
The Value of Life - cinquemb
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/06/the-value-of-life.html
======
throwawaygh
All of the uncertainty around COVID-19 means that we'll build whatever complex
models we want, but then just stare blankly and wonder how the hell to choose
values for various coefficients.

You can drive the suggested analysis here as far as you want, but ultimately,
you will lift your head and realize it's all useless for actual policy making
wrt COVID-19.

The ultimate answer is that there is no ultimate answer. Abstract mathematical
modeling for these sorts of questions is therefore mostly useless. Useful
answers come from going in and dealing with lots of messy particularities in a
very messy reality.

I like to think that this problem with quantitative rationality, where you
build a model about one thing and get a very precise answer, but then realize
your answer is really just another question, is exactly what's being alluded
to in "42".

(e: moved this sentence to the bottom of my comment because it seems to be
causing some distracting hostility: "This sort of thought process is _exactly_
how you go about convincing a wise person to just give up on the whole hard
core rationality project. It's an unintentional strawman.")

~~~
donw
Generally speaking, if you are going to offer criticism, try and offer a
solution or ask a question that would address that criticism.

All I see here is "The value of human life is incalculable, so just give up."

Am I wrong? What am I missing?

We don't have infinite resources or infinite capacity to distribute them. That
means we need to make hard decisions about things like medical care. That is
reality. If I get some kind of crazy-aggressive brain cancer that costs a
billion dollars to treat, I fully expect to die.

The best way to make those decisions is to have some kind of model that can
(a) be readily understood; and (b) helps us make those decisions fairly and
with as little unintentional bias as possible.

There will always be bias -- it's part of the human condition -- but if we can
be transparent about our biases and willing to discuss them, we open the door
to improving our decision-making systems later on.

With that in mind, what would you suggest as a model for determining, say, how
we budget for healthcare?

~~~
throwawaygh
_> if you are going to offer criticism, try and offer a solution or ask a
question that would address that criticism._

My solution is that the solution probably isn't useful so don't bother.
Seriously. The game of assigning quantitative value to lives is almost never
going to help you make better decisions.

 _> All I see here is "The value of human life is incalculable, so just give
up."_

Nope. It's exactly _not_ that! I don't think it's incalculable. You can
definitely choose a way to calculate it. Precisely, even. But it's going to be
some complex function. And you're going to plug that function into another
model. And when you do that, one of two things will happen:

1\. you'll ground out in a deontology because you choose extreme values, or

2\. the uncertainty in the other parts of the model will dominate.

In COVID-19, #2 is what happens.

 _> With that in mind, what would you suggest as a model for determining, say,
how we budget for healthcare? _

I suggest that any reasonable model would look more like an entire industry of
mathematicians thinking about edge cases than what we would recognize as a
single mathematical model. And even then the answer would probably suck. And
definitely nowhere would you find it useful to have a quantitative assignment
of lives vs. money, because anywhere you try to use that is going to have a
ton of uncertainty that dominates the useful range of possible values. Which
pretty much comports with my original comment that "there is no universal
answer". I'm not an actuary or policy analyst, though.

~~~
barrkel
> _game of assigning quantitative value to lives is almost never going to help
> you make better decisions_

Quality adjusted life years is part of the analytical basis of funding of
interventions in the UK's national health system (NHS).

Does this change your position?

~~~
throwawaygh
Not really. National healthcare systems are maybe the one reason why I said
"almost never" and not "never". When your problem is literally and directly,
not indirectly, about assigning finite resources where lives are on the line,
that's the cases where a model that relates the two is most likely to be
useful. And even then most healthcare systems don't even try.

When the effects of sacrificing lives are more disconnected, the model becomes
less useful. In particular, I don't think these sorts of models are useful for
making decisions about how to respond to COVID, which is what this article is
about.

------
young_unixer
> Studies that estimate the monetary price we are willing to pay to save a
> life have long shown puzzlingly great variation across individuals and
> contexts. Perhaps in part because the topic is politically charged. Those
> who seek to justify higher safety spending, stronger regulations, or larger
> court damages re medicine, food, environmental, or job accidents tend to
> want higher estimates, while those who seek to justify less and weaker of
> such things tend to want lower estimates

If lawmakers are deciding the price, then we're already wrong.

