7 ms·

How Much Is a Human Life Worth?

35 points by danielrpa 6y ago

stargrazer 6y ago
Why do articles insist on providing numbers with no appropriate context? What do the absolute number of deaths of 9/11 or absolute number of deaths in Viet Nam have to do with this? Perhaps better comparisons would be: how many deaths are there in the world per day? Before and after the instigation of covid19? How many deaths due to pneumonia before and after? Has the death rate in other categories been reduced? Are there fewer accidents? Maybe we should just lock down forever because it might save at least one death due to accident? "On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero".
- aaronbrethorst 6y ago
  The absolute numbers provide context for people to compare this current tragic loss of life with past tragic losses of life. It’s an important caveat, though, that we don’t know the total number of dead from the Vietnam War. The numeric threshold we’ve crossed is for American soldiers killed. A number that includes the Vietnamese in that increases to the hundreds of thousands or into the millions.
- ForHackernews 6y ago
  I'm not sure why 9/11 or Vietnam are "not appropriate" contexts. They're both widely considered national disasters in which too many American lives were lost, yet neither one claimed as many as this covid-19 outbreak. Comparing to other sources of mortality is interesting, too, but if the question is "how many deaths is too many deaths" -- in the context of 9/11 and Vietnam the bar seems to be much lower -- it's worth reflecting on why that is. Is it "worse" for Americans to die needlessly in terrorist attacks or foreign wars than in nursing homes? If so, why?
- DennisP 6y ago
  Appropriate context: right now, daily US deaths from covid19 are about equal to heart disease and cancer. That's pretty high for a threat that didn't exist a few months ago. We try pretty hard to reduce heart disease and cancer deaths, but we don't social distance for them because they're not contagious. If we allow covid's exponential spread to resume, it will be our leading cause of death before long. Meanwhile, countries that did strict lockdowns for a while and used that time to roll out lots of testing are getting through this with little damage.
  - pacala 6y ago
    If the countries you are referring to are South Korea, Taiwan and New Zealand, it may be that the rest of us have very little chance to follow suit. We are too interconnected and too diverse to counteract the exponential nature of the threat. At some point we have to make peace with ourselves.
    - DennisP 6y ago
      South Korea started early with a massive amount of testing. Asian countries in general have had a high rate of mask wearing and good compliance with social distancing measures. We could do this sort of thing in the U.S. If our challenges are more difficult, that's not a good reason to do less.
  - glofish 6y ago
    The problem with your math there is that by and large, we are talking about the same people - only the timeline is different. It is just as possible that over a longer time period say a year the math will be radically different. We'll have fewer cancer deaths because the patient had already died of COVID. It is possible that a country has many deaths because up to that point it was able to keep large swaths of "terminally ill" people alive. Delay, isolation and testing do not actually solve anything. For large segments of the population the virus is not a risk at all, they can't even tell that are infected. Long term it is not obvious who gets out better, the population where the infection rates are high and they can reduce the crippling economical restrictions or populations where they managed to have no infections but the sanctions remain for years. History, in general, is characterized by surprising twists and turns where it was impossible to tell what comes next.
    - DennisP 6y ago
      To conclude that a lot of covid victims would have died anyway, you would have to show that the total number of deaths is up less than the number of covid deaths. In fact, we see the exact opposite: total daily deaths has increased by more than the known covid deaths. This appears to be partly from missing covid deaths (e.g. from people dying at home), and partly from heart attack and stroke patients delaying trips to the ER from fear of covid. But wait, you mentioned that "the timeline is different." Well of course, we're all going to die eventually. That doesn't mean we should just lay down and die today. Epidemiologists strongly disagree with you about delay and testing. If you lock down enough so the replication rate goes below one, you can get the virus down to manageable numbers. If you cautiously open with lots of testing, you can isolate the cases that show up, and tests all their contacts. On the other hand if you shut down without bothering to build your test and trace infrastructure, then you're right, the delay didn't help at all, because you were incompetent. The idea that we can just open up and people will happily go back to work and shopping while the bodies pile up is unrealistic, to put it mildly. We're actually extending the economic crisis, not shortening it.
