The Economy of Mortality, From Actuarial Science to the Funeral Industry

“ Life insurance ads merely insinuate that he may be guilty of dying without having provided for the smooth continuation of the system following the resultant economic loss, while the promoters of the “American way of death” stress his capacity to preserve most of the appearances of life in his post-mortem state. ”

“ It matters little to the great mass of individuals whether that money, the measure of value, is put into circulation via the insurance companies or by the individual.
Standard mortuary tables are admitted in evidence, in awarding damages for wrongful death. Such tables apply to the whole community even more clearly than to the deceased. Whatever a man's station in society, his value is dependent upon, and modified by, his life expectancy. If this be short, the guarantee of his continued usefulness is less assuring than that of a man with the prospect of a longer life. ”

“ That city alone sacrifices twenty-eight thousand lives annually to diseases that are officially called preventable. The yearly burial cost of these victims of professional and community neglect is more than a million dollars. When to the doctor bills, wages lost, burial cost of those who die are added the total doctor bills, wages lost, and other expenses of the sick who do not die, we find that one city loses in dollars and cents more every year from communicable diseases than is spent by the whole United States for hospitals and boards of health. ”

“ We shall conclude, by pointing out the most celebrated treatises on human propagation, existence, mortality, and morbid devastation, by several philosophers. This is the epoch of a new science in politicks, philosophy, and medicine. Meritorious and successful efforts have been made to calculate the prospects of life and death, as the chances on dice, or the blanks and prizes in a lottery wheel. Graunt, somewhat later than the middle of the last century, first wrote a treatise on the London bills of births and mortality, and was followed soon after by Petty, King, and Davenant. ”

“ The costs of medical attendance on these superfluities of disease are heavy items of parochial expenditure: and although much of the undue mortality is of children, and consists in the premature extinction of life that hitherto has no market value—costing only the tears that are shed for it; yet there likewise occur among your preventable deaths, very many cases in which adult life is sacrificed, with all its strength and utility ”

“ These life-annuities have, therefore, fallen in much more slowly than could have been expected; and I have found the same to be true of all the other life-annuities.—The reason, undoubtedly, is, that the tables exhibit the rate of mortality among all sorts and orders of men taken together; whereas, the lives on which annuities are bought, are a selection of the better sort of lives from the general mass, and therefore must be of greater value.—Indeed I am not acquainted with any table of observations which gives the probabilities of the duration of life high enough to be a guide in this case ”

“ The average value of life at all ages is $2,900 and the 93,000,000 persons living in this country would be worth in earning power the vast sum of $270,000,000,000. This is probably a low estimate but is more than double all our other wealth combined. ”

“ That Death affords the means of life.
The picture in this instance gives a philosophic view of the end of man, and represents a snug assembly of the fortunate individuals who prosper professionally by the influence of the grim foe's assistance. Seated convivially on tomb-slabs, awaiting the arrival of a hearse and mourning cortége, is the author of the mischief hobnobbing with his friends and allies. Death and the doctor are blowing a cloud together in cheerful company, for the parson, the lawyer, and the sexton are pleased with his society. ”

“ And in the same way would I deprecate a ‘handsome’ coffin and elaborate headstone; neither can do any good to the dead, and the memory of those we have loved can be perpetuated a thousand times longer should we content ourselves with the simplest oak coffin we can get and the plain cross, which will last as long as anyone could wish it to, while the money saved can be given elsewhere. Everyone has some pet scheme that could be benefited by his or her death; no one but the undertaker and florist is benefited now. ”

“ The rich lavish their money on costly, almost indestructible coffins, which it would be far better to do without altogether, and on masses of flowers that die unseen, while the poor go into debt to buy mourning, which they often pawn before a month is over; and many a widow and family, who have a hard struggle to provide daily food, deny themselves the necessities of life, and sow the seeds of disease and want, in order to set up a tombstone or monument on a grave. ”

