At the start of May 2020, the New York governor Andrew Cuomo was under pressure to relax Covid restrictions. “The faster we reopen, the lower the economic cost, but the higher the human cost because the more lives lost,” he said in a televised address. “The question comes back to how much is a human life worth. That’s the real discussion that no one is admitting openly or freely, but we should.”
That taboo question is at the centre of this riveting book. We may recoil from discussing it, but behind closed doors the price of a human life is being calculated all the time. So who is making these decisions, to what purpose, and according to which criteria? And what do the figures reveal about who – or what – we value?
