The Price of Life: Jenny Kleeman on the data behind decisions on who lives or dies

Jenny Kleeman on a dinner date with former mob hitman John Alite at a New York steakhouse while researching for her new book The Price of Life. Photo / Jenny Kleeman

Are you worth more dead or alive? A new book looks at the dollar value that’s placed on human life from birth to death - and who gets to decide.

The hitman ordered steak and a dirty martini. His black shirt was unbuttoned enough to reveal a hint of faded neck tattoo and a glint of gold medallion, writes UK journalist Jenny Kleeman, who met him for dinner in Manhattan. He ordered steak for her, too.

“How many people have you killed?” she asked him. He told her he didn’t keep count.

For 30 years, John Alite was an enforcer for the Mafia’s notorious Gambino family. These days, he’s a motivational speaker with PTSD and a website selling signed baseball bats. Anyone who’s seen a mob movie will get that.

When Kleeman sat down to interview Alite for her new book, The Price of Life, she had no intention of glamorising him but found herself charmed.

“I really liked him,” she tells the Herald via Zoom from her London home. “That was the thing that spooked me so much. Throughout my life as a journalist, I’ve been with some very dangerous people. And the way that I get through it is by not really believing they’re that dangerous.

“I couldn’t really believe John had murdered people, but he definitely has. He’s been to prison for it. But he was refreshingly honest when I put difficult questions to him. It was an extraordinary experience.”

We like to think human life is priceless, writes Jenny Kleeman, but in reality, there's a dollar value placed on it all the time. Photo / Nina Raingold

Beginning The Price of Life with a chapter on contract killers is a clever move by Kleeman, a former foreign correspondent who’s skilled at engaging with weighty issues through compellingly human stories.

Her 2020 book Sex Robots & Vegan Meat was the result of a five-year investigation into the stealth creep of technology and how it’s radically redefining our lives. That one opens with her visit to a company in San Diego that makes hyper-realistic silicone sex dolls, including a male version with the CEO’s face. Eeuw.

The level of philanthropic investment in the vegan meat industry sparked her interest in taking a closer look at the practice of effective altruism, essentially a way of assessing how to get the biggest bang for your buck. That led her in to a deeper exploration of how the “value” of human life is monetised from birth to death, and the ethical dilemmas behind what are inherently cold-hearted calculations.

Here’s a snapshot of what she found, which she uses in The Price of Life as a discussion starter for each section of the book (converted from British pounds to New Zealand dollars):

• The cost of creating a life: IVF from $30,000
• Taking a life: hiring a hitman, $32,000, the economic burden of the average murder, $6.8 million
• Losing a life: insurance payout, $424,000
• Saving a life: the cost-benefit benchmark for one “quality-adjusted life year” in the UK’s National Health Service, $42,500-64,000, the going rate for ransom payments, $783,000
• Buying a life: human trafficking $850
• And, finally, the market value of a cadaver, $10,600

Ironies abound, of course. Infertility treatment to birth a new life costs roughly the same as procuring a professional killer to terminate an existing one, although the asking price for a hit apparently took a tumble when the peace process in Northern Ireland saw guns for hire flood the market.

A shrine to London teenager Shaquan Sammy-Plummer, who was stabbed in 2015. His murder was one of 570 in England and Wales that year used by the Home Office to calculate the economic burden of the average murder on the public purse: $6.8 million. Photo / Jenny Kleeman

New Zealand’s ACC system means families of murder victims or people who are killed accidentally can’t sue for compensation, as they can in the US and UK.

However, as abhorrent as it may seem on first blush, decisions are made here every day based on the dollar value we place on human life - from whether or not to fund an expensive cancer drug to the allocation of infrastructure resources. How many deaths does it take to justify the cost of putting median barriers on a motorway?

“We like to think that human beings can’t be bought, but that doesn’t mean no price can be put on a human life,” Kleeman writes. “The cost … is routinely calculated and put into practice by philanthropists, judges, police chiefs, businesses, charities, actuaries, healthcare providers, policymakers and criminals.

“They each use their own formulae and come up with wildly different final numbers, but two things unite them: they are all prepared to use dispassionate logic to quantify what’s supposed to be incalculable, and they generally want to keep it quiet.”

One of the most controversial chapters is on Covid, quoting a statistics professor at Edinburgh University who has calculated lockdown in the UK cost $380,000 per life year saved. That’s six or seven times the level of spending for almost every other health condition.

What the bald figures don’t capture is empathy and the sacrifices people were prepared to make to protect those around them, but in a free and open society, that’s the kind of discussion we should be able to have.

Kleeman was schooled early in asking uncomfortable questions. In her late 20s, she worked for Channel 4 programme Unreported World, covering stories that tended to be ignored by the global media. Her first piece was on the killing of street children in Honduras.

Now a freelance writer and documentary maker, she’s currently presenting a BBC Radio series called The Gift on DNA testing kits, which are often given as presents with little thought to the potentially life-changing consequences of what might be revealed.

Working on The Price of Life has shifted Kleeman’s perspective on valuing (or devaluing) a person’s worth simply by running the numbers. Artificial intelligence and the algorithms it generates can be useful tools when there are tough calls to be made, she says, but a pure focus on data can exclude a more nuanced take.

“I realise now there is a lot to be said for being prepared to go there and calculate the incalculable. But I’ve spent a lot of time with people who think that [quantitative] way and instinctively devalue the qualitative. In an age where everything is reduced to numbers, it worries me that we have been moving so far in that direction.”

The Price of Life, by Jenny Kleeman (Macmillan, $39.99).

• The Price of Life: In Search of What We’re Worth and Who Decides, by Jenny Kleeman (Macmillan, $39.99) is out now.

Joanna Wane is an award-winning feature writer on the NZ Herald’s Lifestyle Premium team, with a special focus on social issues and the arts.