4 ms·

Sure, life’s worth about $10M – makes sense. Till it’s your life.

• msla 8y ago
  Unless you wrap yourself in gauze and never leave the house, you've effectively put a value on your own life that's far less than $10 million.
  • nradov 8y ago
    Social isolation is a risk factor for early death, so even staying in your house is dangerous.
• GuB-42 8y ago
  That's statistical. A close approximation of how we value our own life would be the value of a micromort (1 in a million chance of death). According to Wikipedia people value one micromort of their own life at around $50 (inferred by how much they want to pay for safety features). So if I am average, I would probably value my life at around $50M, so yeah, you are right, though maybe not in the way you intended. Still, it is difficult to make sense of comparisons between our own perception of the value of life and how much we actually value it based on our actions. The expenses on safety when chances of death are low is only one aspect.
  • owenversteeg 8y ago
    Huh, that wikipedia page is very interesting. Pretty weird how the UK values a mort at 1.6MM and the US at 7MM. Also, the page on Microlife is great. Wish it was longer!
    • mmt 8y ago
      > Pretty weird how the UK values a mort at 1.6MM and the US at 7MM I think you misread. It's 2.6 and 6.2 (in millions of USD) You might also find that it's not so weird in that this valuation is not general but specific to road improvements. It could be explained by the relative prevalance of road fatalities, which would skew the relative political importance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... Note that traffic fatalities per 100k of population are 2.9 for the UK and 10.6 for the US.