What is the monetary price of a life in the calculation of wartime damages? I’m particularly interested in how the price of a life figured into the calculations of WWI and WWII reparations payed by Germany but also modern-era reparations demanded of Serbia (1.9 billion euros the last time I checked) for its role in the 1990s Balkans conflicts.
I don’t know about war casualties. My father was a small-business owner in the 1970s and 1980s. He once told my that if an employee died on the job, the insurance companies generally expected the lawsuit to settle for $10 000, assuming you weren’t negligent.
It doesn’t appear to have been calculated in such an itemised, bottom-up, way, and whatever was demanded had in the end to take account of ability to pay anyway.
The history is interesting: I hadn’t realised there had been such reference back to tit-for-tat reparations, from the Franco-Prussian War to Napoleon - maybe that influenced France’s post-WW1 demand.
The value of human life is a routine measure in insurance, economic modelling and a bunch of other stuff and it gets into both standardised values and the particularities of individual trauma. There are a few alternative methods of calculating these values. A standard modelling figure I found for 2015 for a road fatality was AU$4,339,000 [about U$ ~3M]. For injuries there is a quality of life value as well as impaired earning potential.
A lot of it seems to be calculating broader economic effects and then apportioning causes and, possibly, taking away the number you first thought of.
I think there might not be a lot to gain from a fine-grained calculation versus a broad whole-of-economy approach. The demography of fatalities will indicate how the more enduring impact on the young vs older casualties will cost more over decades, and how shattered cities and towns may affect future life quality.
In the UK the standard basic payout for death in a car accident is between £10,000 and £20,000.
There would be payments on top of that for such things as medical costs (not covered by the NHS), loss of potential earnings and funeral costs. A young professional with children would warrant a much larger payout than an elderly person with no dependants.
That said, I think that any war reparations would be negotiated between the parties involved.
The movie “Worth” (2020), starring Michael Keaton and Stanley Tucci attempts to answer that question in the context of 9/11:
“Worth” delves into that question by telling the story of the 9/11 Victims’ Compensation Fund. The fund was created by an act of Congress to ease the suffering of families who lost loved ones in the attack and (perhaps more importantly, from the government’s standpoint) keep them from suing the two airlines whose planes were hijacked.
Is a janitor’s or schoolteacher’s life worth less than a Fortune 500 CEO’s because the CEO earns more money and owns multiple houses and cars and has stocks and so forth? That’s the sort of question that the people in charge of the fund had to answer every day between the establishment of the fund and its two-year deadline for payout.
It fails to provide great insight into the “formula” but it does humanize the process and points to the challenges and flaws of having to come up with a monitary figure of what a life is “worth”.
100 years ago, a lot of people were farmers. And farmers are self-employed. Many of them don’t employ anybody outside their family. Nor will a farm necessarily fall apart and quit working just because one member of the family dies. In short, there is very little in the way of economic facts to make a modern-style economic calculation of their life’s worth.