What is the price of a human life?
Priceless, you might say, but if you did you’d be wrong! Everything has a price these days including human lives.
An Associated Press study has discovered that the US environmental protection agency (EPA) values a human life at $6.9 million, down from $7.8 million five years ago. So life comes cheaper in Bush’s USA.
That’s not just a sick joke, it matters.
The less a life is worth to the government, the less the need for a regulation – such as the tighter restrictions on pollution that the EPA refused to impose today, effectively postponing any action on climate change until after Bush leaves office.
Consider, for example, a hypothetical regulation that costs $18bn to enforce but will prevent 2,500 deaths. At $7.8m per person (the old figure), the lifesaving benefits outweigh the costs. But at $6.9m per person, the rule costs more than the lives it saves, so it may not be adopted.
You might get wiser as you get older, but in 2002 the EPA decided that well worn folks weren’t worth as much.
In 2002, the EPA decided the value of elderly people was 38 percent less than that of people under 70. After the move became public, the agency reversed itself.
But before you pay out too much on the EPA, they are still giving the highest price of any government agency, according to The Guardian.
The EPA traditionally has put the highest value on life of any government agency and still does, despite efforts by past administrations to use the same figure in all US government agencies.
I wonder how our Government values us.
$6.9 million? Boy, have I been short-changed!
The value of humans was an issue noted by George Monbiot in this article some time ago.
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/02/19/an-exchange-of-souls/
I cant really do justice to a summary but its about the Sterne report ,climate change and measuring the costs of action/inaction so have a read of the whole thing.
This single line may promote interest: “The poorer people are, the cheaper their lives become.”, with this as an interesting tangent: “His [Sterne] report shows that the dollar losses of failing to prevent a high degree of global warming outweigh the dollar savings arising from not taking action. It therefore makes economic sense to try to stop runaway climate change. But what if the result had been different? What if he had discovered that the profits to be made from burning more fossil fuels exceeded the social cost of carbon? We would then find that it makes economic sense to kill people.”
The astonishing answer, if I’m reading the American situation rightly, is yes it would make sense to kill people, and that’s what ‘responsible’ policy makers would do!
Well it’s good to see Govt departments acting with some rationality.
But only a bit - when it comes to traffic safety each $100,000 spent
is figured to save a life. By which reckoning, environmental funding
is grossly irrational.
Also, it’s typical that when government does use a rational basis
for funding decisions, the political Left goes and makes cheap,
hysterical propaganda out of it.
Brian - is it really surprising that the government doesn’t consider the value of a human life to be infinite? If you really assumed that you’d end up make some rather strange decisions when trying to make rational decisions against things we more openly value.
As for the valuing older people more than younger ones don’t we make those sorts of decisions already even if we don’t put a number on it? Eg decisions around organ transplants, rescuing the young kid from the fire before the elderly man?
What price human life?
A necessary price, or decision making would be based on the yardstick of piffle.
Excellent. Now let’s have a cap-and-trade system on reproduction.
Can I be paid for my lack of offspring please?
Chris (a different one), it’s not at all surprising that governments can’t consider resources to be infinite. Most of us are aware, I think, for example that certain kinds of medical treatment are simply unaffordable for governments to subsidise or pay the full price. Also with older people resources to prolong life are not infinite. What’s different about this story is the following:
1. We might not be aware that government decisions that don’t bear directly on saving lives also can have life and death implications. It’s quite obvious in things like road design etc but we might be surprised at how far such thinking goes.
2. I was not aware that government agencies predetermine an ‘objective’ value on a human life. I’d be interested if Australian government agencies do this, and if so what that value is. In the US I’m sure it is relevant to court challenges, compensation and damages cases etc.
3. There seems to have been a depreciation of that predetermined value in Bush’s America, when, as indicated in the article, with increased wealth and indexation for inflation you would expect an increase.
I’m not sure what a is on about, but are the lives of other species deemed to be worthless?
That is so fucked. They should be shot. Worthless pricks.
This discusion is interesting. Of course, governments and business must estimate and weigh, the costs and (economic) benefits of various forms of action or inaction. That is the framework adopted for making a wide variety of decisions about the worth of various investments/decisions/actions. So what?
If you are outraged by the calculations adopted, or more accurately I suppose, by the fact that such calculations are made at all by people who are in a position of power of everyone, remember, it is politics that in the end determine the value the powerful put on the lives of those they exercise power over. The real question is, how much do we value ourselves?