Each person perceives the subjective value of their own life differently.
There shouldn't be a unified "value of life". Each person should do their own
cost-benefit analysis and decide how much they're willing to risk their own
safety. The incentives should be placed in such a way that each person's
decision doesn't directly impact other people's lives though.

And maybe those that "want lower estimates" don't really want lower estimates,
but they don't want any specific estimate to be shoven down their throats. In
the same vein that those that want less safety regulations don't really "want
more accidents", they want more agency and freedom of choice so that each
person can make their own decision depending on their priorities.

~~~
goto11
So how would that work - I have covid, how do I determine if I should stay
home? Should people I will potentially encounter throughout the day each
individually decide how much they would pay me for staying home?

------
andrewla
This is very silly; the worst case of a fetish for creating metrics to try to
make something "objective" when the determination really needs to be made on
the totality of human experience and moral reasoning.

The "ship pollution to poor countries" is a great example of this -- hey, we
have this metric, and according to this metric, it's a net win. This is one
path to doing monstrous things in the name of minimizing a metric, rather than
actually making progress.

To convince yourself that the task of "value of human life" is futile, the
following thought experiment suffices -- there are different penalties for
deliberately causing the death of another (and distinction based on the
quality and recency of those motives) vs. negligently causing a death vs.
recklessly causing a death, in all justice systems invented by humans.

The article says that attempts to do this have "shown puzzlingly great
variation across individuals and contexts", but then attempts to reduce it to
new and interesting metrics instead. Uncertainty is the fact of life; this
pursuit is meaningless except as a post-mortem examination of the impact of an
action taken in ignorance of the metric. If the metric is involved in the
decision making in any form it immediately becomes useless and
counterproductive.

~~~
cryptonector
> To convince yourself that the task of "value of human life" is futile, the
> following thought experiment suffices -- there are different penalties for
> deliberately causing the death of another (and distinction based on the
> quality and recency of those motives) vs. negligently causing a death vs.
> recklessly causing a death, in all justice systems invented by humans.

How does that prove the futility of the exercise? It only proves that there
must be more than one way to do it, and that the right method depends on
context. There are metrics for use in criminal cases, civil cases, insurance,
etc. It's not like we can fail to make these determinations -- failing to put
a value on human life in each relevant context is akin to saying there is no
value to human life at all.

~~~
andrewla
> failing to put a value on human life in each relevant context is akin to
> saying there is no value to human life at all.

This is the crux of the problem with metric-based examination of nearly
everything except physics.

It is not nearly akin to that. If anything, saying that you can have a metric
that measures the value of human life is much more akin to saying there is no
value to human life at all -- all of life is "haggling over the price" as it
were.

Saying that it cannot be measured is just making an epistemological
declaration of lack of knowledge. Not of the general form of "well, we just
have to find the right variable and plug them in to the right formula" but of
the form of "this is not well-suited to being reduced to a metric, as any such
reduction will mask aspects of its value that are obvious but not easily
measured".

To be clear on the dangers (as if the McKinsey-fication of "dump the pollution
in pooristan" wasn't enough) the problem is that given an imperfect
approximation to some theoretical perfect metric, we have absolutely no way of
determining how imperfect it is. There's nothing to measure it against except
other potential metrics. There's absolutely no concept of ground truth -- the
universe will not correct you (as it will if you measure mass incorrectly when
doing physics).

------
donw
There's a lot tied up in here, so I'm going to attempt to untangle.

First, I don't think there is a universal model that we can apply to every
possible case. Budgeting medical care, for example, will depend pretty heavily
on funding cycles, and a surplus at the end of the quarter raises the question
of "could this have been better allocated to serve patients' medical needs
during the quarter?"

Off the top of my head... I'm thinking that something like a lifetime maximum
with some sort of payback mechanism may be the answer. E.g., you get $2M of
medical care over the course of your life, but when the medical system has a
surplus, those numbers are adjusted.

Liability, on the other hand, is a whole 'nother ball game.

A manufacturer that deliberately chooses not to implement a safety feature
because "the lawsuits will be cheaper" is making both a moral and an economic
choice, and that's something that needs to be addressed via both torts and
corporate law. Broadly speaking, I think that putting the customer -- rather
than the shareholder -- back in the economic drivers' seat would do a lot to
remedy this.

