Splashed across the front pages today — well, at least one paper I saw — are headlines about the EPA slashing the value of life revising the value of a statistical life downward. This is highly newsworthy, but only because most people haven’t been paying attention to economics or regulatory policy. (One can’t really blame them …)
There are two things that make the news juicy: the fact that regulators are placing a value on life, and the fact that they’re revising the value down.
Most people don’t know that you can put a value on human life. Most people don’t know that they put a value on their own lives all day every day. The slogans that we grow up with — “life is precious” — dominate their thinking. Our parents value our lives very highly and teach us to at least talk about the value of life in exaggerated terms.
This kind of talk and thinking isn’t universal, of course — in our culture and others, sacrificing one’s life for a high ideal is well regarded, as is sacrificing one’s life for science, or for fun. That said, being cavalier or anti-life is generally not a good idea. No, there’s some balance between prizing life and prizing fun, the greater good, ideology, religion, or what-have-you.
We do strike those balances every day. When we go to cross the street, we make judgments about the threat to our life and health from oncoming cars and decide whether to cross in the middle of the block, at a cross-walk, at a controlled intersection, or at a pedestrian footbridge. Most of us have had occassion at least once to think about crossing a freeway — and we haven’t done it.
All this is because we are weighing the value of getting to the other side against the risk of costing ourselves our own lives. To articulate this balancing, what economists are doing is using a dollar value to measure the relative importance of life versus other things.