I was wondering which quote you were talking about. I found "A Single Death is a Tragedy; a Million Deaths is a Statistic".

There as Quote Investigator article on it, it is again a much older quote. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/21/death-statistic/

Still, the question is: for a given amount of resources (time, money, people) how many quality-life-years can be added?

If this quality is order of magnitude lower than other less exciting solutions (e.g. access to medicine and education for kids from poor families), then we should be aware that what we pay for is not lives saved, but an emotional entertainment show.

I'm reminded of a fellow in, IIRC, St. Louis. He expends tremendous amounts of energy, time, and money rescuing stray dogs, to the point where he doesn't have much of a social life. It's all about the dogs.

Someone asked him why he didn't instead pour that energy into helping homeless people. His response was something to the effect that there were plenty of others helping people; his passion was the dogs. I believe he also turned the question around: what are you doing to help the homeless?

A few dozen cave divers can't do much to help the millions of impoverished children, but they used their skills to perform heroic and deadly feats to help 12 children and their coach, and inspired many around the world to ask themselves these types of questions.

Reducing that to a cost-benefit analysis vs some vague "but can't we spend that effort on the other lost kids?" question is both impossible and missing the point.

It's hard to imagine leaving them in there AND living with the knowledge that they had been left in there. Attempting a rescue seems like a pretty human thing to do, and I found it hard to blame people for being people. I certainly do awesome & dumb things because I'm a person.