~~~
082349872349872
It's too bad there's no equivalent to "one cuts one chooses" for financial
modelling. For instance, if we lived in a transhuman universe and the sick old
person could trade consciousnesses with the healthy young economist simply by
paying the difference in their QALY values (maybe funding sources would even
enable the LDO, the leveraged die out?), QALY numbers might be different.

------
linsomniac
There was a really good podcast on this on Planet Money a couple months ago
called "Life vs. the Economy".
[https://www.npr.org/transcripts/835571843](https://www.npr.org/transcripts/835571843)

It discusses various ways that the value of a life have been calculated and
how it has been used to determine whether product labels are worth changing to
save lives. They suppose that the shutdown could have saved $10 trillion worth
of lives.

~~~
jaekash
> They suppose that the shutdown could have saved $10 trillion worth of lives.

I suppose it could have cost $10 trillion worth of lives. Not sure what the
calculus of suppose is exactly, once I have figured that out I can take this
to the bank.

------
cryptonector
> Here are five increasingly sophisticated views:

> Infinite – Pay any price for any chance to save any human life.

> [...]

Say you take this position, that the value of a human life is infinite. Then
you come to a situation where you have to make a trade-off: some must die in
order for others to live. Something of a Sophie's Choice, though perhaps less
dramatic. Now what?

This does happen! When it happens it's not necessarily obvious, but it
happens. TFA gives an example.

Putting an infinite value on human life isn't practical. Putting a finite
value on human life seems crass, but is practical. We just have to be a bit
crass then -- what else can we do?

~~~
andrewla
When in life outside of imaginary scenarios can this calculus actually be
done? The entire idea here is ridiculous and relies on a predictive ability
that nobody actually has.

It's like the trolley problem -- the reality of that problem is somewhere
between "how the fuck should I know what this lever does, I'm not a trolley
engineer" and "what if the people move".

If one person, Bob, seems likely to you, a police officer, to murder another
person, Alice, then you don't say "well, Bob has greater expectations of
higher lifetime earnings and Alice is too risk-averse". The idea that you can
look at this outside of the direct context by examining a metric is ridiculous
on the face of it.

~~~
cryptonector
All the time. People have to decide how much to spend on their own healthcare,
for example -- in some cases it's governments that have to, in others it's
individuals and/or their families. Courts have to decide how to award damages
in wrongful death cases. Juries and courts have to decide how to sentence in
homicide cases.

~~~
andrewla
> Then you come to a situation where you have to make a trade-off: some must
> die in order for others to live.

I mean, in a wrongful death case, nobody is going to die for anyone to live.

The healthcare thing is more nuanced, and is part of the problem with any sort
of centralized decision-making around it. On an individual level it's not
usually any sort of tradeoff -- your choices don't make anyone else live or
die except in imaginary fantasies. For governments they do have to make the
choice AND THAT IS EXACTLY THE PROBLEM. Governments have been dominated by the
pursuit of efficiency against metrics and avoiding any responsibility for
outcomes because it's a "science".

