COST/BENEFIT ANALYSIS IN PRACTICE

As an illustration of how cheaply life is held in some of the places where we work, the following story was pretty shocking to me. I was in a Middle-Eastern country last week and one of our staff told me how, some years ago, his father was talking to a man who had shot another man dead for the equivalent of about one pound sterling/$1.75. "How on earth could you shoot a man in order to get one pound?" he asked. The man looked surprised. "But the bullet only cost me three pence," he said. (About 5 cents.)