“One Death is a Tragedy; A million deaths is a Statistic”

‘One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic’

The phrase is attributed to Stalin although it is doubtful that he ever said it. Regardless of origin, it gives an insight into the mind set of Stalin and others like him that made them responsible for mass tragedy. When we think of one death it is easy to engage with the terrible consequences. We can easily imagine the loss of life and its effect on others. This becomes even more powerful when we have a name or picture to attach to the death to make it all the more vivid. These thoughts ultimately prevent people from causing such tragedy. The incredible loss of one million deaths, on the other hand is impossible to grasp. We can’t imagine all one million individually unique lives lost and all their friends and family who have to live with the death.

The quote has fascinated me for a long time as it highlights the way our emotions don’t always support our moral aims. This is typically seen by the type of news people get upset about. People were furious about the Grenfell tower fire which killed 71 people, yet have failed to care or even notice the 340,000-460,000 people who died from the fallout of US nuclear testing. Take that in for a moment. Nearly half a million people died in recent history, in a western country, due to a government oversight and few people have ever heard of this or even care about it. That is equivalent to 4789 Grenfell tower fires. Frederic Bastiat described this as the ‘seen’ and the ‘unseen’. He said bad economists were only able to consider the obvious effects of actions, whilst the best could forsee and weigh up all the consequences, even those others find hard to engage with.

The fact that our emotions do not make us care for those most in need or those we most care about perfectly according to need is not such a problem in normal life. The greatest consequences of most peoples’ actions effect themselves and the people they know well. Evolution has surely made us to focus on these people around us with names and faces, not the million dead or starving people on a spreadsheet. When dealing with actions of great consequence, especially corporate and government policy, the problem of our emotions steering us to the ‘seen’ rather than ‘unseen’ is catastrophic as it allows resources to be wasted that could go to those most in need and can in fact ignore the side effects of suffering for others. The history of Communism is littered with mass starvation that was (and is) simply forgotten when compared to the glory of revolution. The lesson to be learnt here is that policy ought to be designed by technocrats using evidence and theory to make predictions of policy effects for which the costs and benefits ought to be weighed up. When we let mobs or autocrats design policy it no longer reflects our best interests, but let’s the ‘seen’ disregard the ‘unseen’.