If more people are dying than should be dying, then you just spend more in
accordance with your principles; this is the way that the NHS (for example)
was designed to run, until the 1970s, when this obsession with deference to
"experts" and pursuit of metric-driven efficiency (not just in England but in
most other countries too) drove it to become a managerial culture and
alienated the entire workforce associated with the program.

~~~
cryptonector
> The healthcare thing is more nuanced, and is part of the problem with any
> sort of centralized decision-making around it. On an individual level it's
> not usually any sort of tradeoff -- your choices don't make anyone else live
> or die except in imaginary fantasies. [...]

Really? What about your choices regarding people you have power of attorney
over, or, say, minors whose guardian you are?

Should a family bankrupt itself to pay for treatment for a child whose life
expectancy with treatment is only a few years anyways? Should a family
bankrupt itself to pay for an elderly member's care who has no assets left and
little life expectancy? These are difficult decisions to make if you should
ever have to, and god forbid you ever have to. But they do come up in real
life, and implicitly or otherwise, people do put a value on life.

------
gumby
> The second view, where we put a specific dollar value on each life, has long
> been shunned by officials, who deny they do any such thing, even though they
> in effect do.

I don't know how much they deny it; what fascinates me is that different
departments of the US government assign _different_ dollar values to a life
(e.g. when it is too expensive to mandate a change to the road building code).

~~~
jojobas
What is often lost on people is that saving a life can (and does) cost other
people their lifetimes.

Driving 10km/h slower to save lives? People could accumulate hundreds of man-
years essentially not lived while driving very quickly.

~~~
bickeringyokel
If I understand what you're saying, I think it's a stretch to say that "wasted
time" is the same as literally not existing.

~~~
totony
Maybe not equivalent, but there is a ratio to be argued. Being dead or being
forced to do nothing for the rest of your life has little difference for most
people

~~~
bickeringyokel
Not sure what you mean by, the rest of your life, driving a bit slower to save
lives is a fraction of your life spent. I guess there's probably some moral
equation being levied when people decide speed limits, but it probably has
more to do with minimizing deaths rather than comparing the value of time.

~~~
totony
It's just an extreme example to show that time and life both have comparable
value.

Speed limits have an implicit value comparison. If you want to minimize dwaths
you could ban all modes of transportations or set a 1 mph speed limit, but we
value our economy and time more than the amount of deaths caused by higher
speed limits.

------
devmunchies
so if human lives are priceless, then we are prioritizing it over other life
on the planet. This may not have been a big deal until now that we have ~8
billion people. This worldview will eventually kill everything to preserve
humanity, which will ironically kill humanity.

You aren't evil for saying human life is not infinitely more valuable than all
other life. There's a point where the scale tips.

I enjoyed reading a book by the late Finnish conservationist Pentti Linkola,
who said that to achieve healthy levels of biodiversity that the value of a
species should become less valuable as it becomes overpopulated. (e.g. house
cats are not as important as tigers right now, given tiger endangerment). It
applies to humans.

------
Symmetry
This seems like exactly the sort of piece where I'd want to link to _By Very
Slow Decay_ but I can't because Slate Star Codex isn't up any more.

~~~
nayuki
[https://archive.is/XpJdX](https://archive.is/XpJdX) (
[https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-
decay...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay/) )

(Slate Star Codex going down is related to news item
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23610416](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23610416)
; [https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/22/nyt-is-threatening-
my-...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/22/nyt-is-threatening-my-safety-by-
revealing-my-real-name-so-i-am-deleting-the-blog/) )

------
alex_young
The troubling question here isn’t really what price to put on saving lives,
but rather why we would divide our resources in such a way that such questions
are meaningful in the first place.

We live in a world of great abundance of every measurable sort, and insistence
on putting economic expansion ahead of protection of our friends, families,
and neighbors would be better analyzed using the lens of ethics rather than
that of finance.

~~~
ikeboy
Resources are scarce. There's no way around that. There is always a way to
spend more resources to decrease the probability of death by some amount.

We could, say, ban driving except by professional trained drivers, and get rid
of tens of thousands of deaths per year, at the cost of "only" a hit to the
economy. Should we do that?

~~~
alex_young
Highway fatalities are not an epidemic.

Would this analogy hold up if we instead considered the cost of defending
against an invading army? Would it really be reasonable to ask if we had
enough money to build the machinery to hold them at bay?

In past times we and other successes societies have worked in concert to
defeat threats to our collective and worried about fixing any economic
consequences later.