Brian - your anti Amercican slip is showing! All governments do this and I bet most use a much lower figure - they probably just don’t make the figures as easy to get hold of. The A P ’study’ is also flawed:
What they don’t say (of course) is that a cheaper - slightly less costly - regulation will get adopted instead. It may cost 18 billion to reduce the amount of a hazardous chemical to say 1 ppm but only 10 billion to reduce it to 2ppm. I saw a list many years ago of the relative cost of reducing chemical hazards in terms of lives saved and it varied enormously. Some were estimated to cost hundreds of millions per life saved - an obvious waste as the money saved could easily be used to save more lives elsewhere at lower cost.
In fact if you think about it rationally rather than emotionally some sort of cap and trade should probably be in place. Pick a ‘value’ (as creepy as it may sound) and let the market decide which regulations make the most sense for the least amount of money. The value could then be made to rise slowly over time as we get richer.
Of course judging by some reactions here that will never be possible.
a, give up on the wankery about ‘the political left’. Meaningless twaddle.
It’s a sad but not shocking and very necessary thing that lives are valued. If they weren’t given a realistic dollar figure, all sorts of bad outcomes would be generated.
Fact is people generally value their own lives at far far less than the responsible public agency. E.g. smoking - most people would give up smoking permanently for $1M, but it’s got a far more than 1 in 7 chance of killing you prematurely.
And old people are worth less (not worthless), even if it’s impolitic to say so. We used to say ‘women and children first’.
Hell, wilful, I’d take up smoking for a million dollars.
Peter, there is nothing anti-American in what I have said, but Americans are clearly questioning the Bushistas’ motives.
amused, I’d put it to you that there are important questions about how we value others, and certainly the power factor is important.
The question is raised as to whether such decisions should be entirely formula driven or whether each case should be considered on its merits. If the latter what criteria should be applied?
Also do we regard the lives of non citizens to be equal to those of citizens?
Companies often move operations off-shore so that they can escape demanding work safety and environmental safety regulations. Are we just to shrug our shoulders about this?
Putting a monetary value on human life is the thin end of the wedge. No? If this suggestion reaches its inevitable conclusion, it must mean that the old and infirm, and even the long-term unemployed are, in monetary terms unproductive, and only a drain on the public purse.
When your life is reckoned in dollars, and you are no longer making any what right do you have to live and what possible recourse is left open for you to demand the right to continue on?
I am of course priceless, although my mother would say I’m worth my weight in carraway seeds.
The EPA’s a lot more generous than WorkCover or the TAC.
It’s also interesting in terms of the other sort of language we hear about the ’sanctity of human life’ etc. That idea only goes so far. It’s clear that some poeples’ lives are more valuable than others. It also goes to the arguments of utilitarian philosophers such as Peter Singer, who argues that in some cases some non-human life is of more value than human life.
If our government does have its version of such figures, than how does that effect policy discussion? Why isn’t it talked about transparently in that context?
Brian - for a long time I’d assumed that the government did put some value on a human life in many areas in order to be usefully do modelling of different choices. And as distasteful as it sounds, you do need to use consistent-objective-as-possible value otherwise you end up with less than useful answers.
I’d point out that this doesn’t mean that you can’t throw away results from models that don’t fit in with your ethics (eg killing people would be better for the environment), but getting those sorts of answers should lead you to rethink your assumptions and how the model works.
The actual value of a human life would of course be very controversial, especially when it moves up or down. These days I think they would try to put a price on other species and the environment beyond its impact on humans. At some point you’d need to work out whether the existence of a specific species is worth more or less than a human life.
We do these sorts of calculations in our heads, we just generally don’t use numbers and we end up with very different results. I’d rather that these calculations are done in the open and with numbers where we can objectively explain decisions to each other, and argue over pricing/models etc rather than people trying to justify a decision based on it possibly saving just one life.
I’m not surprised that the government doesn’t publish these numbers, nor even discuss the existence of them. I doubt society in general is ready for these sorts of discussions and people don’t like the feeling that they’re getting turned into a number. eg. Government arts funding is around 1.5 billion/year or equivalent to around 200 lives/year if our government prices us the same as the US government values its citizens. Is it worth it?
Is there actually some link between the EPA’s downward revision and Bush’s policies, or is the reference to declining human value in “Bush’s USA” just a high-school shot? Serious question. And how on earth can you write a post about this kind of thing without adding a single word about why it has happened? Aren’t you curious, or at the very least interested to see whether you really can blame it all on nasty Republicans?
