Whose Life is Worthy of Being Saved?

“Whose life is worthy of being saved?” This is a question that has long plagued us but now has become much more relevant. Another related question is, “who should decide whose life is worth saving?” For over fifty years, economists have been charged with estimating benefits of regulations that claim to save lives by determining what it is worth to save an “average” life. In particular, they do this without getting into whether one person’s life is worth more than another’s.

Recently, a blogger for the Center for Progressive Reform (CPR) wrote that benefit-cost analysis (BCA) employs methodological techniques “that can be clumsy, unscientific, ethically dubious, and, too often, downright absurd,” making it “arguably worse than useless.” These arguments come from a tiny but long line of critics, perhaps going back to BCA’s first use in the U.S. for federal water projects ninety years ago. 

The primary criticism of BCA is the use of the poorly named “value of a statistical life.” Economists look at how much people are willing to pay to reduce small risks to their lives. Using, for example, wages that compensate people to take risky jobs, they can calculate how that would translate to an entire life. A concrete example might be how much additional wage a person would require to drive a truck full of explosives versus a load of furniture. 

Armed with a value per life saved based on these kinds of statistics, economists find that saving a statistical life based on these small trade-offs is worth around $10 million. With that value, they can determine how many lives need to be saved in a regulation to make it worthwhile. If, for example, a regulation is estimated to save 10 lives (benefits of $100 million), but costs only $20 million, it would be worth it. But if the same regulation costs $1 billion, the money would be better spent elsewhere. This advice is given to decision makers who may use other criteria to make their actual decision. But here’s the rub – economists use this value, $10 million, for everyone - everyone is treated equally. 

One argument that has been around for years is that we should value younger people who have many more potential years to live than older people. There are also statistics for quality-adjusted life years that look at the remaining life years and the likely quality of those years. While these newer valuation techniques have been used for a few decades, they are rarely used.  

That’s because most economists prefer to leave decisions on who to save to people elected to make such decisions. President Biden has now commanded economists to help make these decisions by, for example, giving more weight to “disadvantaged, vulnerable or marginalized communities.” He also wants them to place a value on “human dignity, racial justice, environmental stewardship, the interests of future generations, and, of course, equity.” He insists economists should quantify these outcomes because they are, “particularly hard or impossible to quantify.”

Wait, what?

As long as we’re picking whose life is more valuable, perhaps we ought to pay attention to people who do the most for others. Should, for example, Mother Theresa have been valued more highly than others because of her serving the poorest of the poor, the sick and the dying? How about Jack Welch, the CEO of General Electric who grew the company from $12 billion in 1981 to $410 billion by the time he retired? He must have been responsible for creating thousands of jobs.

Beyond the obvious implication of the Biden Memo that an economist can now find a benefit under any rock they choose, this also places economists squarely where, as a profession, they did not wish to go. They are being asked to compare Jack to Jill and determine whose life should be preferred based on important but, as far as benefits go, squishy values. Economists use how much people would pay in their private lives to determine benefits. What, precisely, might people pay to ensure others have some marginal increase in “human dignity?”

One reason they do not wish to do this is precisely the criticism they should expect to receive if they are required to do so: that the analyses will be “clumsy, unscientific, ethically dubious, and, too often, downright absurd” making them “arguably worse than useless.”