Quiescence · open research
How much human life is in the things you buy?
HumanToll estimates how many deaths and injuries go into making a product, a material, or €1,000 of spending — and shows every step behind the number.
Everything we buy is made by an economy that costs people their lives: in wars, at work, and through the water, food and air that the economy provides or fails to provide. This project follows that harm along the chains of companies and countries that make things, and adds it up for each product. Deaths and injuries are both published, always with how uncertain they are, and every figure can be traced back to the wars, materials, countries and data behind it.
Two headline numbers, never one
A death and an injury are different harms, and both are counted. No figure is ever published on its own, without its range.
Lives
Deaths attributed to the supply chain of a product, a material, or an amount of spending — that is, to the work of making it.
Injuries
Injuries and illnesses that leave people disabled but alive, shown just as prominently as deaths — not as a footnote.
Life-years
Years of life lost, and years lived with a disability, so that a death at nineteen and a death at seventy-one are not counted as the same thing.
Numbers a person can picture
Per item, per kilogram and per €1,000 — and also turned around, because "one death for every N items" is something a person can picture, and a decimal with six zeros after the point is not.
Four kinds of harm, not just war
The project started with war. War is not where most of the harm is.
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Conflict and political violence
Deaths in fighting, killings of civilians, and the hunger and disease that follow. The counts come from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP); injuries are estimated from the ratio of wounded to dead that studies of real wars have measured, not guessed.
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Work
People killed, injured or made ill at work, by industry. This is the one kind of harm where injuries are counted directly, and the one that needs no judgement about which industry is responsible: the record already says.
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Poverty
Deaths caused by hunger and by unsafe water and sanitation — harm from what an economy fails to provide.
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Pollution
Fine dust in the air, substances at work that cause cancer, and heavy metals released by mining and processing.
What “not counting natural deaths” means here
A death is counted only when research has measured how much of that kind of death is caused by something the economy produces, spreads or withholds — polluted air, unsafe water, a dangerous job, a war. Deaths with no such known cause are left out automatically. Nobody has to decide what counts as "natural": if science has found no link to the economy, the death is not counted.
One consequence matters: harm that cannot be linked to a product is left out. So every figure this project publishes is a floor, never a total.
How a number is built
Six steps. Each one can be looked at, disagreed with, and traced back to a data file whose exact contents are recorded.
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Count the harm
From the organisations that collect it, with the uncertainty they report, and checked across the four kinds of harm so that a miner killed in an armed attack is not counted twice.
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Link it to the economy
Each war, and each kind of harm, is shared out among industries — oil, farming, mining and so on. Every share is scored against nine written criteria, with a source for each score, so none of it is simply asserted.
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Link it to materials
Each industry’s share is divided among the raw materials it actually digs, grows or uses, using production and trade figures rather than opinion.
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Follow it along the supply chain
A table of what every industry in every country buys from every other carries the harm from the mine to the part to the finished product — including all the ways industries supply one another in circles.
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Divide by what was made
The result is given per item, per kilogram and per €1,000 of spending, so that a croissant and a car can be compared at all.
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Keep the uncertainty all the way through
The whole calculation is repeated thousands of times, each time with the uncertain inputs varied a little. What is published is the range the answer falls in and a grade saying how sure we are — never one number on its own.
Making things, today. Using them, next.
For now the model answers one question: how many people were harmed making this. A second half — harm from using a product, such as road deaths, smoke from burning fuel, firearms, tobacco and alcohol — has been designed and will be published as a separate figure beside the first. Until then every number here says "production phase only", because for something like a car the harm from using it is probably larger, and hiding that would mislead.
What this is not
- Not a claim that a product caused any one death. The link is statistical: it is about large numbers of people, not individuals.
- Not a judgement on anyone who buys something. A high figure describes how a thing is made, not the person who bought it — what can change it is how companies and governments buy, regulate and choose suppliers.
- Not complete. Harm that cannot be linked to a product is left out, so every figure is a lower bound.
- Not exact. A figure printed without its range would mislead by its very form.
- Not a boycott list. The comparison tool exists to show why two products differ, and the answer is usually one material from one country — which is something that can be fixed.
Questions
Is this saying my shopping kills people?
No. It measures harm that can be linked, by statistics and stated assumptions, to the work of making goods. What to do about it is a question for how companies and governments buy, regulate and choose suppliers — not for guilt.
Are all wars about money?
The main scenario assumes that organised violence is tied up with economic activity, and measures that activity — not the reasons anyone fights. A war that began in religious hatred still buys rifles, burns fuel, takes land and sells what it digs up. Four other scenarios are published beside it, including a cautious one that counts only the links the evidence supports best.
Where does the data come from?
Open sources anyone can cite: the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) for wars; the International Labour Organization (ILOSTAT) and the EU statistics office (Eurostat) for work; the UN food agency (FAOSTAT) and WHO/UNICEF for hunger, water and sanitation; Eurostat FIGARO for supply chains, the EU’s table of what industries buy from each other; and the World Bank for prices and population. Every source, its licence and the exact version used are listed.
Can I check a number?
That is the point. Every figure links to the wars, materials, countries and data behind it. Every calculation records exactly which data files it used, with a fingerprint of each file so any change would show. A published result is never edited: a correction is a new calculation, and the old one stays readable.
When will there be numbers?
When the model passes its test on the past. It has to produce sixteen years of results that rise and fall with real events, and that change only for reasons that can be written down. Until then this page explains the method.