The dollar value of a human life
This BizWeek article about preemies brings up the issue of how much money it is worth spending to save a human life. A popular knee-jerk reaction is to claim that you cannot put a price on the life of a person. It's easy to demonstrate that this is not true. All I need do is point out the large number of people who die every day from causes are trivially preventable at pretty low costs, often in the double-digit range per person. If we are to make sweeping generalizations about the value of a human life then we need to be consistent about it. A 22 week old foetus in the USA should not have a higher value than an 11 year old child in an impoverished developing country.
No, the truth is that human lives are worth different things to different people. To your immediate family that value may be infinite or priceless but to random strangers (the majority of the worlds population unless you are extremely famous) that value is going to be very low, possibly even zero. It's interesting to think about about the value we place as individuals on the lives of complete strangers. If you haven't already seen the infomercials, I'll enlighten you now that it is indeed possible to keep alive perfectly healthy children for as low as a dollar/day. If you aren't doing that already then you've established the value that you personally place upon the lives of strangers. And it's not very high.
So what are the factors that determine how much society values a human life? For people to whom we don't have an emotional attachment that value is influenced primarily by utility and scarcity just like most other things. If the human race were in danger of extinction then every life would be treasured. With more than 6 billion people alive, there is no scarcity, driving down the value of a life. That leaves utility. It's difficult to calculate the utility of a person because that value is different for every beholder, which is why we probably have slightly different values for the lives of strangers. The labour market is a crude approximation of this value but it has enough problems that we certainly shouldn't rely on it to determine how much people's lives are worth.
Of course, in the absence of a way to measure what we want, humans tend to instead measure they closest approximation we can get. Cory Doctorow described a better system that sounds intriguing, although I'm not sure if it would work in a scarcity-based economy.
No, the truth is that human lives are worth different things to different people. To your immediate family that value may be infinite or priceless but to random strangers (the majority of the worlds population unless you are extremely famous) that value is going to be very low, possibly even zero. It's interesting to think about about the value we place as individuals on the lives of complete strangers. If you haven't already seen the infomercials, I'll enlighten you now that it is indeed possible to keep alive perfectly healthy children for as low as a dollar/day. If you aren't doing that already then you've established the value that you personally place upon the lives of strangers. And it's not very high.
So what are the factors that determine how much society values a human life? For people to whom we don't have an emotional attachment that value is influenced primarily by utility and scarcity just like most other things. If the human race were in danger of extinction then every life would be treasured. With more than 6 billion people alive, there is no scarcity, driving down the value of a life. That leaves utility. It's difficult to calculate the utility of a person because that value is different for every beholder, which is why we probably have slightly different values for the lives of strangers. The labour market is a crude approximation of this value but it has enough problems that we certainly shouldn't rely on it to determine how much people's lives are worth.
Of course, in the absence of a way to measure what we want, humans tend to instead measure they closest approximation we can get. Cory Doctorow described a better system that sounds intriguing, although I'm not sure if it would work in a scarcity-based economy.