- deleted 6y ago
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- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
  The comparison to 9/11 is motivated by "look how much we changed things and how much we spent because of that." If we changed that much for something less devastating, we should be willing to change/invest at least as much for this.
snorrah 6y ago
$10 million is the current value of life, with the article ending by suggesting it’s probably worth less by now.
- downshun 6y ago
  That's about 30 thousand koi fish! Enough to feed a town for three days!
  - davidajackson 6y ago
    Or 60,000,000 Bells.
deleted 6y ago
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war1025 6y ago
The value of a human life is in most cases next to nothing. A life is priceless to the closest friends and family. Beyond that its value drops rapidly. If lives were anywhere near as precious to politicians as they like to pretend, we wouldn't be sending kids off to war. We would be investing in anti-poverty measures. The value of a life to someone in power is proportional to the likelihood of being overthrown or pushed out of office due to that person's death. Often a life has negative value to such a person.
- deleted 6y ago
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- lowdose 6y ago
  When there's a person, there's a problem. When there's no person, there's no problem. Josef Stalin
- bilbo0s 6y ago
  >Often a life has negative value to such a person. Never thought about it this way, but it's true. A dead person can't vote against you. So to the extent that a given person, or group of people, can be relied on to vote against you, it wouldn't be that bad for you game theoretically if they were not around.
  - clairity 6y ago
    that's why we shouldn't let power concentrate in any person or organization, public, private, or religious.
    - bilbo0s 6y ago
      At least no organization that requires votes. Absent illegal activity, money will continue to flow when a person dies, but votes can be guaranteed to stop.
      - clairity 6y ago
lidHanteyk 6y ago
Consider: You are worth about $10mil, in terms of labor. If you work for 40yrs, from 20 to 60, then you are worth about $250k/yr. Conclusion: We are underpaying nearly everybody in society.
- whiddershins 6y ago
  You don’t work all your waking hours, and if someone does, they usually make that much or more.
  - lidHanteyk 6y ago
    You've been downvoted, but it's worth pointing out exactly why you're wrong: I am talking about salary, which means that folks are compensated not based on a number of hours spent working but on the overall impact that their work has on the organization. Also, I have been salaried several times in my life, and in each case, I was expected to do various things outside of a 9-5 "workday" sort of framework. Without being too self-oriented, I think that I earned the salary commanded. I've never been compensated even $200k/yr, and my highest is about $150k/yr. Even those of us that are well-paid and well-respected for our work are not paid enough to justify the time that we lose to work.
    - whiddershins 6y ago
      I truly am not understanding how anything you write makes me wrong. If we value a life at a certain amount, it seems we can value it out at per year, per hour. These are all just estimates. But if your life is worth x per year, and you x * z number of waking hours, and you trade some of those waking hours for cash ... Where am I wrong? Edit: I’m not even sure why we are pruning non working years from the calculation.
      - lidHanteyk 6y ago
        Aha! It's because we are talking about the value of a laborer, of a plebian, of an everyman. The value of the typical person, to some society, is the labor that they can provide to the society. Money is the only way that society can estimate the value of people. This might be a foreign way for you to look at people, but it's common in the Marxist worldviews. In other words, society doesn't care what you're doing when you aren't working, as long as you're leaving society alone. Thus society has no real reason to pay you just for existing. We might demand that our society put money in everybody's pocket, as a way of creating a capitalism which respects humanity, but it is not strictly necessary, because money is not strictly necessary for a society to exist.
cousin_it 6y ago
The question doesn't make sense as is. It should be rephrased in marginal terms: if we decide to spend one extra dollar on saving lives compared to today's situation, how many lives will it save? Also it should be measured in QALYs, not lives. I don't know the exact answer, but I've seen estimates from 20K$ to 200K$/QALY. (That's for the West, in the developing world it's much cheaper.)