“ She had a weary look, the expression of one who is tired always, who gets up tired and goes to bed tired, and who never by any accident gets a good rest, who even when dead is not permitted to lie quietly like other people but gets buried the same day in a cheap coffin that hardly keeps the earth up and is doomed to he soon dug up to make room for some other tired body in that economical way instituted by the noble philanthropists who unite a keen appreciation of the sacredness of burial with a still keener appreciation of the value of grave-lots. ”

“ To give one specific instance, there is the widow who spends every dollar left her by a departed husband to pay for an elaborate funeral for him. In the eyes of the world, he must be buried "right"; and though it leave her in debt, she makes an impressive funeral service. Would it not have been more sensible to bury him simply and unostentatiously, preserving a little of the money left her for the necessities of life? It is one of the ironies of life that often more attention and honor are paid to the dead than they ever receive in life. ”

“ These masses are the most important and expensive incident of the funeral. They cost from two hundred to one thousand dollars, according to the strength and fervor of the orisons employed. They are repeated several years on the anniversary of the decease, and afford a most sure and nourishing revenue to the Church. They are founded upon those feelings inseparable from every human heart, vanity and affection. Our dead friends must be as well prayed for as those of others, and who knows but that they may be in deadly need of prayers! ”

“ The simple offering of food or shedding of blood at the grave develops into an elaborate system of sacrifice; even where ancestor-worship is not found, the desire to provide the dead with comforts in the future life may lead to the sacrifice of wives, slaves, animals, &c., to the breaking or burning of objects at the grave or to the provision of the ferryman's toll, a coin put in the mouth of the corpse to pay the travelling expenses of the soul. But all is not finished with the passage of the soul to the land of the dead ”

“ Makes every day seem a solemn festival.
All trades are dead, or almost out of breath,
But such as live by sickness and by death.”
The circumstances are so exactly the same as in 1603 that it is needless to repeat much: the sextons, coffin-makers, [Pg 515] bearers, searchers, apothecaries and quacks are all profitably employed ”

“ Funerals cost this country in 1880 enough money to pay the liabilities of all the commercial failures in the United States during the same year, and give each bankrupt a capital of $8,630 with which to resume business. Funerals cost annually more money than the value of the combined gold and silver yield of the United States in the year 1880! These figures do not include the sums invested in burial-grounds and expended in tombs and monuments, nor the loss from depreciation of property in the vicinity of cemeteries.'
For the rich, cremation would answer as well as burial ”

“ Such fluctuations affect both the value and the rate, either of wages or of profit, according as the market happens to be either overstocked or understocked with commodities or with labour, with work done, or with work to be done. A public mourning raises the price of black cloth (with which the market is almost always understocked upon such occasions) , and augments the profits of the merchants who possess any considerable quantity of it. It has no effect upon the wages of the weavers. ”

“ A rise in the price of the necessaries of life affects the lower classes of the population more especially, but its influence upon the general death-rate is trifling. Death-rate varies in accordance with occupation. The lower classes have a higher death-rate than the upper; the weekly wage-earners have a higher death-rate than the rest of the population; and mortality is greater in the towns than it is in the country. Of late years, there has been a gradual decline in the death-rate, the decline in the towns being proportionately greater than the decline in the country districts ”

“ With increasing civilization, new and fatal epidemics appeared, reaping a rich harvest for the grim monster—Death—and adding yearly to the per-centage of the ever-increasing bills of mortality. Many an honest practitioner threw away lancet and saddle-bags in despair, while quacks and medical charlatans, profiting by the wranglings of the regulars, and the weariness of the people, drove a reckless but well-paying trade, with nostrums of every character, from the deadliest poison to the simplest house-hold herb. ”

