The Value of a Human Life

Posted by CircuitGuy 7 years, 3 months ago to Economics
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This is inspired by Mike M's interesting comments here: https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...
"Your claim is the reverse, that we are saddened by the victimization of one, but outraged at the deaths of many. And why not? I mean, can you say that one person is "worth" more than some number of others?"

I can imagine a thought experiment in which the same car has various levels of safety features available at different prices. Then you take a cohort of buyers with equal driving records. In this thought experiment, there is reliable data for how many death's will occur at each level of safety. Suppose there are some amazing features that cost millions of dollars. Or you an inexpensive Ford Pinto that can catch fire violently in moderate collisions. We could take the amount people pay for safety divided by the probability of a sever collision and calculate how much they value the lives of themselves and their passengers.

This sounds meretricious. It's like measuring the value of time with family by how much extra pay it would take for someone to take a job requiring one hour extra round-trip travel. But job choice and car safety features are real-world questions that must be answered. If we simply say because life is priceless, we should spare no expense, things will be prohibitively expensive.

This was part of the backlash against the Ford Pinto case. There were documents in which they determined which safety features were included by looking at cost * number of units produced < * number of projected deaths + value lost to disability * number of projected disabilities.

People found this unsettling, and it made Ford look bad. But I don't see what else Ford could do.


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  • Posted by Herb7734 7 years, 3 months ago
    Human life's value is determined by the person who owns it. Human life other than his/her own is determined by the relationship between the owners of those lives. Human life as a resource has great value, and when it is cut short before achieving it's full potential, that is an occasion for sadness.
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    • Posted by ewv 7 years, 3 months ago
      When a good person's life ends it is an occasion for sadness regardless of how long or short it was.

      The value of a human life depends on the question, of value to whom? A person determines the value of his life to himself through the choices he makes in becoming what he is. His value to others depends on what he is and the value of that to them. Life is the fundamental value philosophically, but the degree of value of each person's life to himself and to others depends on achieving its potential.

      But human rights are the same for all and do not depend on individual choices of specific values. Our rights are a value by the nature of human beings.

      The issue of the economics and safety depends on who is paying for what and the rights of the individual. The value of a human being philosophically -- and of his rights -- is not the same as someone's economic value to someone else in a market.

      Responsibility for negligence in misleading or unexpectedly dangerous products does not depend on economics. What kind of car someone wants with what degree of protection he wants to pay for beyond what is normally expected is up to him. When a car company makes decisions on what safety features to offer in different models, it is offering a product that it thinks people want for the price in a market, not deciding the "value of a human life". Car companies engage in trade, they do not serve others altruistically.
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  • Posted by $ blarman 7 years, 3 months ago
    You've obviously watched the youTube series of Milton Friedman where he tears into a college student trying to propose that Ford was "bad". I loved Friedman's response: that the choice was really about whether or not to install a part - not on the value of a human life.
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    • Posted by 7 years, 3 months ago
      I haven't heard of of the Friedman video, but I experienced this when I took an engineering management class ten years ago. Many of the students had never worked in industry. They tended to think For was bad. Having worked in engineering for years at that time, I saw it as looking for a fall guy when a judgment call turned out to be unpopular.
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  • Posted by khalling 7 years, 3 months ago
    this reminds me of the hatchet job Nader did with his seminal book, "unsafe at any speed." the idea that as consumers, we must be given safety features without our ability to critically think for ourselves. My parent purchased a new car in 1962. They opted for seat belts (at the time those were not standard). today with all the safety bells and whistles? people buy mini Coopers. talk about unsafe at any speed...
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    • Posted by 7 years, 3 months ago
      "the hatchet job Nader did"
      I had a colleague whose wife died around 2000 in a very minor accident; she was killed by the airbag deploying. A few years later he said he had researched it carefully when he sued the car maker. He said he believed Ralph Nader's activism played a role in his wife's death. Nader pushed for air bags, he said, before the industry was ready.
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  • Posted by DrZarkov99 7 years, 3 months ago
    As unfeeling as it may sound, the law of diminishing returns dictates that when the cost of saving one life endangers the existence of other lives, you stop with the attempt. Liberals often perform emotional blackmail to get what they want. When liberals want to increase the mountain of regulations, they always try to tie them to lives saved, to make critics sound merciless. Sometimes this approach trips them up, particularly when they get caught fabricating the numbers.
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  • Posted by $ Olduglycarl 7 years, 3 months ago
    Funny thing about the Ford Pinto...the Vega had the same gas tank set up, just as many Japanese models did later and no one took note of how many caught fire in a rear end collision.

    Funny...I bought a new 73 pinto while in AIT (army) just before graduation...on the way home on leave we passed a Vega aflame after a rear end collision on the Penn Pike. When I went to my duty station I left the car with my dad...he got rear ended...never caught fire, at 150K miles, we gave the car to my brother-in-law and he got rear ended...again (without the so called Co. fix)...never caught fire.

    Always wondered if that too, was a Ralph Nader style pile of crap.

    As for the bigger question...There are risks to living and no guarantees but one should always do the very best one can with what one has...
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  • Posted by $ blarman 7 years, 3 months ago
    Value in an inanimate object lies in its usefulness or its scarcity. Human beings are anything but scarce and their usefulness is of a wide range, but they also contain something an inanimate object does not: future capacity. That is what makes valuing a human being so problematic - or even impossible - because one can not value future potential. That is essentially why murder is such a problem (aside from force itself) and the punishment for murder so hard to define.
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