Today, what's a life worth? The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.
The latest Science
magazine reports on the
six-and-a-half-billion-dollar Clear Skies
plan for cutting power-plant emissions. The EPA has
analyzed this plan, and they estimate that it'll
save us 93 billion dollars by the year 2020.
You might well wonder how they get that number. It
has two parts: One is the cost of health care for
respiratory illness, cancer, and the like. The
other is a flat six-million-dollar value for each
of the estimated twelve thousand lives that'll be
saved.
Others in government grew nervous about the initial
six-and-a-half-billion-dollar expenditure and did a
different calculation. They reduced the value of
each life from six to three and a half million
dollars and prorated it for older people -- the
ones most affected by bad air. (I clearly have less
future value to society
than a teenager does.)
So we're reduced to haggling over the dollar value
of a human life. The problem is that governments
have a finite amount of money to spend. As we make
up budgets, we count the cost -- of wars,
education, and, ultimately, life itself.
This Science article includes a sidebar on
the cost per life saved that is imposed by
government regulations. Requiring head-impact
protection, like helmets for cyclists, imposes only
about 700,000 dollars for each life. I also think
we'd agree that child restraints in cars are well
worth it. Their net cost is two or three million
dollars for each brand-new life that they save.
Most expensive are OSHA requirements that protect
us from methylene chloride. We pay thirteen million
dollars per life to satisfy those requirements.
That sounds excessive until the life saved belongs
to someone I deeply care about. Indeed, once one of
these losses makes it into the courtroom, its value
skyrockets.
Also in this issue we find a note that helps give
us perspective. The Germans are building small
tunnels under highways so migrating frogs can
safely cross them. Barriers along the roadside
guide frogs into those tunnels. The
half-million-dollar project will get three thousand
frogs safely across the roads each spring. Within
fifteen years, that'll come to ten dollars per
frog.
And so, what's a frog worth? What are you worth?
What'll I be worth ten years from now when I'm
really old? This arithmetic not only puts us off
our feed; it also seems to degrade us. Yet it is
arithmetic that we cannot dodge. I spoke to an
economist friend who told me, not entirely in jest,
that there are two kinds of people, real people and
statistical people.
Budgets must be drawn up, and money is always
limited. In matters of public safety, statistical
people are the only kind that it's possible to deal
with. As for our own lives, or those of our
children, which are beyond price: Well, to preserve
those lives, you and I will always work much harder
than any government would ever work on our own
behalf.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
J. Kaiser, How much Are Human Lives and Health Worth?
Science, Vol. 299, 21 March 2003, pp,
1836-1837. (See also the note on page 1839, Berlin
Builds Frogways.)
No helmet or seatbelt in this 1919
Century Magazine illustration
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-2003 by John H.
Lienhard.
