
Your Life Is Worth $10M, According to the Government [video] - nradov
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2020/07/17/870483369/your-life-is-worth-10-million-according-to-the-government
======
schoen
This is really great!

A couple of anachronisms:

the Macbook inside the robot (!!!)

the TI calculator (that one looks to me like it's from the 1990s)

the mojibake on the printouts (looks pretty Unicodeish to me)

Can you spot any others?

P.S. an explanation of the importance of doing this according to HPMOR:

> Every time you spend money in order to save a life with some probability,
> you establish a lower bound on the monetary value of a life. Every time you
> refuse to spend money to save a life with some probability, you establish an
> upper bound on the monetary value of life. If your upper bounds and lower
> bounds are inconsistent, it means you could move money from one place to
> another, and save more lives at the same cost. So if you want to use a
> bounded amount of money to save as many lives as possible, your choices must
> be consistent with some monetary value assigned to a human life; if not then
> you could reshuffle the same money and do better. How very sad, how very
> hollow the indignation, of those who refuse to say that money and life can
> ever be compared, when all they're doing is forbidding the strategy that
> saves the most people, for the sake of pretentious moral grandstanding...

[https://www.hpmor.com/chapter/82](https://www.hpmor.com/chapter/82)

The video seems to agree -- doing the calculation allowed OSHA to justify the
regulation, in part because _there are still other safety regulations that
wouldn 't be justified_ under the same method (it's not a blank check for OSHA
to impose every safety regulation it can ever think of). (The cost-benefit
robot saying that it now understands the value of human life might sound
ironic, but it _didn 't_ understand how to account for them before the
calculation and it _did_ after the calculation, so, kinda?)

------
supernova87a
For those who are new/naive to this concept and find the statistical value of
life repugnant, consider this (which others have quoted to me):

"If you refuse to put a value on life, the value that will be inserted into
the spreadsheet concerning the value of life is 0."

~~~
pyuser583
“Invaluable” assets are a thing, and usually valued at “1” of the most
commonly used unit of currency (“1 dollar”, not “1 cent”).

------
chrispeel
I'd love to see someone do an analysis of how much each state is (implicitly)
valuing a statistical life in the COVID19 age. For example, given state A
which opens quickly, and state B which opened much more cautiously, it seems
that A is valuing lives at a lesser amount, while B is valuing each life more.
I guess this could be tricky to tease out of the data, yet it seems like it
could be fun problem for an economist and a statistician to team up on

~~~
sandoooo
You'd have to work out the human cost linked to the cost of economic losses
from lockdown, though. Unemployment increases death rate and shortens
lifespan. I'd love to see somebody do this too, but it's a mountain of work.

Another factor to consider is that nobody knows the future. Let's say I invest
$10m in a scheme that I expect to save 10 lives. Alas, the guy I gave the
money to chose to spend it all in Vegas then jump off a tall building. If you
look at outcomes alone I spent $10m for -1 lives. Does this mean I value lives
at -$10m?

Applying this to coronavirus response, it is more likely that the fast-opening
states have convinced themselves that the infection rate can be kept under
control, and it will cost them less in terms of both lives _and_ money to open
sooner. Whether they're right or not is another matter entirely, but people
lose their life savings betting on the stock market all the time.

~~~
chrispeel
> Applying this to coronavirus response, it is more likely that the fast-
> opening states have convinced themselves that the infection rate can be kept
> under control, and it will cost them less in terms of both lives and money
> to open sooner.

Yes, I agree. See [https://www.npr.org/2020/04/06/828345390/pandemic-onomics-
le...](https://www.npr.org/2020/04/06/828345390/pandemic-onomics-lessons-from-
the-spanish-flu)

------
ARandomerDude
This is a subtle fallacy of equivocation. Payment incurred after a loss is not
the same thing as worth. Human life is invaluable, but that doesn't mean we
can pay infinite money for restitution. Even if we could, monetary
(quantitative) compensation could never replace the qualitative value life has
to you, your loves ones, etc.

~~~
conanbatt
Except that we make choices daily on that. We choose to have alcohol for
pleasure in exchange for health, we get on an airplane to travel the world at
the risk of a plane crash, etc. We constantly trade life for money.

The problem is not in the sophistication of a method to value human life, its
just a tool for analysis. The problem is the utilitarians eager to decide who
lives and who dies, something very present in the current pandemic.

~~~
dilyevsky
Neither of your examples are trading life for money

~~~
conanbatt
Pleasure for Money + Pleasure for life -> Money for life.

------
coronadisaster
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life)

------
grdeken
Seems high

------
macinjosh
And according to me, the government is worthless.

~~~
timbit42
Perhaps that is true in your country.

------
moonka
$10M may be the monetary value used for these type of calculations, but when
you look at our country's yearly budgets, it's clear that each live is valued
much lower than $10M. Especially after seeing our response to Covid-19.

~~~
sandoooo
The government thinks $10M per life is about the right number _on the margin_
given US's economic situation and the slack they have in the annual budget.
Obviously if there's a nuclear war tomorrow, or something else that
drastically changes either the money supply or the number of people who need
saving, the exchange rate would be different.

Realistically I think the value should be a lot lower, considering there are
many interventions you could do that saves more than 1 life per $10M, even if
we confine calculations to the US. (World-wide the marginal cost of a life is
probably less than $10k). Of course you have to also take into consideration
what is politically and organizationally feasible, so perhaps $10M is the
_government 's_ marginal cost of a life considering its set of permissible
policies.

...Or maybe somebody just pulled a number out of a hat to justify an expensive
piece of legislation in the 80's, and nobody's bothered to update the number
since.

~~~
pyuser583
This is the thing - it’s likely the exact value for a human life varies
dramatically depending on the context.

That’s because they’re not usually attempting to assign a value to human lives
in any abstract sense.

