The Magical Threshold Misery Number

by Michael Bear

category: Humanitarian Relief

Published May 15, 2009 @ 03:48PM PT

I've been wondering recently about my magical threshold misery number - the number of people killed or displaced before I start to pay attention to a given conflict or crisis.

I'd say that it takes at least one hundred dead in Congo or Somalia to spark my curiosity.  The bar is set slightly lower for Darfur and now Sri Lanka - fifty dead, give or take - mostly because they're already in the news.   That said, it helps if they all die at once; casualties spread out over a week or more don't have the same impact.

(The magical threshold misery number is particularly low for Palestine, and particularly high for Afghanistan.  Sensitivities being what they are.)

As for displacement, usually at least 100,000 people have to flee their homes before I think it's blog-worthy. A few unlucky tens of thousands just don't make the cut.

834,000 displaced in Pakistan? Check.

50,000 still trapped on the frontlines in Sri Lanka? Check.

135 killed in Mogadishu over the past few days? That's on the borderline, but what the hell - check.

I know, I know, the inhumanity - reducing people to numbers.  As the man once said: "Suffering is not increased by numbers; one body can contain all the suffering the world can feel."

True, but not particularly useful when it comes to blogging.

The magical threshold misery number serves a number of purposes, not least separating out the normally bad from the particularly bad. 

Take eastern Congo, for instance.  What with marauding rebels and various home-grown militias, one would expect quite a few civilian casualties on even the best of days.  Throw in a national army that tends to shoot (or rape) first and ask questions later, as well as an almost complete lack of basic social services, and the daily misery only increases.

In other words, ten dead in Congo isn't particularly newsworthy, if you define newsworthy as something new.

At the same time, higher casualty or displacement figures also serve as a useful shortcut, a way of telegraphing that this, now this is a serious crisis.

To that end, large numbers are the humanitarian blogging equivalent of an exclamation point, or at least a way to cut through all the complexities.  Everyone understands that a few hundred thousand people fleeing their homes means that something bad is happening.

Granted, this is somewhat lazy, in the way that shortcuts are always lazy.  It also leads to a certain number fatigue - eventually, a few hundred thousand people fleeing their homes ceases to excite much attention, or sympathy.  It begins to seem normal, and the threshold number inches up yet again.

Not to mention that those who live by numbers, die by numbers.  According to a recent Economist article about the fighting in Pakistan:

"A senior military official claims about 800,000 civilians have fled the latest fighting. Relief agencies put the number between 240,000 and 400,000. They are joining about 500,000 displaced by earlier fighting in NWFP. However an official from a relief agency claims that the numbers of refugees have been exaggerated. Among the charities that have set up relief camps is Jamaat-ud-Dawa, an Islamic group that is in theory banned, as a front for the terrorists of Lashkar-e-Taiba."

That said, I don't see many alternatives.  Fuck, I admit, it's a parable in a way - that simply recognizing a problem doesn't always lead us that much closer to solving it.

[Pakistani IDPs fighting over a mattress - Photo from AFP / Getty Images]