Don't know when this'll be up on the KV web site -- it hasn't been updated in a while; but the latest issue's on the news stands now, so go grab yourself one.
Life Inference
Is it worth a darn?
by Scott McNutt
The cusp of a new year is always a good time to examine the significance of our existence on this plane. Why are we here? What’s the purpose? What’s the true value of a human life?
That last question’s been asked and answered since hunter Og whacked gatherer Ig over the head with his mammoth-hunting club during a dispute over restitution for mammoth prints in the barley patch, and Ig’s wife ran out shrieking, "Oi vei! Who is now to gather the hens’ eggs?"
Ancient philosophers abstracted a man’s worth in terms of his dedication to the community (i.e., the Greek "polis" and the Roman "civitas"). To end generations of retributive blood feuds, early English law fixed a price for a man’s life (i.e., the Anglo Saxon "wergild"). Timeless fables have measured a man’s life-worth by the dozens of good vibrations he sets off, which then ripple outward, spreading aid and comfort among souls unknown, of which the vibe originator isn’t even aware (i.e., the Frank Capra "movies"). Yes, for all our existence we have struggled to quantify the value of a single life. And for all our existence, we’ve been inadequate to the task.
Then we discovered life insurance.
It all began here when aliens from the planet Actuarius, hurrying to a clam bake in the Crab Nebula rammed into the Earth while their rocket-ship driver was checking the map to see if they'd already missed the ecliptic plane off-ramp. Dusting themselves off, the partygoers got out of their vehicle to assess the damage and see if they could figure out where they'd taken the wrong turn.
Sure enough, sighting the curve of the Little Bipper, they recognized the Big Bopper and realized they’d lost their way in the bird constellation Cygnus when they’d taken a break for some interstellar swan diving (easy for these aliens, having as they did the physiognomy of long-necked geese), possibly because of all the Coronas they’d gone through. Having oriented themselves, they hopped back in their cruiser and bopped along their merry way. But in their haste, the driver left behind his map.
An early human entrepreneur happened to find the alien chart. From it, he figured the probability of a spaceship coming from Actuarius actually colliding with theEarth, which, as it turned out, was really long odds. From this specific measurement of an astronomically high probability, the early entrepreneur realized he could extrapolate the probabilities for much more likely, terrestrial events.
He thought, "An Actuarial ship, moving with velocity A, hitting the Earth, moving with velocity B, has a probability value of C. So if Car C leaves Farragut heading East at 70 miles per hour, and Car D, traveling on the same road, leaves Ft. Sanders heading West at 50 miles per hour, the probability that they'll crash somewhere along the way and kill someone is something I can make a lot of money taking bets on."
His scheme more successful than he ever dreamed, the entrepreneur developed a whole series of Actuarial charts to identify the best life-or-death moneymaking bets. And in a masterstroke of marketing, he coined the user-friendly designation "life insurance," rather than going with the more apt "life gambling." Thus was launched another way to part money and marks.
Yes, the preceding is a pile of BS. It seems about as plausible, though, as the real history of actuarial tables - and slightly less dull. But if you are seriously interested in learning about the life insurance industry, you can go to www.lifeinsure.com.
There you will find all kinds of stuff on all things insurance - including an insurance blog. Yes, now there truly is a blog for everything. The site also includes a form that allows you to fill in all your personal data, including height, weight, age, systolic rate, cholesterol count, personal habits, medical history, and family medical history (including whether great-uncle Nerwin died from a breathing obstruction caused by an overabundance of matted nose hairs in nineteen-aught-eight).
In return for your taking the time to fill out the form, the site will helpfully tell you that you left an entry square blank seven pages back. It will persist in telling you this no matter how many times you go back through and complete the form. This quandary helps you understand your desperate need for some kind of life insurance – you realize you could die of old age while filling out the form that’s supposed to estimate how much life insurance will cost you.
As you probably already guessed, I’m writing about life insurance because I got some just in time for a new year – my own new year, that is. I got insurance before my own superannuation caused my rates to go up.
So now I’m worth a quarter-million dollars dead to my wife. That set me thinking about how we measure a person’s worth, because I know some company shelling out 250,000 smackers for my delectable corpus delicti doesn’t measure my true worth as a person. I can be bought a lot more cheaply. Offer me $100,000, and, baby, I’m all yours.
Anyway, to return to the topic at hand: a life’s worth. How do we define it? All those old Ogs and Igs (and Ig’s wife), those Greeks and Romans, those Anglos and Saxons, those Franks and Capras, they had their answers, however incomplete. Still, maybe they had it mostly right. Perhaps it’s in our struggle to define life’s worth that we find its value.
Whether we can afford to buy $10 thousand or $10 million of life insurance, we intuitively know that those monetary figures are not a true reckoning of our worth to the people in our lives. We know life is worth more than that; we just don’t know how much more - or even exactly what we’re measuring it with, or against.
But as long as we strive to assess a value for life, we give life worth. In other words, as long we don’t take life for granted, we are investing it with worth, even if we can’t say precisely how much its value is. In other other words, the act of wondering about life’s value demonstrates its worth.
Not buying that explanation? Prefer something more concrete? OK then, would you care to bet that if Car C leaves Farragut, heading East at 70 miles per hour, while Car D...?
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