BBB
BBB, the article suggests strongly, without substantiation, that this is a political decision driven by the Bush Administration. Certainly BushCo have the runs on the board when it comes to decisions about clean air.
Brian — if I understand this particular valuation study correctly, it measures a few specific things in addition to the standard actuarial value-calculus of estimated earnings over lifespan, etc. What the study particularly factors in, IIRC, is the extent of cost willing to be borne on average, in order to underwrite risk aversion in a range of categories.
With that in mind, it would be germane to ask whose “life” in particular is being assessed by the study: any and all persons living in the US, or citizens living in the US. Because of course, the massive influx of Third World immigration and illegal alien migration specifically, would have the natural result of dialing down the ‘risk aversion’ factor, due to the obvious: swarm after swarm of cheap illegal labor undermines our normative and legal standards about things like wage minimums, OSH regulations for the workplace, housing and health standards, access to care, I could go on. And on.
From the link:
“Instead, economists calculate the value based on what people are willing to pay to avoid certain risks, and on how much extra employers pay their workers to take on additional risks. Most of the data is drawn from payroll statistics…”
Well whaddaya know. A massive increase of cheap illegal labor willing to do anything, brings down the cost of paying employees to do things safely, as the law requires. Who would have ever guessed?
In that sense, when you say “There seems to have been a depreciation of that predetermined value in Bush’s America” you are absolutely correct, but for a reason you probably were not considering. Bush’s tenure has been marked by a wilful, criminal, and indeed traitorous abdication of his sworn duty to defend our borders and uphold our laws, resulting in the massive, catastrophic and yes, very much *illegal* incursion of people whose presence has the inevitable effect of causing the depreciation which you so deplore. This is of course, where the rubber hits the road for [politely refrains from long string of epithets] multiculturalists, who categorically refuse to be serious about the intersecting and largely predictable play of forces. For what reasons, who knows, but I can think of a few.
There are as many illegal aliens in the US (overwhelmingly poor, uneducated, unskilled, and unassimilated, but really, really fertile) as there are people of all categories in Australia. These folks consider that the increased risk-burden they take on by disregarding our norms and laws, still pays better dividends than the risks of remaining in their poverty-stricken and backwards homelands. There is, as they say, a margin in this. One must put that in one’s actuarial pipe and smoke it.
I hope you’re not going to start trading your emissions.
BBB @ 20 Exactly. I’m a little surprised that some people find it surprising. Also the he US tends to a bit more open about all this, with lots of people taking a look at it etc. so they tend to get the flack first - and loudest. Fits nicely with the general anti - US stance of many people.
I’m sorry you find the offsetting so offputting, Jobby.
Caroline said:
How do you avoid putting a monetary value on human life? Say you had to make decision on whether or not boom gates should be installed at a railway crossing on the basis the road engineers estimate it would save 1 life a year. What do you say if its going to cost $1 million, or $10 million, or $1 billion? At some price you’re going to say no, and you’ve then put a price on how much you value a human life.
BBB there are several different approaches to writing posts. When I write about climate change I usually (not always) try to answer all the questions and in a sense end discussion. I’m always pleased though if I can be shown to be wrong or additional information is added.
Another way is to put it out there to see what commenters know and can contribute.
In this case I simply don’t know why it has happened, or whether the reduction is political as claimed by some American interest groups. I was hoping you might be able to enlighten us all.
Chris (a different one), I seriously doubt that Australian government agencies use predetermined specific values. The point you made about the funding for the arts is an excellent one. It’s kind of what I had in mind when asking whether there would be other criteria, but hadn’t shaped into a specific example.
In other words the quality of life is a factor not to be dismissed lightly.
I have to go out for the rest of the day, so be good everyone please.
It’s distasteful but it’s only making explicit the choices we implicitly make every day. If you ever get in a car, then you don’t believe the value of your life is infinite: you believe a very small chance of dying is outweighed by the benefit of going somewhere you want to go. Like someone else said, if you smoke, you don’t think the value of your life is infinite. If I offered you a bet where the odds were 90% I give you a million dollars, 10% you die - you might be tempted to take it. That would suggest you place a value on your life of less than $10 million. And unless you give every cent of your income above subsistence level to a charity that saves lives, that suggests you don’t view ohter people’s lives as having infinite value - otherwise you’d prefer to spend all the money you could saving lives rather than on things you enjoy that have a less than infinite value.
