Jeff Russell

I believe you're focusing on dead authors presently, right? If you have room for an author who is aged-but-alive, I might suggest "Seeing Like a State" by James Scott. His premise is that when a government (or anyone, really, but Scott's an anarchist and so he's talking about governments :) ) measures something, it optimizes for that measure at the expense of all else (including it's long-term sustainability).

A simple example from the first chapter is how a government (I believe one of the various German governments of the 1800s) wanted to optimize timber production on a piece of land, so they chopped down all the trees (getting timber), planted a monocrop of the best-producing species, in 30 years chopped down all the trees (getting lots of timber, hooray), replanted the monocrop, and then found to their dismay that the land was barren and none of the trees they planted grew. Turns out a forest isn't just a collection of trees, who knew?

The book is largely a series of case studies along these lines about various other measures (land use, weights and measures, etc.).

I suppose we're seeing now what happens when one applies such a methodology to the value of a human life?