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Comment by aaron695 | Hacker News Reader

Well if you truly meant one life saved fair enough.

So you'd have to deducted the people killed in making sites like these first. So a web site is possibly $40,000. A humans life in the US is probably worth around $2,000,000. So it might cost one 50th of a humans life to create a site like this.

I'd guess not, but the figures are complicated, the site is used for other things for starters.

I'd suspect a suicide help line would be better money spent. Don't drink and drive campaigns, healthy eating, quitting smoking help all far better returns I'd guess.

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1. Human lives are valued at between $6 and $8 million in the US.

This is not what can be produced in the average human life, which is probably more like $1 million as I estimated recently here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5543848 . Instead, it's how much it costs to save a human life on the margin, which is the applicable number here.

2. My impression from previous things I've read is that suicide lines are largely ineffective.

The figure I've seen is $2-4mm (based on payouts from life insurance by the government, etc.), but this was a few years ago, so maybe inflation.

Obviously there are huge differences between humans.

Life insurance payouts are actually an even worse measure of value here. Life insurance payouts should be set by the liabilities left over when someone dies (i.e. children that still need to be raised). A person with no dependents doesn't need life insurance (except for funeral expenses), but that doesn't mean orders of magnitude less should be spent to save their life.

Should be but frequently are not. Life insurance is frequently based on current income rather than current liabilities, and that is before we get into known cases of fraud involving murder for the insurance money.

Still I agree with you. Have a couple of upvotes. You can put a dollar value on a human life but it doesn't really cover it. Life is more than dollars and cents.

There are things at play other than life or death. Let's say you work on campus. There's a shooting and you're freaking out and there all kinds of rumors circulating about what you should do. When's it safe to leave? Should you evacuate? etc. Having a central place where all of that is available is valuable to a huge number of people. Multiply that number by whatever monetary value you attach to that peace of mind and you end up with something that certainly justifies the cost.

Are you kidding us?

You cannot compare 'human lives' by comparing dollars. And surely, the site does not "cost" one 50th of "a" human life.

Economists figure these things out by looking at how much people value their own lives (e.g. how much of a salary increase people expect for high risk jobs). The figures calculated are surprisingly low (IIRC ~$300,000 for an Australian in the late 90s). You need to do this kind of analysis to do cost/benefit analysis -- e.g. should we spend money on making a road safer or building a new hospital?

According to Wikipedia -- $6-7M per life in the US.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life

Not to be a dick, but is an MIT student life valued higher than an average US citizen? I ask this in terms of average production value.

I wonder if someone would be brave enough to even predict these figures.

If you can save 1 life by spending $2.5M and instead you build 50 websites for $50k then it is reasonable to say that the site cost 1/50th of a human life.

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