How Much Is Your Life Worth
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How Much Is Your Life Worth?
Have you ever wondered how much your life is worth? Economists have. The good news is that, if you are an American, your life is very valuable, with the EPA setting the value of your life at around $7,400,000, though other estimates (such as the estimate used in the visualization below) place it higher, at closer to $9,600,000. However, if you live somewhere else, your life is likely worth less, often much less.
Highlights
The value of a statistical life, or VSL, is a measure of “mortality risk reduction” or the benefit you get from a decreased chance of dying.
What would you be willing to pay to get a car with airbags instead of one without?
the valuation of life is actually about making sure we properly value government interventions that save lives.
When considering whether to enact policies, governments often conduct cost-benefit analyses (also called benefit-cost analysis, CBA, or BCA) to determine if the benefits of the policies are worth the costs to the public. You might think of a CBA as an operationalization of a consequentialist assessment of the morality of an action. It counts up the benefits, subtracts the costs and assesses which policies create the most benefit in the world.
We need to place a value on lives because dollars are the units that are used to add and subtract these costs and benefits.
if we don’t place a value on mortality risk reduction, we essentially consider its value to be zero.