Abstract
Many risk-management decisions in the sphere of public policy hinge on the issue of evaluating and comparing various measures to reduce risk to life. On the surface, such problems seem to have a straightforward solution: Estimate how many lives the measure may be expected to save, and then multiply the resulting number by the “value of a life.” Accordingly, it is maintained that the planning of measures such as installing safety devices or rebuilding hazardous facilities implicitly rests on assessing the value of human lives in essentially economic terms. Decisions of the sort at issue here are seen as a straightforwardly hardheaded matter of comparing the cost of the protective measure on the one hand, with the product of lives saved by “the value of a life” on the other. Consider just one example of this line of thought (quoted from a recent discussion):
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References
Lee J. Seidler and Lynn L. Seidler, eds. (1975) The Cost-Benefits of Saving Lives, in Social Accounting: Theory, Issues and Cases, Los Angeles, p. 319. The account is based on an article in Business Week (October 14, 1972), p. 41.
R. Thaler and S. Rosen (1976) The Value of Saving a Life: Evidence from the Labor Market?, in Household Production and Consumption (N. Terlechyj, ed.) Columbia University Press, New York. A replication of this study under somewhat different assumtions increased this figure by one order of magnitude. (See E. Rapoport, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of California at Los Angeles, 1977.) The linearity assumption involved in such calculations is clearly something questionable. The man who accepts a 1% chance of death for $10,000 may well balk at accepting $1,000,000 for certain death.
3 The following may be considered regarding these issues: E.J. Mishan (1971) Evaluation of life and limb: A theoretical approach. Political Economy 79 687–705; Lee J. Seidler and Lynn L. Seidler, eds. (1975) Social Accounting: Theory, Issues, and Cases Melville, Los Angeles; R. Zeckhauser (1975) Procedures for valuing lives, Public Policy 23 419–464; Ralph Estes (1976) Corporate Social Accounting Wiley. New York. pp. 136 ff.
C. Stuart, and M. Speiser (1975) Recovery for Wrongful Death 2 vols. Lawyers Cooperative Publishing, Rochester, New York.
Baruch Fischhoff, Sarah Lichtenstein, and Paul Slovic (1979) What risks are acceptable? Environment 21(4), 19.
For an interesting discussion of very different aspects of the issues, see T. S. Schelling (1966) The Life You Save May Be Your Own, in Problems in Public Expenditure Analysis (S.B. Chase Jr., ed.) The Bookings Institution, Washington DC, pp.127–162.
7 Time Magazine (1980) November 17, p. 92.
Robert N. Grosse (1969) Problems of Resource Allocation in Health, in The Analysis and Evaluation of Public Expenditures: The PPB System (Washington, Subcommittee on Economy in Government of the Joint Economic Committee, US Congress 1969), vol. 3, pp. 1208–1225. See also idem, Effectiveness In Saving Lives as a Resource Allocation Criterion, in Seidler and Seidler, op. cit., pp. 330–346.
S.B. Gibson (1976) Risk Criteria in Hazard Analysis, in Chemical Engineering Progress, 92, pp. 50–62.
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Rescher, N. (1987). Risk and the Social Value of a Life. In: Humber, J.M., Almeder, R.F. (eds) Quantitative Risk Assessment. Biomedical Ethics Reviews. Humana Press, Totowa, NJ. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-59259-656-0_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-59259-656-0_9
Publisher Name: Humana Press, Totowa, NJ
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