I’m sorry if I’m offending anyone, but governments and others have to make these choices all the time - how much should a government spend on measures that save a few lives? And I’d suggest it’s better to acknowledge honestly that we’re engaging in this exercise than pretending we’re not. I’d suggest that governments that valued lives as high as $7 million would probably tax us far more, spend far more than they do on health and very little on much else and probably wouldn’t be very popular - because people out there as much as they deny it, value other people’s lives at far LESS than $7 million.
Anybody who says they don’t think human life has a monetary value is kidding themselves.
Every year thousands of people get killed and aimed on the roads. We could stop it all tomorrow by restricting the speed limit for all vehicles (including bicycles - mung bean eaters take note)to 5 km/h.
All those in favour say aye.
No takers? I thought so. The costs ($$$$) would far exceed the value of the lives saved.
Then there’s the cost of developing new life saving drugs. Suppose we could develop a drug to cure a very rare form of cancer, at a cost of %100 million per life saved.
All those in favour say aye.
The list goes on and on.
It’s all very distasteful of course. Life is sacred, yada yada - just ask the Pope if you run into him on the Bridge Clim this week - but it does have a value.
I can quote on reasonably good authority (though with an imperfect memory) that the cost of putting 40kph zones in front of every school in Victoria was going to be $25M initially, and $5M annually (can’t recall if this was cash costs, or included lost amenity for drivers, but I think the former only). The upside was a child’s life saved every two to three years.
How many children’s lives would be saved with more money for exercise, or upgrading the Children’s, or compensating advertisers in some manner, or better resourcing CSV? Point is, there are much cheaper ways of saving a lot more kids lives than variable speed zones everywhere. But the Herald Sun loved it and Bracks reputation remained good. Buying votes from parents can be costly.
“I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection.”
amused, I’d put it to you that there are important questions about how we value others, and certainly the power factor is important.
Well yes, that’s the point. Of course it is important how we value others and the way we actually illustrate that point, is not by blather concerning the sacredness of human life, or by ’shock’ that these kinds of calculations are made (heard of the insurance industry-understand how it works?) but by ensuring that actually existing humans have the best lives the current knowledge and wealth can deliver. I am aware of all the arguments concerning ‘ends’ and the difficulty of obtaining final agreement on these issues, but the endless moralising blather is starting to really annoy me. It is true that these kinds of calculations are made all the time, and it is also true that it is an interesting question as to why and how the different calculations are made which yield different values for a ‘human life’. But the reality is in a practical sense, that people have precisely the value they are able to both imagine for themselves, and impose on those on whom they must rely (in a technical and knowledge based sense) for advice and leadership on a range of questions.
j_p_z, I never took you for a traditional marxist. ha ha ha. So it’s all the multi culturalists fault is it? You are sounding like a trotskyist.
I think this is being looked at backwards.
A high price that a government puts on a life indicates an enhancement of where it is in the support of life.
Government is about choices. If vaccination saves a life for every dollar spent, then that would place the value of a life at $1 for that programme. If you have to start choosing between programs that only save lives/millions of dollars spent then that should only happen after all the lives/thousands of dollars options have already been exhausted.
So if you look at it that way then a dropping price means that the government in question is failing (not such a surprise in this case). It doesn’t mean that you can ask that nation for some number of slaves at the going rate, or that you can pay them the going price then hunt their citizens.
In effect the number is just a ROI valuation.
Ideally, of course, we would know all the things we could do to save lives, put them in order (cheapest to most expensive) and do those things up to the limit of the funds available to save lives.
As we do not know all the things we could do then this way has to be used - we will do all things that have a cost per human life saved of less than a certain amount.
Ugly, but in a resource constrained world, the only real way to go about it.
Andrew Reynolds — not disagreeing, but as a point of clarification, I’d suggest that the EPA in this instance (or any other large government agency, for that matter) isn’t, strictly speaking, trying to “save lives,” as you say. It’s trying to formulate workable and affordable (and hopefully optimal) policy platforms, as a tool to help operate/administer a large and complex society. Part of that brief involves avoiding/barring unnecessary dangers, and that will of course tend to save lives, but it’s not the best way to frame the question per se. The EPA is trying to solve elaborate problems that have large amounts of variables; one of the ways for them to see more clearly is to assign presumed values to as many of the variables as you can. That’s of course just methodology in the abstract. Whether or not the EPA is deliberately fudging the values in order to meet pre-set politically-motivated targets, is a separate question.
A lot of the outrage here reminds me of the old stand-up comedians’ saw about the airplane’s black box: “Why don’t they just build the WHOLE PLANE out of that stuff?!”
