somebody is murdered.

So they had to rely on the the statutory compensation from their government.

The British person who was killed, his family would have got the statutory criminal injury compensation, which is about well, it is eleven thousand pounds.

Which is about, what, fourteen thousand dollars.

If you look at those numbers, it is absolutely absurd to suggest that the lives of the people killed on the bridge were worth 140 times as much as the lives of the people killed with knives by the same people seconds later.

But that's what those figures show.

Let's take a turn for a slightly cheerier view of this.

What about the price of creating a life?

I mean, I know

if I want to make a baby, I mean, there is a

well-established procedure for doing this, and if I can find somebody to help me out, then it's effectively free, assuming that we're lucky and everything sort of works out.

But the traditional method is not available to certain people in certain circumstances.

If they have fertility trouble, if you have a same-sex couple.

So, in those circumstances, how much does it cost then to create a baby?

It's really expensive.

In the UK, you're supposed to get IVF, at least one round of IVF, paid for on the NHS.

But some research that's been conducted recently by the Fertility Network shows that the vast majority of people who are having fertility treatment are in fact paying for it.

The average cost was £13,700.

That's the average amount that someone in the UK is paying to have a baby through fertility treatment.

That's nearly $18,000 and it hugely varies depending on all kinds of things.

age, family history, where in the UK you live.

But it's also incredibly cheap if you compare it to another group of people.

When it comes to gay couples, particularly gay men, it's extremely expensive if they want to have a biological connection to their child because not only do they have to fund IVF, but they also have to fund the cost of surrogacy, which at the moment, if you were to have a baby born through surrogacy in the US, it's around $280,000,

which basically means that you have to be kind of biologically fortunate or incredibly wealthy if you want to have a child.

In a somewhat bleak subject, there are moments of human goodness in Jenny's book.

According to the charity GiveWell, for example, it costs a bit under $5,000 to save a child's life in Africa in the most efficient way.

But there's no escaping the fact that when we talk about the price of life, it is still the case that human beings are bought and sold.

Jenny pointed to a CNN investigation from 2017 that found manacled slaves being sold in Libya for just $400.

dollars.

Everything has its price.

And even in death, a human body has a value.

There is a price for a cadaver in the US where there tends to be a price for everything.

In most countries in the world you can't charge for a cadaver, but in the US you can charge for supplying a cadaver to a medical institution, to somebody who wants to conduct medical research or learn anatomy.

And the price of a cadaver bought from the US is about $5,000,

excluding shipping.

So the price of a human being dead could be sold for more than 10 times as much as that same life alive if it was being sold in a Libyan slave market.

Our thanks to Jenny Kleeman, author of The Price of Life.

And that's it for this week.

Please do get in touch if you've seen a number in the news that you think we should take a look at.

The email, as ever, is more or less at bbc.co.uk.

We'll be back next week.

And until then, goodbye.

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