I started writing this newsletter 1 year ago, and picked it up again a while back after a radio segment by David Castello-Lopes, French comedian and the funniest man in the world.

“On average, 2 children in France choke to death on kettle crisps. But those 2 deaths could be prevented by a massive awareness campaign on the dangers of kettle crisps, whose surface, rougher than the trendy smooth crisp, tends to lodge in infants’ airways and kill them.
This campaign will cost €100M.
You’ll tell me that with that money, we could do better things, like painting Montreuil [a Paris suburb] purple.
But if you say that, you’re implicitly admitting that the lives of those children who will choke in the future aren’t worth €100M. They’re worth less.” (our translation)

Depending on our own ideas, and on the judgements we pass on a person or a situation, we attribute a different value to that person.

Take prisons, which cost around €5bn a year²⁴ (excluding construction) for 70,000 inmates, or roughly €70k per person per year.

Meanwhile, a primary school pupil costs €6.2k a year, a secondary school pupil €9.7k and a university student €10.2k.²⁵

In fact, debates about prisons regularly boil down to lines like:

“They’re treated better than our old folks in care homes”

You could say that’s expensive for someone who screwed up.
That we could put more into education.
That it would reduce the number of screw-ups.
That budgets for supporting victims are nowhere near as high.

Let’s go to the extreme.

Holding Salah Abdeslam²⁶ at Fleury-Mérogis prison, near Paris, costs €400,000 a year.²⁷
Not to give him a dream life, but on the contrary to give him the harshest possible detention while respecting his basic rights.

The life of a son, murdered by Abdeslam’s accomplices, is worth €47,500, according to the Fonds de garantie des victimes du terrorisme, the French state fund that compensates victims of terrorism²⁸