Seven children killed, one hundred and seventy-six injured in Cité Soleil between May 10 and May 13, 2026, according to UNICEF. At the same time, Médecins Sans Frontières urgently evacuated its Cité Soleil hospital after treating more than forty gunshot victims in twelve hours. At least five thousand three hundred and fifty-four people displaced, according to OCHA. That is the toll for one neighborhood over four days. A few weeks later, the event had almost faded into the miscellaneous news section.

And yet, around this event, the machinery of statistics keeps operating. Médecins Sans Frontières calculates its evacuation and treatment costs. OCHA publishes the annual humanitarian needs in dollars. The IOM counts the displaced, their camps, their rations. Donors tally material losses, buildings to rebuild, schools to reopen, hospitals to rehabilitate. Everything is quantified except one thing: the economic value of the lives themselves, and the productivity they would have generated. It is precisely this gap that the present column seeks to address.