Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

My friend getting a master’s in public health said that he wanted to do a presentation showing how many tsunamis worth of human life were being lost on a continuous basis because of poor public health in countries such as Mali where the life expectancy at birth is 45 years.  My response was that he should add in a calculation of the equivalent lives lost doing personal computer system administration.  For example, if I wanted to upgrade my desktop PC (vintage 2002) it would cost me a week of time re-installing applications such as Adobe Photoshop and my flight planning tool.  A week lost to sysadmin is actually worse than a week lost at the end of one’s life when one would be less vigorous.

The question then arose “What sorts of activities in a Western society are so boring that they should count as a reduction in our life expectancy?”  Friends at dinner immediately offered “doing taxes” and “sitting in a traffic jam”.  Are there others?  And do we have so many that our useful life expectancy is substantially reduced?  And could it be reduced to the point that some African men might have more hours of actual life available to them than American men?  (Women in Africa are saddled with lots of chores that are as tedious as Windows sysadmin, e.g., carrying water.)

Over breakfast at a favorite little French cafe in Harvard Square today a friend who is getting a master’s in Public Health at Harvard mentioned that under Saddam Hussein Iraq’s entire health care system had a budget of $18 million and that under U.S. occupation this has subsequently grown to $1.8 billion.  How well did Saddam do with his $18 mil?  http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/iz.html shows Iraqi life expectancy at birth to be 68 years versus the U.S.’s 77 years. Those extra 9 years are nice, of course, but they come at a cost of about $1.9 trillion per year or 100,000 times Saddam’s budget.