Value of life
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
I never posted this as the value of a life didn't feel proportional to the value of a lifetime, though i never really objectively understood why. Feels like a similar paradox to the repugnant conclusion.
It's just the calculus suffers from the same existential problem as abortion morality - how do you weight a lived life vs non-existence?
They won't help you with non-existence though.
* not clear 2 * 50% QALY == 1 * 100% QALY
* maybe factor in "non-existence" with expected life expectancy?
* need negative QALY to factor in pain, dissatisfaction
Probably because no single person loses their entire remaining lifetime due to slower traffic, vs the person who dies in traffic that does.
Sitting in traffic is not the equivalent of being dead, so it's not as bad. The other side of the argument is that the people sitting in traffic are missing out on their peak years, while the reduced lifespan from a traffic death removes the last years, which at best are less enjoyable.
I can't tell if that's a joke or not.
If you want to approach it from a happiness utilitarian perspective, a year at 60 or 70 is usually worth more than a year at the lifetime average happiness.
Various sources show something like this: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201207_...
I would argue that it is considerably worse, since people sitting in traffic generally have to be conscious during the experience, which is not the case for being dead.
But even that does not take into account secondary effects to reducing the speed limit like fewer people traveling, less air population, people having more time to meditate, etc... All in all, it's very hard to estimate the impact of such policy.
> fewer people traveling
I don't think anyone says to themselves "it's a 20mph zone on the route so I'm not going, if it was 30 I would go." Lower speed limit != fewer travelers.
> less air population
Assuming you meant pollution, the same amount of cars going slower would cause more pollution in a given area, not less.
> people having more time to meditate
I'm sorry what? Most people don't meditate, and how is sitting in the car longer going to give you more time to meditate?
Longer travel times result in fewer people wanting to travel. Was not expecting this to be controversial.
> The same amount of cars going slower would cause more pollution in a given area
Drag is proportional to the square of the velocity
> Most people don't meditate, and how is sitting in the car longer going to give you more time to meditate?
Meditate is perhaps the wrong word.
In general the slower you drive the lower your mpg (and hence pollution).
I think this one?
There was also some evidence that drivers give cyclists more room if they see they aren't wearing a helmet.
Personally I'm going to buy some pink lycra as I've noticed my wife gets far less aggravation from drivers than I do when we are out cycling.
(but we did it as a joke)
Llywodraeth Cymru (Welsh Government) claims that a public health study suggests its new 20mph limits will see, annually, a 40 per cent reduction in collisions, between six and ten lives saved, and anything from 1,200 to 2,000 people avoiding injury as a result.
Scale that up across the country and you are looking at way more than "4 or 5 lives".
Save 1 life in the USA, or take the same 7.5 million and save ~1000 lives in Africa. Interesting lens on which to view these numbers.
In terms os life: the value of life is universal (at least it should be), the cost of saving one (or ending one...) depends on circumstances. And the price someone is paying in order to safe / end said life is again something different.
Edit: The value of the item initially mentioned can be anything: from the 80 for the customer at the time of purchase, 500 because it provides the customer with clean water a week later or even negaitive (e.g. because it is a replacement part, non-original, for a classic car and the resulting values of the car decreased after installation).
The cost to a consumer purchasing a burger is the retail price, not the amounts the restaurant spent on labor and ingredients.
A given good has multiple cost, up and down the supply chain. A widget can have different costs to the original manufacturer, the wholesaler, retailer, and finally consumer.
It makes no sense to say the cost of a widget is X, without specifying cost to whom.
https://www.npr.org/2020/04/15/835571843/episode-991-lives-v...
The topic is also related to yesterday's thread "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero (2022)"
In general, it's economically irrational to spend large amounts of money making space travel safer for a small number of astronauts. It would be better to just say "this is dangerous as hell; we'll pay you $10M/mission (say) to justify the risk."
Yes, that's rational. But being careless with other people's lives is something many people (including me, an economist) are morally not OK with.
I imagine there's a fair amount of useful technology that got developed along the way, and a bunch of global cultural value (and US soft power) over several decades derived from having putting a person on the moon.
It's certainly the case that many of the supposed benefits of the Space Shuttle (and the Space Station) didn't materialize. The Space Shuttle has the additional "negative benefit" of having retarded development of US expendable boosters. Something like an expendable Falcon 9 could have been created decades earlier, had policy been rational.
- Astronauts received expensive training, you don't want to lose the investment
- Astronauts are not just random people, they have a hard to find set of qualities
- Having people die in public is bad publicity
It is not politically correct to say it like that, but it is undeniable that some lives are more valuable than others.