“ The effect of mortality on the whole is, moreover, not to diminish natality, but rather to favor it. The death of an adult leaves some position vacant, and makes room for the institution of a new household and the birth of other children. So when a rich old man dies, the money he leaves helps set up his children in life; and when a poor old man dies, a burden is taken away from his descendants, who had to support him and who can now marry and have children. Some of the parallelisms in the movements of population which statisticians have observed may be explained thus. ”

“ We have no right to assume that the mere entry of these foreign peoples has at once a favorable effect upon their mortality. Their adverse conditions of life, especially in our large cities, the economic stress to which they are put, and the dangers in the unskilled trades in which they engage, all would point to a continuance, at least, of the higher death rates from which they suffer in their native countries. ”

“ The mere consideration that burial in the heart of cities is unhealthy, would but lead to extramural interment, to which our only objection—though even that is no very trifling one—is that it would diminish mortality, and consequently our trade. But this Science—confound it!—shows that the dead do not remain permanently in their coffins, even when the sextons of metropolitan graveyards will let them. ”

“ In other words, society shirks its duty by laying the whole cost on the victim, whereas the injury comes from what may be called the legitimate risks of the trade. Compensation for accidents or deaths due in any line of industry to the actual conditions under which that industry is carried on should be paid by that portion of the community for the benefit of which the industry is carried on—that is, by those who profit by the industry. ”

“ The workers of all these toil for the Field boys.
They delve in mines, and risk accident, disease and death, or suffer an abjectly lingering life of impoverishment. Thousands of coal miners are killed every year, and many thousands more are injured, in order that two boys and others of their class may draw huge profits. ”

“ It was this cheerfulness, he found, glimmering like some weird death-fire over the actual horror, which made his realisation of the tragedy the more poignant, and lent even a certain distinction to the poverty which she described. Here, indeed, was the supreme vulgarity of suffering—and before it his own personal afflictions appeared as unsubstantial as shades. At least he had had the empty dignity of receiving his sorrow with a full sense of its importance, but with this woman the very presence of grief was crowded out by the brutal obligation to meet the material demands of death. ”

“ For when men give orders on their death-bed to raise to them fine monuments, which will waste all their substance, and take pains to lay out beforehand a vast extravagance in their funeral, and in their lifetime insult the poor that come to them for a penny and a single loaf, but when they are dead give a rich banquet to the worm, why seek any more exorbitant thraldom to the disease? ”

“ The wounds of grief are less apt to find a cure in that rank of life where the sufferer has wealth and leisure. The poor widow, whose husband was her all, must break the paralysis of grief. The hard necessities of life are her physicians; they send her out to unwelcome, yet friendly toil, which, hard as it seems, has yet its healing power. But the sufferer surrounded by the appliances of wealth and luxury may long indulge the baleful apathy, and remain in the damp shadows of the valley of death till strength and health are irrecoverably lost. ”

“ And if barbarians sacrificed human beings, do not we spend the financial equivalent of many human lives in statues, memorials, and otherwise useless funeral pageantry? The difference between them and us lies not so much in the motive as in the lower value placed by them on human life.
The truth is that offerings to the dead, from a flower or a few grains of rice to a human victim, are partly a symbolical language addressed to the deceased, and partly constitute an appeal for sympathy by the mourners and a response by their friends. ”

“ And when we consider further the gratuitous and wasteful destruction of property as well as of life which is involved in sacrifices to the dead, we must admit that with all its advantages the belief in immortality has entailed heavy economical losses upon the races—and they are practically all the races of the world—who have indulged in this expensive luxury. It is not for me to estimate the extent and gravity of the consequences, moral, social, political, and economic, which flow directly from the belief in immortality. ”

“ They dread also the disrespectful and careless funeral which public charity, or rather law, bestows; and many a wretch denies himself the few sordid comforts within his reach, that he may hoard up enough to purchase a more decent burial, a better shroud, or a firmer coffin, than the parish will afford.
The wealth of this nation is their own boast, and the envy of all the rest of Europe; yet in no other country is there so much poverty—nor is poverty any where else attended with such actual suffering. ”