An interesting tidbit in the post is that DHS values each life at $6.5 million. Since most people do not have a net worth that high, and will never earn anywhere near that much in their lifetimes, it really makes me wonder where they get these numbers. While any loss of life is tragic, that loss rarely represents a financial loss of $6.5 million to the economy - even if you take earning potential into account.
Simply adding up all the dollars that might find their way into and out of your bank account is rather a naive way to value a life.
You may not ever earn or own that much money, but perhaps one of your descendants might be the next Gates/Buffet/Rausing/Musk (pick your favourite rich person).
If you are yet to breed, or having bred, yet to finish your job of raising that child, then you might want to include the potential financial loss that your descendants incur by not living up to their full potential, or taking an extra generation to climb above your current social level.
You mention a financial loss to "the economy", rather than explicitly to the household of the deceased. You may not earn $6.5M for yourself, but you might implement some feature that saves 1000 people who earn $65K each a year of effort.
Your employer may need to replace you, we often see posts about how important it is to hire the right people, because of how much the hiring process itself costs.
If a well-liked individual dies, then the productivity of some of those close to them drops for a period. Your next of kin may have to take time out of work to arrange the disposal of your remains, attend an inquest, deal with probate, authorise the withdrawal of life support from your brain-dead body (and deal with the psychological trauma that that might cause). Your friends and relatives may take a day off work to attend a funeral.
If blame is to be apportioned for someone's death, expensive legal professionals will be involved in working out how much blame should fall on whom. Insurers will argue about how quickly their liability should be discharged, and how much they should actually pay.
"[Economists] often consider the value of a statistical life (VSL). The VSL is the value that an individual places on a marginal change in their likelihood of death. Note that the VSL is very different from the value of an actual life. It is the value placed on changes in the likelihood of death, not the price someone would pay to avoid certain death."
It doesn't particularly matter what the specific number is, what's really important is that we have consistent way of looking at all the different ways we could save lives by spending money and evaluate them rationally, rather than spending $1e9 to save a life here but refusing to spend $1e5 there. People's intuitions about these things are really horrible, and if someone is willing to pay an amount to save 1 life they usually aren't willing to pay anything like 10 times as much to save 10 lives.
Judging people's "value" according to their wealth is laughable and has a whiff of protestant fundamentalism to it. There are a ton of people with absurd wealth who are in fact costly to the economy (drug kingpins, polluters, embezzlers, corrupt heads of states...).
Not the way I think about it, but maybe you could: You earn dollar, then you spend a portion, someone else earns some of that, then spends a portion of that, this continues. So $6,500,000 is not that unreasonable with that and inflation in mind.