~~~
ikeboy
I mean, that's a different argument than saying value of life doesn't matter.

Value of life is relevant when comparing different possible actions that cost
different amounts of resources. If it's clear that the benefit is more than
the cost, you might not actually have to do the analysis. But if the cost is
measured in trillions of dollars, then it becomes very relevant to see exactly
what the expected benefits are. If the invading army is going to kill a
hundred thousand people, and defending against them requires using up
resources equivalent to letting five hundred thousand people die, then it's
very much a question that should be asked.

------
mjevans
Money is not good at capturing the value of potential.

It is one thing when talking about fungible goods, just things of which any
two can be compared and evaluated. A box of crackers, maybe a brand of
crackers. A donut versus a cookie or some other snack; compared to a healthy
food or complex meal of some degree.

Money is supposed to be good at valuing things that are willing to be traded.

This is why placing money on quality of life, and on medical care, and the
basics needed to live is unethical. Ability to pay does not assess value. As
far as I know, in more morally aligned countries, waiting lists for 'spare'
organs (from the recently no longer in need of them) are based mostly on who
is within reach of viable transfer completion, first in 'line' first received.
If our medical technology were better even that wouldn't be necessary. Those
lines would see output from growth fabs and be fulfilled in that order.

Emergencies are one thing; triage is used by doctors to take a logical,
predetermined, approach to making decisions no one should ever have to make.
They're going to suck anyway.

The current global pandemic is a different kind of emergency. It's like some
comic book villain has a death ray that turns n% of the population into sub-
critical masses of radioactive material. Get enough together and there will be
'clicks' (on a Geiger Counter), maybe cancer. Get even more together and there
will be an actual explosion (hospitals overflowing).

It's a __preventable__ emergency, where if people take the correct steps the
risks are reduced or eliminated.

* Every normal person wearing a mask that disrupts outward airflow and reduces the spread of exhaled particles, REDUCES the exposure risk of everyone else to that person. That's why __EVERYONE__ needs to wear a mask, not just some people.

* The same is true for properly and fully washing hands, to reduce contact transmission.

* An even more effective strategy is to limit, or even eliminate if possible, exposure between people. That's what everyone avoiding unnecessary in person meetings is about and why working from home (when possible) is the best strategy.

The issue with that last step, however, is that our entire economy is
absolutely not oriented to supporting that behavior. Major systemic changes
are necessary to support it. Even things like the design of air-circulation
which should be optimized to drive expelled particles down to the floors (much
like in cleanrooms). At least in public spaces and work settings (including
warehouses). Though it might be cheaper to have tele-operated robots
controlled by workers in a videogame like way for the warehouses.

If 'we' as a society respond to the global pandemic correctly, maybe we can
even start to automate a lot of the jobs that can be done by robots and focus
less on everyone working as much as they currently do.

------
JordanFarmer
> The key question: how much money (or resources) should you, or we, be
> willing to pay to gain more life?

This whole article is based on a false premise. We can spend x dollars to stop
this virus from getting to poor old grandma. We cannot stop this virus. Any
vaccine will not help significantly either as it has mutated many times and
will continue to do so. The shutdown and stay at home were only measures to
slow infection rates, buying time to prepare hospital beds, tests, masks ETC.

This virus will continue to spread until 80% of the population has had it
(herd immunity). The financial cost has been paid, we are re-opening and will
not close again unless we overwhelm the measures that we have put in place.
The second wave of the 1969 pandemic virus is still with us folks (it's one of
the seasonal flu varieties). This one isn't going away save a miracle.

Pandemics are nothing new. We get through them and move on (sounds harsh but
is the reality). We are a communal people. It isn't possible to "burn out"
this particular virus. This article seems to think we somehow can buy our way
out of it.

~~~
xg15
> _Any vaccine will not help significantly either as it has mutated many times
> and will continue to do so._

> _This virus will continue to spread until 80% of the population has had it
> (herd immunity)._

If the virus mutated as rapidly as you assume (I haven't seen any sources for
this) there wouldn't be any natural herd immunity either.