- etrevino 6y ago
  FYI for those who don't know: QALY is Quality Adjusted Life Year. Parent is right that it's problem the best metric to use. I believe that we aren't using it because we don't know the morbidity that results from Covid-19. In other words, we don't know how Covid affects people's long term health. Someone might survive the virus, but end up having long term lung or liver or whatever damage. That reduces their capacity to work and may reduce their lifespan, i.e., their economic output after the life-saving intervention is reduced.
- godelzilla 6y ago
  Can we add even more pseudo-science though?
- techmaster7b 6y ago
  $20k to $200k
malyk 6y ago
Here’s a good recent RadioLab episode with the guy who calculated the current $10m figure. https://www.npr.org/2020/04/15/835571843/episode-991-lives-vs-the-economy https://www.npr.org/2020/04/15/835571843/episode-991-lives-v...
- herrvogel- 6y ago
  A bit older, but this[1] Freakonomics episode was also great. [1]https://freakonomics.com/podcast/kenneth-feinberg/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/kenneth-feinberg/
- mercutio2 6y ago
  Planet Money, not RadioLab, but still, good episode.
wtfrmyinitials 6y ago
I thought this was a pretty decent article until the very end when the author asserts: > ...nobody could be bothered to develop a nationwide program to test people for infection and trace their contacts if they were positive, or to adequately support a pause of economic activity... As for nationwide program to test people, of course nothing was built yet; it's a novel virus and therefore novel tests are needed. If a government had built out contact tracing pre-covid, they would be (rightly) criticized for taking steps in an authoritarian direction. Apple and Google have stepped in and built contact tracing, so to say this hasn't been developed is also factually inaccurate. Finally the comment about the ability to "adequately support a pause of economic activity" is kind of silly. To pause economic activity is to pause everyone's lives. What does it mean to adequately support people when they're no longer allowed to do the things they enjoy? It was a breath of fresh air to read an article that admitted that this is a difficult trade off, not some kind of easy decision that's being ruined by the other guy. It was disappointing that it was concluded with a similar tone.
- verall 6y ago
  > adequately support a pause of economic activity They mean to support people & families that lose their jobs. A good example is Florida and a couple states with intentionally byzantine and understaffed unemployment offices - claims are being handled so slowly that tons of at-risk people who have lost their jobs and are eligible for federal dollars will not see them. Adequately supporting a pause in economic activity might have included overhauling or providing alternate systems for states with broken unemployment or paying wages private wages to prevent layoffs. I don't particularly like the latter option but I certainly feel like a competent government could have paused economic activity and then supported its frozen citizens better. 3 of my favorite local restaurants have closed since the pandemic. There are "nonessential" businesses still expected to make $6k/mo rent without any customers. The private equity that owns most of the land in the area seems not to mind at all; construction is still booming...
  - aaronbrethorst 6y ago
    Florida’s junior senator brought this upon the state. I hope Floridians remember in 2024: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/florida-unemployment-benefits-desantis-trump-rick-scott.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/florida-unemployment...
deleted 6y ago
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alex_young 6y ago
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- shiftpgdn 6y ago
  Everything you've written is wrong. No dead were burried in a park and there was mostly plenty of space for dead bodies. You should watch less CNN.
missedthecue 6y ago
Whatever someone's willing to pay for it
generalpass 6y ago
No matter whether people own their own lives. It is for experts and bureaucrats to decide what are lives are worth, what our lives are for, what is safe, what is acceptable. Human life is just an equation for the central planners to tweak. Soon, we will be each be followed an assigned quadcopter monitoring our every activity to make sure we are not engaged in any unsafe activities so as to be certain we are providing our maximum societal output.
lowdose 6y ago
> Assuming that social distancing measures can substantially reduce contacts among individuals, we find net benefits of about $5.2 trillion in our benchmark case. The article linked to this paper but I find their conclusion very unlikely. $5.2 trillion is 6% of the world combined GDP. When people are not performing value adding activities they consume value. Inventing money out of thin air is not similar to people actually creating value. If these are the numbers our politicians base their decisions on we are in deep trouble. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3561934 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3561934
flexie 6y ago
A better question would be ‘How many years do we save’ because the vast majority of the people dying from covid-19 are old people who already suffer from one or more prior diseases. The average life lost in Vietnam or Afghanistan had maybe 55-60 years left, had it not been for the bullet that cut it short. The average age of covid-19 victims is maybe 73 or so, and those people would in average have lived another 0-5 years (typically less than the average life span for men of 78.5 years because of the prior illness).
