Excess supply reduces value.

One year back police fired on bikers in Delhi, resulting in the death of a 19 year old boy named Karan Pandey. Adding insult to injury the National Human Rights Commission has ordered Delhi government to pay Rs 500,000 to his widowed mother as compensation. A magistrate has found inconsistencies in the police version of events and CCTV pictures belied police allegations of stone throwing. The mother naturally has refused to accept the paltry compensation and wants justice for the death of her son. If we assume that he would have lived up to 70 years that works out to Rs 10,000 for every 10 years of life. Is that the price of a 19 year old with his life in front of him, 19 years of educating, feeding and clothing him and 19 years of worrying about him if he developed a fever or was late coming home? In contrast New York city is to pay $40 million to 5 men who spent 10 years in prison for a crime they did not commit. That amounts to Rs 480 million or 48 crores per person. How is the price of 10 years of a person's life worth Rs 48 crore in New York and just Rs 10,000 in Delhi? Because life is cheap in India, because there are too many people and the population just keeps rising. With so much supply the value keeps dropping. In over a week's fighting only one Israeli has died from Palestinian rocket fire compared to 200 Palestinians killed by Israeli bombing on Gaza. Rate of deaths are so high because 1.66 million Palestinians are crammed into 360 sq km of land while there are 8 million Israelis in 20,770 sq km. So, many of the rockets land on empty fields while any Israeli bomb is almost sure to kill someone. Just as the government in India finds Indian life cheap so the Hamas government of Gaza finds its people of little value. Yet Palestinians could win the war against Israel if their leaders wanted. An article in the Wall Street Journal makes the point that if Palestinians and their supporters in the west stopped seeking the destruction of Israel and adopted Gandhian non-violence then they would win the moral battle and force Israel to compromise. We would go further. They should recognise the Holocaust and sympathise with Jews for the pain they have suffered and then compare their own lives under the occupation to that of Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen concentration camps with pictures and statistics. Israel will surrender in one week. But they will not do that. Partly it is because they are fanatics and partly because the population is growing so it is easy to sacrifice a few. If people stopped producing children Hamas will find that without people they will not have a government. That will concentrate their minds. The lower the supply the greater the value.