Given the current outrage over the US reparations to the families of the 16 Afghan civilians killed recently, allegedly by one SSG Bales, I thought I might approach the situation from a new angle.
On the one hand, $50,000 seems like a paltry sum for a life. And on the other hand, it seems like an enormous amount.
But rather than arbitrarily making assumptions, let’s analyze this:
The Afghanistan GDP/capita (average salary per person) is $900/year.
The US-led coalition pays the families of people killed during coalition operations (whether we directly caused said death or not). As somber as this sounds, the normal “payout” per person is an average of $9,000.
This equals the income production of the deceased family member for the next ten years. While it is extremely difficult to even attempt to put a price on the life of any human, in this case, it must be done SOMEhow…
However, rather than the standard nine thousand dollars, fifty thousand dollars has been given to the families of each of the deceased in the aforementioned incident.
A quick division problem 50,000 divided by 900 equals 55.6. The real world application of this is that a seemingly insignificant amount is equivalent to the income production of the deceased family member for the next 55.6 years. (Ironically, the TOTAL life expectancy of the average citizen of Afghanistan is 47.9 years, so this figure is somewhat “over-the-top.”).
This also results in a total price of $800,000.
Now, personally I think this is probably more appropriate than the average of $9,000 that currently goes to families of the victims.
But here is the REAL question:
Given the 15 out of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudi, when is the Saudi Arabian government going to pay an average of $481,470 to each of the families of the 2,996 people killed on September 11, 2001. This would equal the income production of the deceased family member for the next ten years.
Or, if we are going to apply the “55.6 Rule,” the appropriate amount allotted each family who lost a family member in the 9/11 attacks should be $48,147 x 55.6 and this would equal $2,674,833.34.
Now, given that only 15 out of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudi (79%), it’s fair to pair down this $2.6 million to $2,113,118.34 per family.
This new total multiplied by the 2,996 people that were killed on 9/11 would be $6,330,902,542.40. This is pocket change for Saudi Arabia.
But somehow, I do not see any “reparations” being by the Saudi Royal Family anytime soon, nor any apologies given.
Weren’t the hijackers independent, and not actually connected to the Royal Saudi Family at all..?
Joey brings up a good point. This would be a better comparison if SSG Bales were not connected with the US gov’t. Since the Saudi hijackers were allegedly independent (at least, we have no proof linking them to the Saudi gov’t) then our shooter in Afghan would have to be in a similar situation.
On another note, if we were to try and put a valuation on a human life it would seem fair to look at the average lifespan in that region, subtract the age at time of death, and then multiply the remainder by either the average yearly salary or current salary at time of death. This would cover the amount of money that the deceased would likely have made had they been allowed to live out their natural life.