If you think of money as labor and say there are 2000 work hours in a year, then at $10/hour a $1 million waste of money is wasting 500 work-years of human life

If you think of money as labor and say there are 2000 work hours in a year, then at $10/hour a $1 million waste of money is wasting 500 work-years of human life. 2000 hours/(365 days * 24 hours) = 22%, so that is 500 * 0.22 = 114 lives wasted on a fruitless project. If a wasteful project is government, then you have the additional complication that the government ultimately uses police and SWAT teams to enforce the tax code. So $20 million / ($50,000 total taxes paid in a year) = 400 man-work-years wasted. Multiplying by the 22% time spent working above gives 90 years, which is close to the lifespan of an average person. So you could say a waste of $20 million is equivalent to wasting a software developer's life(assuming his taxes are $50k). Murder removes the remaining lifespan from someone, so there is a sense in which it is equivalent to time spent on pointless labor, which is equivalent to money. Though, you'd want to specify how the Volkswagen incident is a 'multimillion dollar catastrophe': * Is it from the fines imposed? That's an arbitrary number in the law or from some judge. You can't blame Volkswagen executives for causing economic damage here; the judge or lawmaker seems like the responsible party. * Is it from environmental damage? It's tricky to get a dollar number from this. You can try, but I'd have low confidence in the result, and chaining that with the low confidence in the 'murder<=>wasted labor' equivalence makes an unpersuasive argument. * Is it the forced recalls? Here, the Volkswagen executives could be said to be responsible for wasted consumer time driving it to a dealership for repair, wasted employee time fixing the cars, wasted lawyer's time defending their case, wasted judge's time fining them, wasted regulator's time preparing endless reports, etc. But, the economic cost of just the recall is probably smaller than what the OP was thinking. * Is it damage to the Volkswagen brand? I was recently shopping for a car with a friend, and one criterion was "Anything but a Volkswagen". Even if I don't care about the pollution, cheating makes them untrustworthy. This reduces consumer choice, which has some economic effects. In what other senses can you say that the Volkswagen executives caused an economic catastrophe(and hence, robbed people of their precious little life cleaning up the mess)?