Comment by huitzitziltzin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by huitzitziltzin | Hacker News Reader

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That's a pretty harsh view.

Let me try something else: the author notes that 6,000 people take their lives in the UK every year. That has a very substantial cost, potentially measurable in many ways, but let's measure it in dollars.

The US EPA uses a value of about 7 million dollars for a statistical life in 2006 dollars [1], or about 10 million 2021 dollars [2].

The cost of suicide in the UK in the aggregate is something like 6,000*10,000,000 dollars. That's a 60 billion dollar problem.

Nearly every 60 billion dollar problem is worth caring about. Hypothetically, if you could spend $10 billion dollars to prevent all of those suicides, you would be generating a $50 billion dollar gain.

It's worth at least asking of a "we need to talk about..." article how big the problem is (on some dimension, whether in dollars or otherwise). This one is quite large.

[1] https://www.epa.gov/environmental-economics/mortality-risk-v... [2] https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm

>Suppose each person in a sample of 100,000 people were asked how much he or she would be willing to pay for a reduction in their individual risk of dying of 1 in 100,000, or 0.001%, over the next year. Since this reduction in risk would mean that we would expect one fewer death among the sample of 100,000 people over the next year on average, this is sometimes described as "one statistical life saved.” Now suppose that the average response to this hypothetical question was $100. Then the total dollar amount that the group would be willing to pay to save one statistical life in a year would be $100 per person × 100,000 people, or $10 million. This is what is meant by the "value of a statistical life.” Importantly, this is not an estimate of how much money any single individual or group would be willing to pay to prevent the certain death of any particular person.

I think it's important to note that the value of a statistical life has nothing to do with actual value, or money provided into an economy. So it's not something that can be taxed against etc. So to me it's false statement to say "spend $10 billion dollars to prevent all of those suicides, you would be generating a $50 billion dollar gain." there is no _actual_ dollar gain. The gain is that the average mortality goes down by 0.001%.

> The gain is that the average mortality goes down by 0.001%.

What made you come up with that nonsensical figure? Suicide is the leading cause of death in males under 45 in the UK. [0] And here's another tidbit [1]:

> Eliminating suicide as a cause of death would have increased life expectancy at birth by 1.92 years for males and 1.36 years for females from 2011 to 2015 [in the US].

We can debate whether and how much reducing mortality helps society, but please don't pretend that suicide is in minor in the grand scheme of things.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_Kingdom

[1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31733510/

The figures were not for suicide specifically but from their source for generating the cost of a statistical life.

I'm simply saying reducing mortality 0.001% doesn't equal 10 million dollars saved per 100,000 people as they somewhat implied. It's that society as a whole is perhaps willing to spend $10 million to reduce mortality 0.001%.

It’s not a false statement.

You are correct that saving lives in this way doesn’t put money in anyone’s pocket. Nor can the value generated be taxed.

However, it generates $50 billion relative to the actual state of the world in which there is a cost that large due to suicides.

>However, it generates $50 billion relative to the actual state of the world in which there is a cost that large due to suicides.

What does that mean? What if I say a life is worth 1 trillion dollars, of 1 google dollars? does that mean that if I save a life the world is 1 trillion dollars richer?

It would mean that if you decided a life was worth a trillion dollars.

This is intrinsically a very hard question to answer. Fortunately there are ways to make better estimates for that number than by guessing.

The way people behave when buying either insurance products, products which enhance their safety (in particular: reduce the risk of mortality) are informative about these implicit valuations.

There is a large literature in economics about this (Kip Viscusi at Vanderbilt has an accessible book about the topic, since he has written many of these papers) and of course the EPA and other government agencies have estimates as well.

I get that there are different ways to price a human life. I was mostly curious about what you meant by this statement

>relative to the actual state of the world

"the actual state of the world" does translate to any definition I know.

“Actual” == “not counter factual” in this context. How about “the current state of the world” ?

Imagine two worlds:

1. The current/actual state of the world: far too many people commit suicide every year.

2. A counterfactual state of the world in which spending $10 billion on mental health services prevents 6,000 suicides in the UK.

A $50 billion welfare loss has been averted in (counterfactual) world 2, relative to (actual) world 1.

> 1 google dollars

Unless this is a fancy way of saying “an amount of money equal to the value of the most well-known unit of Alphabet”, you probably mean “1 googol dollars”.

yup. Thanks

I'm not sure the 10 mil per life is correct. As a counter point value, a highway worker is $10,000.

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