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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

I love it when deskjockeys start putting a price on other people's lives.

Construction is dangerous, if you are willing to compromise on that then you'll see that you can do even better when you drop that price. And before you know it we're back in the 1930's again.

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The simple fact is that there is a trade-off between the effective safety measures put in place, and the costs of doing so. And at some point you cross a line between reasonable and unreasonable expense. Dollars may be imaginary, but they trade for real resources, and those resources exchange for opportunity costs elsewhere, including lives that might be saved or improved by other routes.

I'll but the question back to you: how much are you willing to pay to save one additional life? $1 million? $1 billion? $1 trillion? $100 trillion? (That last is more than total gross world production.)

I've got my own considerable problems with numerous elements of evaluating costs and benefits in economics, many of which I've been trying to articulate for over three decades and am only just now starting to get a handle on. I would not argue, for example, that just straight earning potential is an adequate basis. I also don't think that various proposed "market bid" rates for how much individuals are willing to accept under very specific and limited conditions are particularly useful.

But even accounting for community, social, and disruption losses, somewhere between tens and hundreds of millions is likely a reasonable balance.

That's fine as long as the ones deciding on the balance have to take a large share of the risk of injury. Be the first to work in the same conditions you expose others to. Otherwise, you're just a hypocrite and a monster.

Your rhetoric doesn't match the world.

Part of society involves distributing decisionmaking and risks. And no, not always equally. I don't find the argument that those most adept at accurately and fairly assessing risks are necessarily those who can accomplish the tasks involved.

To put this in a different field: I'd not expect my airline pilot to be the best qualified accident investigator, nor systems engineer, nor aircraft fabricator. And I as passenger bear the consequence of their combined work.

Reality bekons, if you care to heed its call.

'No taxation without representation' is not based on the presumption that those being taxed are the best at determining the value of taxation, or even of electing their own representatives. Those who do not bear the cost of their own decisions are a priori unqualified to make those decisions as they are subject to adverse incentives.

Well, yeah. They can opt to not pay the "risk tax", by simply not going down that career path. Not every construction job is rebuilding a high risk dam spillway. Not every aerospace engineer job involves stepping into a 100% oxygen flammable Apollo rocket chamber.

The understanding is that 1. society should be allowed to consider increased risk, and 2. in the event something bad happens, the victims should be compensated.

Literally nothing I said stated about society and risk stated that dangerous jobs are only for low level construction workers. You're just using silly ad hominem ("desk jockey") and emotional appeals (poor vs rich!) without considering the point.

In fact, one of my examples of risk was the Apollo project, where the most notable 3 casualties (Apollo 1's Virgil Grissom, Edward White II, and Roger Chaffee) were highly paid astronauts with engineering backgrounds. I'm not discriminating against construction workers, I'm making a statement on acceptable risk in society in general.

Finding a balance on putting price on human life is simply a necessity. I have a friend who's a petrol engineer working dangerous jobs at a high salary, and it's a risk he's willing to take. However, the modern general public is culturally shifting to people like you who literally hear the words "possible risk" and the frontal cortex of the brain shuts down and start ignoring the costs.

You've put an interesting perspective on the safety/cost balance. I find it ironic that the replier is effectively demonstrating your point: people have an emotional attachment to safety, but not opportunity cost, regardless of the math. This is perhaps a form of "one death is a tragedy, ten thousand deaths are a statistic."

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