Statistic of the Day

[jpmassar]

The Environmental Protection Agency set the value of a life at $9.1 million last year in proposing tighter restrictions on air pollution. The agency used numbers as low as $6.8 million during the George W. Bush administration. The Food and Drug Administration declared that life was worth $7.9 million last year, up from $5 million in 2008, in

Comments

[ext_1460]

There's no sane way to justify that kind of valuation. There's few, if any, human lives that can be sold for hundreds of thousands, let alone $5m or $9.1m. Replacement cost in many cases is actually negative (people would pay to come to the US and take someone's place).

Even if you COULD do a cost-benefit tradeoff, you must consider that the relevant measure is "marginal years of life-quality", not absolute lives.

But you can't - different things have different values to different agents (thus the benefit of trade). There simply _is_ no common value that a central planner could conceivably use for this.