Has an economist ever calculated the worth of human life?

September 29, 2006 3:32 PM

Has an economist ever calculated the worth of human life? It would be an added bonus if it s/he had worked out the different value in different parts of the world.

I have seen this ask.me post, it's not quite what I'm looking for. I'm specifically looking for economists pondering this question, and, I hope, daring to supply an answer.

posted by Kattullus to Society & Culture (14 answers total)

Response by poster: If anyone could offer citations for these, for instance, my day would be made:

Although the purchase-based model is not applied by U.S. courts, it has a profound effect on national policy: Federal agencies, which must conduct a cost-benefit analysis of any proposed regulation with an expected annual economic impact of $ 100 million or more a year, have each developed a standard price for human life, ranging from $ 6.2 million at the Environmental Protection Agency to $ 3 million at the D.O.T. In fact, it was Miller who raised the D.O.T.'s life price from $ 200,000, which means that if some new roadway feature--more malleable metal railings, say, or wider lanes--costs $ 30 million and will save more than ten lives, D.O.T. now considers it worthwhile. "I've saved thousands of lives," he says. "Few economists can say that." - from an article by Adam Davidson linked from the ask.me post I linked to.
posted by Kattullus at 3:44 PM on September 29, 2006

Do you have any friends in law school? A lot of tort & accident law casebooks have chapters on this subject. In particular, the Keeton, Sargentich & Keating one (publisher's website) is quite detailed on the subject, including some of the figures given in your post. Unfortunately mine's in storage at the moment, but any law school friends might be able to get ahold of one.
posted by rkent at 4:00 PM on September 29, 2006

See Table 1, Page 16 of this paper (PDF) -- labour market statistical values of life. Lots of references.
posted by Rumple at 4:06 PM on September 29, 2006

Chemically, your bod (and mine) is worth about a fin.
posted by rob511 at 4:28 PM on September 29, 2006

Depends how you want to calculate value. Rumple's is pretty good, but I don't think that paid labor is the only way to measure human worth. There are lots of things we do that have no monetary value, but that add other kinds of value to the world.

Your body is worth about $45 million if broken into the right component parts.
posted by decathecting at 4:35 PM on September 29, 2006

decatchecting.. wow!

Rather, bone marrow heads the list…priced at $23 million, based on 1,000 grams at $23,000 per gram.

Where can I sign up to sell a few grammes of bone marrow?
posted by wackybrit at 4:59 PM on September 29, 2006

I wish I could give you the cite, but I read about it in an economics textbook:

There was a study that attempted to put a figure on how much we value our own lives. It looked at how much we were willing to spend on average for a safety measure, versus how much safer it made us. (So, e.g., how much we were willing to pay for an airbag.) It gave a number around $100K-200K if I remember correctly.
posted by kingjoeshmoe at 5:39 PM on September 29, 2006

This slate article may be helpful. It mentions the paper rumple links to above.
posted by phatboy at 6:05 PM on September 29, 2006

This slate article

Screwed that up somehow.
posted by phatboy at 6:06 PM on September 29, 2006

there's too many intangibles to calculate ... what do you think the life of a colonel in the soviet army is worth?

whatever you answered, it's too low
posted by pyramid termite at 6:50 PM on September 29, 2006

wackybrit: "Where can I sign up to sell a few grammes of bone marrow?"

Many universities have research programs that offer donors a small compensation. I've actually done something like this, and got paid $230 for it, so the costs there are kinda skewed.
posted by Mr. Gunn at 6:51 PM on September 29, 2006

There was an interesting episode of Open Source that was about this question. The main guest was the guy who had to decide how much to pay the families of the September 11th victims. His job was a special case where the answer was simply "whatever will keep the families from taking the government to court." Then they had Peter Singer and a Rabbi come on and be less practical about it.
posted by Hildago at 8:01 PM on September 29, 2006

An Ethics teacher of mine discussed this once. He claimed that this question arises when engineers are designing things (I don't remember, buildings maybe?). The question specifically is, since in many cases the costs would be prohibitive to make a structure perfectly safe, how much additional money do you spend to potentially save one more life? Supposedly the value put on a human life in this kind of situation is somewhere around 1 or 2 million dollars, if I remember correctly. That is, for example, if it would cost $5 million to potentially save one more life, you don't spend it; you've got to draw the line somewhere.

Note: Due to my poor memory and lack of citation, what I've written here is probably completely wrong. Maybe someone else knows what my teacher was referring to.
posted by Burns Ave. at 12:41 AM on September 30, 2006

The value of human life is a huge underlying issue in medicine. It can indirectly be calculated when you look at studies discussing things like screening tests and vaccines. Although I don't have any specific references consider how many Hepatitis B vaccinations (for example) are given to prevented "x" number of deaths. If a vaccination program is adopted, then the cost of the vaccine (plus it's implementation) divided by the number of lives saved, would in theory be equal to the value of human life.

Governments make this decision all the time but they probably look at it from the perspective of health care dollars saved from avoided hospitalizations, surgeries, medications, etc. If the cost of a vaccination program is less than the money saved on all those complications, then it's worth it.
posted by commissioner12 at 10:27 AM on September 30, 2006