$10M is kind of an average. When you build a road for instance, astronauts and violent criminals can both take it. The astronaut is more valuable than the criminal, but it makes no sense to make the road safer for astronauts without making it safer for everyone else, so we take an average. But put in their respective environments (Space Shuttle vs prison), it becomes very obvious whose life is the most valuable.
Also the Cold War ended so the motivation behind funding dual use aerospace technologies weakened. (The same technology that can propel astronaut capsules and satellites into space and recover them can also launch nukes).
Assuming those numbers are correct, when you look at them, the contribution of the putative saved lives to the cost of a kWh is somewhere around 1 millionth of a dollar (I forget the exact number), and so is totally swamped by the actual differences in cost. This is not the case for lives lost to fossil fuels, particularly coal; there the contribution is significant.
Speaking of which, I believe the trolley equivalent of this rephrasing would be one track, one person tied to the track, one freight trolley with no passengers but with a total dollar value of $x, and one lever which will derail the freight trolley destroying it and cargo entirely. What value of $x would be worth pulling the lever?
Anyway, as philosophical or moral problem, the trolley question just sucks.
Since I didn't fail the assessment, the answer at least wasn't completely wrong I think.
The moment you start saying "10 million dollars of cargo" people will naturally picture a container full of ipads owned by some trillion-dollar megacorp that won't feel the loss at all, and derail the train.
It would also be relevant to know who will bear the cost of losing the trolley. Is it society as a whole or some capitalist?
Otherwise, we live with a dissonance - on the one hand, we consider life priceless; on the other, we often spend a very limited amount of money to save it. We switch back and forth between these two modes of thinking, making it unable to form a rational policy.
7.5 million is about 125 years of labor at the US average pay.
It is amazing society will pay this, and it came up more often, we simply couldn't.
https://mikerowe.com/2020/03/walk-me-through-this-safety-thi...
To put in terms of the infinite trolley problem: The longer the trolley gets, the bigger the probability that one of the passengers is an EMT commuting to his shift, where being late could cost a life. You can add many such passengers, with various levels of complexity, where being late could end up costing a life or a livelihood.
So at some point, not hitting the brakes becomes worthwhile even just in terms of lives saved. The problem is that it is very hard to measure the exact impact of "inconveniencing" the 8 million passengers. I expect many lives will be lost if you stop a train with 8 million passengers for ~15 minutes. I would probably not stop the train with even less passengers, maybe a few hundred thousand.
Edit: added the last paragraph, to drive my point home.
Even if I agree that value is not cost, having a number is better for decision making than having nothing, especially in engineering projects.
Woah that's tiny.
The part about the calculation the EPA uses is very relevant:
> 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 by 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
The drugs company can sell their new wonder drug to the UK for 80k a year, or not at all. That's why these drugs are so much cheaper in the UK than in countries such as the US.
Well, sort of. The drugs come to us in the UK after the US customers have paid for the R&D. That's why they're cheaper; they're not being used to fund new drug discoveries.
E.g. You are deciding if you will spend 1 Billion to develop a drug with a 20% sucess rate. Europe sales are projected at 2 Billion, and US sales at 10 Billion.
It is US sales that make the expected value positive. If the US paid European rates, the product would not be developed.
The R&D funding came from the previous drug, not the current drug.
In practice, yes that is often the case, but it doesn't matter for the new drug development decision.
If a new drug is unprofitable, it doesnt matter if there are funds from a prior one. A company will invest it elsewhere instead of spending it on a revenue negative drug.
Similarly, If a new drug looks profitable but internal funds are scarce, the Company will secure funding or sell distribution rights to raise the funds.
The Key role that the US is currently playing to making drugs profitable to develop that otherwise would not be.
I have worked on several programs, and the question is always "what is the return on investment" and never "how much do we have in the bank".
Obviously, a certain premium is appropriate, to reflect all the value that isn't reflected in salary, like raising children, caring for elderly parents, chores around the house, voluntary work and so on. And there's no amount of money that will make a person whole again after, say, the loss of their spouse.
But if for statistical purposes we absolutely have to?
I'd say $7.5 million sounds pretty generous.
Are Musk, Bezos, Gates, Zuckerberg, Buffett 1 000 000 times more valuable than other persons?
> 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 by 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.”
As to Bezos and Gates, fortunately the statistical value of a life only has to concern itself with the median person, not with outliers.
You can place an infinite value on a human life, but killing five people to save one still doesn’t make sense.
Some infinities are larger than other infinities.