When the Numbers Stop Working: A Craft Essay on “Cost-Benefit Analysis of the Soul” by Jennifer Freya Helgeson
I spend much of my professional life thinking about systems. I study how communities absorb shocks, how resources move through networks, how risks accumulate, and how decisions made today shape outcomes years from now. I am trained as a behavioral economist, and much of my work depends on measurement: costs and benefits, probabilities, tradeoffs, projections, resilience. There is comfort in this language. A model can turn uncertainty into variables. A spreadsheet can make a complicated problem appear solvable.
But there are losses that refuse to be modeled.
“Cost-Benefit Analysis of the Soul” grew out of living in the space between those two truths: the usefulness of measurement and the impossibility of measuring what matters most. The poem takes the language I use professionally—net present value, discount rates, insurance, liquidity, capital, projections—and places it against mortality, grief, and the gradual or sudden disappearance of someone we love. I wanted to see what would happen when the vocabulary of rational decision-making encountered an experience for which there is no rational accounting.
The impulse is also personal. When my brother died suddenly at eighteen, there was no gradual recalculation of the future. One moment, there was a future in which he existed; then there was not. The people around him had to continue inhabiting a world whose fundamental assumptions had changed. There was no model for that transition, no adequate language for the peculiar arithmetic of a life that should have contained decades more birthdays, conversations, mistakes, accomplishments, and ordinary afternoons.
Years later, witnessing the terminal illness of a dear friend has offered a very different encounter with loss. This time, the future has not disappeared all at once. It has narrowed and become increasingly visible. Time itself changes character. An ordinary moment—a conversation, a meal, a hand held—can acquire an intensity that is difficult to explain to someone who is not living inside that altered scale of time.
That experience sits behind the opening question:
What is the net present value of a sunset
when viewed through the window of a hospice wing?
In economics, we discount future benefits because a benefit received today is generally valued differently from one received years from now. In the poem, the discount rate becomes emotional. The future becomes expensive. “Someday” loses its purchasing power. The present becomes extraordinarily valuable.
We trade the long-term projections of “someday” for “the immediate liquidity of a hand held tight.”
I wanted that line to contain both the absurdity and the truth of applying economic language to mortality. Liquidity is normally about how quickly an asset can be converted into something useful. But in the context of illness, the thing immediately available to us may be presence itself. We cannot purchase more time. We cannot invest in the future we assumed was coming. We can spend time with someone now. We can hold their hand—literally and figuratively in the present.
The poem then moves into the language of disaster resilience, another vocabulary that is central to my professional life:
There is no insurance for the loss of a language,
no federal grant to rebuild the city of a person
once the storm surge of the cells has crossed the levee.
I think I wrote those lines because I spend so much time thinking about what can be rebuilt after catastrophe. Communities lose homes, infrastructure, businesses, social networks. We ask what resources will allow them to recover, what systems will reduce vulnerability, and what investments can make the next disaster less destructive.
But illness presents a different kind of disaster. The body becomes a landscape. A disease can behave like a flood, crossing boundaries that once seemed secure and changing the terrain as it moves. And yet there are losses for which no recovery program exists. We can rebuild a house. We can restore a road. We cannot rebuild a particular person.
The phrase “the city of a person” came from thinking about how much geography is contained within someone we love. A person is not simply an individual body. They are a map of shared places, memories, stories, habits, private jokes, phrases, histories. When illness takes pieces of that person away, it can feel as though familiar landmarks have disappeared. The landscape remains, but the map is changing.
The final movement of the poem turns outward, toward the community:
We are left with the social capital of grief—
the way the neighbors bring casseroles like sandbags,
trying to hold back a tide that has already
rewritten the map of the living room.
This image comes from another question that has occupied me for years: what does resilience mean when an outcome cannot be prevented?
In disaster research, resilience is often discussed in terms of resistance, recovery, adaptation, and the capacity to maintain essential functions. But grief complicates that vocabulary. Sometimes resilience does not mean preventing the flood. Sometimes it means finding ways to remain connected while the water rises.
The imagery of casseroles matters because they are both practical and inadequate. Food cannot stop death. A visit cannot restore a person. A neighbor cannot rebuild the future that has been lost. And yet these gestures matter enormously. They are a form of social capital precisely because they communicate that no one should have to bear the loss entirely alone.
Writing this poem allowed me to put my professional and personal vocabularies into conversation with one another. Economics gave me the language of value and tradeoffs. Disaster research gave me the language of vulnerability, infrastructure, cascading effects, and recovery. Grief supplied the questions neither vocabulary could answer.
That tension is increasingly central to my artistic life. I am drawn to the places where technical language meets intimate experience, where systems and individual lives collide, and where a framework designed to make something measurable instead reveals what cannot be measured.
Poetry gives me permission to stay there.
Perhaps that is ultimately what “Cost-Benefit Analysis of the Soul” is trying to say: not that everything has a price if you look at it the right way, but that some of the things we value most become visible precisely when our usual methods of valuation fail.
A sunset cannot be assigned a net present value. A person cannot be insured against becoming absent. A life cannot be rebuilt from a grant.
But a hand can still be held.
And sometimes, when the numbers stop working, that is the measure that remains.
