The Price of Life

In this, the 500th post on the Lawrence Economics Blog, we bring you a story from the NYT on the statistical value of life.  Indeed, as anyone in an environmental economics or policy course knows, the “value” placed on saving a statistical life (VSL) is associated with reductions in risk levels that decrease the probability of being killed (i.e., from reducing the number of purple balls in your urn).

This VSL is pivotal in determining the benefits of many non-economic regulations, and many federal agencies have increased the value used in benefit assessment in the past few years.

The Environmental Protection Agency set the value of a life at $9.1 million last year in proposing tighter restrictions on air pollution. The agency used numbers as low as $6.8 million during the George W. Bush administration.

The Food and Drug Administration declared that life was worth $7.9 million last year, up from $5 million in 2008, in proposing warning labels on cigarette packages featuring images of cancer victims.

The Transportation Department has used values of around $6 million to justify recent decisions to impose regulations that the Bush administration had rejected as too expensive, like requiring stronger roofs on cars.

That is the salient point of the article; the rest mostly gets down to talking about the prospects and problems of using VSLs in the first place.  If you are reading this, you probably know already.