There’s not much outrage here…
Brian @ 15
.
OK - I’ll change that to anti Bush instead.
Of course the fact that the EPA pays out a lot more than other government departments would be a perfect reason why the EPA should reduce their ‘value’ so that other departments could increase theirs (money being limited as it is).
No need to blame Bush on this one - but hell, why not!
j_p_z,
Conceded. You clarification puts it better than I did.
From the sound of the promo I just heard the Law Report on Radio National tomorrow is on this very topic. Something to do with compensation payments to 9/11 victims. Well, to their loved ones, at any rate.
j_p_z, I’m really glad we are girt by sea. I used to read a lot about trade and read about farmers in Latin America being wiped out by cheap imports from subsidised American agriculture. Some of those farmers ended up working for a song on the American farms that put them out of business.
What we are hearing here is that the joint couldn’t run without cheap illegal labour, and there is a fair bit of hypocrisy on the part of certain politicians on the issue.
I’d like to introduce a conundrum Quiggin gave us a while ago. My words are different, but the idea is basically the same.
There are two people in a burning building and you can only save one. The choice is between a scientist who has knowledge possessed by no-one else which will with great certainty lead to a cure for cancer, and you mother.
I’d make two comments. One is that emotions and values are important elements in decision making as well as reason. Second, that this is properly so.
What I’d choose under the circumstances is irrelevant, but like Caroline and Fine I’m really uncomfortable with a preconceived number as the value of a human life. Numbers have great and unwarranted power. You would be better engaging with the pragmatics and the particular experiential dimensions of each case, although your decisions might be harder to defend in court.
Brian - I think your example demonstrates why it shouldn’t be one person making the decision and why we need to look for objective measures. Otherwise we’ll end up saving the gold logie winner over the cure for cancer scientist everytime.
Its not that things like quality of life are not important. They do need to be factored into the models, but without them we end up getting caught arguing about ideology and people assume immovable, inconsistent positions.
Also I’d note that we should not be slaves to this process. Just because the computer pops out the answer “A” when you were expecting “B” doesn’t mean you have to accept it. But it should be an indication that you need to look at the situation more closely.
Chris (a different one), I’m still raising issues rather than going firm on answers.
BTW, the Law Report segment turned put to be an interview with Ken Feinberg, the guy who administered a $7 billion fund set up to compensate the victims of 9/11. It’s got too many subtle angles to summarise and the transcript would reward reading (I heard it this morning). It was a one off and was what they called ‘vengeful philanthropy’, in other words a political act and one in the eye for al Qa’eda to show US compassion in the face of their brutality. There was no enthusiasm at all for a similar fund for the victims of Katrina feinberg says:
But to my mind he doesn’t exactly say why.
Brian, I listened to the LR episode on the evening repeat. Definitely an interesting interview. The question of replication is certainly a difficult one, and the justifications for similar funds not being set up in the future that Feinberg provides are both political: the potential of an explosion of litigation doing damage to the American economy; and as you say, the ‘vengeful philanthropy’ angle of showing Al Qaeda that the U.S. would act in a humane and generous way towards its (Al Qaeda’s) victims. But he didn’t really sound like he had a satisfactory response, on the individual level, to provide to victims of Hurricane Katrina, Oklahoma bombing, 1st WTC bombing etc, as to why they would never receive similar compensation.
Also interesting, and troubling, was the equity issue - the fact that to discourage litigation, payouts were made (along with a set ‘pain and suffering’ amount) in terms of lost income - the theory being that rich bankers, stockbrokers etc would put up more of a fight in the legal system than poorer busboys, firefighters etc., and therefore should receive more money. This clause was in the legislation, not Feinberg’s doing, and he suggests that he attempted to ameliorate this to some extent; but it certainly adds to the impression that the exercise was more political than humane in nature.
Nick, good comments. I suspect there is a deeply ingrained feeling on the part of the rich and powerful that some people really are worth more than others.
It was interesting also that some didn’t really want to make a claim, indeed a few never did. Also that some who litigated didn’t do so for financial reasons, but for reasons such as wanting to know what really happened and to send a message to the authorities that they should have performed better.
I think Feinberg also said that those who litigated got less on average than those who didn’t.
My argument is that if human life can have a dollar value, how much money should it cost to perform an abortion, as the Christian conservatives consider that a human life. $20 million, $10 million; I’m curious, especially since elderly people have less value than children.