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- Newsgroups: sci.econ
- Path: sparky!uunet!stanford.edu!leland.Stanford.EDU!jojo
- From: jojo@leland.Stanford.EDU (Joanne Spetz)
- Subject: Re: Value of Life
- Message-ID: <1992Sep1.010021.29903@leland.Stanford.EDU>
- Summary: Valuations are implicit
- Sender: jojo@leland.stanford.edu
- Organization: DSG, Stanford University, CA 94305, USA
- References: <htweedie.04d4@madhat.actrix.gen.nz>
- Date: Tue, 1 Sep 92 01:00:21 GMT
- Lines: 40
-
- In article <htweedie.04d4@madhat.actrix.gen.nz> htweedie@madhat.actrix.gen.nz (Hamish Tweedie) writes:
-
- > Anybody care to discuss their view of the valuation of life by
- >govt. policy makers, and what they view as the implications of the issues
- >involved in such valuations??
-
- My understanding is that policy makers tend to not explicitly declare
- a value for human life, but that the implicit value they hold can be
- deduced by examining the policy choices they make. The number I seem
- to remember is about 2 million dollars: for example, an environmental
- program that will result in 200 million dollars of lost productivity
- but will save 100 lives will be a toss-up. If it's only 99 lives the
- policy is more likely to be rejected. I may be wrong about the number,
- but this is the idea.
-
- Where the valuation of life will become more obvious to the general
- public is in the health care debate (for lack of a better description
- of it). Health care programs which restrict health spending will
- clearly result in the non-treatment of certain individuals. So, what
- is the dollar value of these people? Who is more important: the
- child or the adult? Oregon tried to create an explicit valuation system
- based on public consensus (they held town meetings and conducted
- surveys) and found themselves under much hostile criticism.
-
- How do people feel about such valuation? My impression is that people
- find it to be morally repugnant. However, one cannot avoid making
- some sort of value judgement of human life whenever one supports or
- doesn't support most government policies. People seem to try to
- make themselves feel better by not explicitly stating what their "life
- value" is...but that's only a dodge for the hard, cold, cynical truth
- of economics: everything has a price.
-
- (let's see if this results in any flaming)
-
-
- --
- Joanne Spetz
- Economics Department
- Stanford University
-
-