I’m going to horribly oversimply this. For example. Say I am wearing a shirt a cheap one for Wal-Mart.
This shirt was produced in a sweat shop. That sweat shop has .0005 deaths per day. Thus by wearing this shirt and supporting the mechanisms that brought it to me. I have a killcount for today a number substantially smaller then .0005 and obviously there’s a tonne of subjectivity on what that number might be.
Now include the dye factory that made the shirt green, the shoes I am wearing, the bus I am riding in, the coffee I drink. All these luxuries and that number may go up a little.
I am wondering if this is somthing that is being considered anywhere is somone building a calculation to determine our daily kill counts.
I’m sure most of us probably don’t what to know what ours might be, but knowing what parts of our daily lives have the highest values we might work harder to change for the better.
It might be worth looking how the medical industry does calculations. I’ve not looked deep, but it seem similar to what you want.
They have a quality of life index. Basically you calculate both the increased life expectancy of a treatment, and the patients quality of life, as a percentage. By combining them together, you get a semi useful measure of treatment effectiveness. E.g. a treatment that gave a cancer patient 1 year of perfect health (100%) would have a score of 1 year. A treatment that give 4 bad years of life (20% quality) would only have a score of 0.8 years. The first one would win out, despite having 3 less years of life.
I believe the UK’s NHS uses it. It helps balance things on a large scale. E.g. do they invest extra money in improving cancer treatment in children, or in improving hip replacements in OAPs? Both will help, but how to weigh them against each other? I also believe they have a soft figure for cost effectiveness. It’s caught a few drugs companies short, when the NHS wouldn’t pay for a cancer drug that only offered a minor improvement over the current one, with a huge cost difference.
In your case, the index can be reversed, giving a useful metric. The big challenge would be calculating the index in a reliable manner. A lot of it is subjective, and prone to manipulation.
Interestingly one of the disc world books plays with this. “Going Postal” I believe. A conman is forceably recruited to fix the post office. His golem guard informs him how many people he’s killed, despite never raising a sword.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/451702
This seems exactly like what you want.
Ha! I remember this one.I think that exact quote from may be what caused me ponder this over many years.
I will try to get into those studies when I have better time to digest that knowledge but I thank you for sharing them.