Following the disbursement of Rs. 10 lakh by the Andhra Pradesh government for the family of each victim killed in the stampede on the Godavari last week, we did a small exercise to put a value on the life of an average Indian.
The exercise itself is rather simple – you divide India’s GDP by its population to get the average productivity (this comes out to Rs. 1 lakh). The average Indian is now 29 and expected to live to 66 (another 37 years). Assume a nominal GDP growth rate of 12%, annual population increase of 2% and a cost of capital of 8% (long term bond yield) and you value the average Indian life at 52 lakhs.
People thought that the amount the AP government disbursed itself was on the higher side, yet we have come up with a higher number. The question is if our calculation is accurate.
We came up with the Rs. 1 lakh per head figure by taking the arithmetic mean of the productivity of all Indians. The question is if that is the right estimate.
Now, it is a well established fact that income and wealth follow a power law distribution. In fact, Vilfredo Pareto came up with his “Pareto distribution” (the “80-20 rule” as some people term it) precisely to describe the distribution of wealth. In other words, some people earn (let’s stick to income here) amounts that are several orders of magnitude higher than what the average earns.
A couple of years someone did an analysis (I don’t know where they got the data) and concluded that a household earning Rs. 12 lakh a year is in the “top 1%” of the Indian population by income. Yet, if you talk to a family earning Rs. 12 lakh per year, they will most definitely describe themselves as “middle class”.
The reason for this description is that though these people earn a fair amount, among people who earn more than them there are people who earn a lot more.
Coming back, if income follows a power law distribution, are we still correct in using the mean income to calculate the value of a life? It depends on how we frame the question. If we ask “what is the average value of an Indian life” we need to use mean. If we ask “what is the value of an average Indian life” we use median.
And for the purpose of awarding compensation after a tragedy, the compensation amount should be based on the value of the average Indian life. Since incomes follow a Power Law distribution, so does the value of lives, and it is not hard to see that average of a power law can be skewed by numbers in one extreme.
For that reason, a more “true” average is one that is more representative of the population, and there is no better metric for this than the median (other alternatives are “mean after knocking off top X%” types, and they are arbitrary). In other words, compensation needs to be paid based on the “value of the average life”.
The problem with median income is that it is tricky to calculate, unlike the mean which is straightforward. No good estimates of the median exist, for we need to rely on surveys for this. Yet, if we look around with a cursory google search, the numbers that are thrown up are in the Rs. 30000 to Rs. 50000 range (and these are numbers from different time periods in the past). Bringing forward older numbers, we can assume that the median per capita income is about Rs. 50000, or half the mean per capita income.
Considering that the average Indian earns Rs. 50000 per year, how do we value his life? There are various ways to do this. The first is to do a discounted cash flow of all future earnings. Assuming nominal GDP growth of about 12% per year, population growth 2% per year and long-term bond yield of 8%, and that the average Indian has another 37 years to live (66 – 29), we value the life at Rs. 26 lakh.
The other way to value the life is based on “comparables”. The Nifty (India’s premier stock index) has a Price to Earnings ratio of about 24. We could apply that on the Indian life, and that values the average life at Rs. 12 lakh.
Then, there are insurance guidelines. It is normally assumed that one should insure oneself up to about 7 times one’s annual income. And that means we should insure the average Indian at Rs. 3.5 lakh (the Pradhan Mantri Suraksha Bima Yojana provides insurance of Rs. 2 lakhs).
When I did a course on valuations a decade ago, the first thing the professor taught us was that “valuation is always wrong”. Based on the numbers above, you can decide for yourself if the Rs. 10 lakh amount offered by the AP government is appropriate.
“And for the purpose of awarding compensation after a tragedy, the compensation amount should be based on the value of the average Indian life.” – I m not sure I agree.
I’d argue that the point of compensation is to ensure the victims dependents do not suffer for lack of the breadwinner’s income over the rest of their life. “Suffer” being the key word as opposed to “Income”.
As such, compensation should not be valuation of a life, but number of dependents x Survival amount . Where Survival amount should cover basic needs like food / education etc for each non working member of the family. There could possibly be a component to help victims startup their life again (instead of just living off insurance payouts) , but that is probably complicated to estimate.