(OT) Loss of life and productivity loss.
MQ, you are good at this kind of analysis. I'm curious to know if anyone has looked at things this way. The following article
news.yahoo.com
has something to do with bad driving in China. What caught my eye is the statistic: In China, where someone is killed in traffic every five minutes.
I don't know how things like productivity loss are arrived at. Poking around, I found that as of 1989 (quoting from an article by Rice et al), as far as the U.S goes, injury deaths represent 36 life years lost per death and a productivity loss of $334,851 per death. Presumably, this involves all injuries and not just travel-accidents. Perhaps, as of 2011 we can multiply this number by 3, and so its roughly $1Mil productivity loss per injury-related death. No way for me to know what this cost is globally, but let's say it's $100K.
Now, in China alone, the article suggests there are 288 deaths per day, on average. Multiply this by some factor, say 2, to get a global number ..... so perhaps 500 travel-related deaths per day all over the world. [This number seems way too high to me, but then a single bus can show 50 deaths.]
We talk about productivity in terms of oil ..... because oil is energy. So per gallon of oil, there are known measures of productivity. I can't help wondering if there are measures of how much productivity is lost (through travel-related accidents) per gallon of oil ..... when you consider all such modes of travel and related accidents, including air, train, ship, auto etc.
Every time I think of such things, I arrive at the usual point where we are faced with a lack of data. And, of course, it seems someone is always ready to step in with a theory to fill that gap :). It seems crazy that, in this day and age, we are not able to generate reasonably accurate data. The data will not prove theorems, but may suggest what can be studied more and/or proved. |
