This is a subject that is 0nly seriously talked about when a manmade disaster occurs, lots of lives are lost, and there might be lawsuits against a corporation or government agency. Instantly there is a discussion of lost salaries and who is going to step up and replace their monetary contributions to their love ones. “Something needs to be done so that it does not occur again.”

We take a different view of the many lives that are lost each day all over the world that seem to occur for seemingly no reason. “Too much mayo on a sandwich, you stepped on my shoes, you did not buy the toy I wanted, you hit my car”, and other things that can be easily replaced. Death as we know it is permanent.

The sadness is that we see so much carnage in the news, we have been made less likely to feel shock or distress at scenes of cruelty or suffering by overexposure to such images. We have become de-sensitized to violence. We say things like, “I understand why they killed them.”

Their worth to society is rarely mentioned unless it is within the four walls of the church, by those who are grieving and is mentioned by the person giving the eulogy. Do the last, the least and the lost fit in that $ 6.9 category? Apparently, they are not.  If they were, surely the red flags would be tweaked.

It’s not just the American dollar that’s losing value. A government agency has decided that an American life isn’t worth what it used to be. The “value of a statistical life” is $6.9 million in today’s dollars, the Environmental Protection Agency reckoned in May— nearly $1 million down from just five years ago.

Though it may seem like a harmless bureaucratic recalculation, the devaluation has real consequences. When drawing up regulations, government agencies put a value on human life and then weigh the costs versus the lifesaving benefits of the proposed rule. The less a life is worth statistically, the less the need for regulation. So, it may be that if the rule to adopt costs more than the life it saves, it may not be adopted.

The EPA figure is not based on peoples earning capacity, or their potential contributions to society, or how much they are loved and needed by their friends and family. Instead, economists calculate the value based on what people are willing to pay to avoid certain risks, and how much extra employers pay their workers to take on additional risks.

Twenty plus years ago when I was transitioning from Mass Retail Management, I took a detour for a moment. I worked for one of the largest oil companies. One of the tasks I had to learn was the everyday operation of running the fuel pumps.  There was one customer who always reminded me, “Do You realize that you have one of the most dangerous jobs…”

A few weeks before I left for graduate school, a midnight attendant, working alone, was killed. There was no mention of his worth.  Just like then, there is little mention of the dead one’s worth to society. However, scripture says that every life is precious, even the last, the lost, and the last.