- chinathrow 6y ago
  It's way more than 0-5 years, it's 10 years according to a study made by researchers at University of Glasgow. https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/5-75 https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/5-75 "Deaths from COVID-19 represent a substantial burden in terms of per-person YLL, more than a decade, even after adjusting for the typical number and type of LTCs found in people dying of COVID-19. The extent of multimorbidity heavily influences the estimated YLL at a given age. More comprehensive and standardised collection of data on LTCs is needed to better understand and quantify the global burden of COVID-19 and to guide policy-making and interventions."
- afthonos 6y ago
  Leaving aside the disturbing American trend of minimizing the value of the elderly, your math is based on comparing with life expectancy at birth. You should instead be looking at life expectancy at time of death, which is significantly higher (a decade or more).
godelzilla 6y ago
Not sure why they're doing all these calculations when capitalism already assigns everyone a numerical worth.
praptak 6y ago
So, how much money or effort would you spend to avoid a hypothetical event that kills you with a well known probability, say half percent? I don't even know a conceptual framework to think about it. For 100% it would probably be "all my money" (I'm not suicidal). Should it be half percent of my money for a half percent event?
- shakezula 6y ago
  But it’s not just your life you’re gambling with. You’re gambling with other people’s lives. People who have just as much right to life as you do. People who may be in a much higher risk bracket than you. People who might very well die.
  - praptak 6y ago
    I'm not talking about the virus, just a hypothetical event that kills only me
- mettamage 6y ago
  That doesn't sound like a linear relationship to me and unfortunately many people have experienced this IRL. There are enough people with 33% chance of dying who will go into debt if they have to.
- clairity 6y ago
  > "I don't even know a conceptual framework to think about it. For 100% it would probably be "all my money" (I'm not suicidal). Should it be half percent of my money for a half percent event?" without knowing anything else, it's pretty straightforward: 0.5% * $10MM = $50K. that's what you should pay. but, that's not considering any priors that change that result drastically one way or the other. in any case, it's irrational to think we should (and can) save every life at all costs, at all times. that's not living; that's cowering in fear. we have no control over many things that can kill us, so we need to buffet our understanding of risks and steel our resolve to face them. more importantly, it's inconsistent with our very own actions. we take many, many risks every single day that have non-trivial likelihood of death, like getting into a car (1 in 100 lifetime odds of death). we need to work hard to contextualize new risks based on our past actions, so that we know how much mitigation we should invest in. we can't mitigate everything all the time. we must pick and choose to maximize the return of those mitigations, balanced against the value of the things we cherish.
ovslylegit 6y ago
wharton published a "Coronavirus Policy Response Simulator" on may 1st [1]. Their analysis comes to the conclusion that fully reopening ("States immediately lift all orders listed above as well as restrictions on the operation of businesses and restaurants.") would lead to 500k lost jobs from May first and 350k deaths until end of june 2020, while partially reopening ("States immediately lift emergency declarations, stay-at-home orders, and school closures.") would result in -11.3 Million jobs lost and 162k deaths. Both assuming, that each individual maintains their current social distancing practice. Year-Over-Year GDP change % would be almost identical, -10.1 vs. -10.7. So fully reopening, compared to partially, would save ~11 million jobs, but lead to roughly 190k more deaths. Considering the $10 million as the current value of a human life, a job would be $~172k for the comparison fully vs partially reopening while maintaining current social distancing measures. [1] https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2020/5/1/coronavirus-reopening-simulator https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2020/5/1/corona...
sandworm101 6y ago
>> How Much Is a Human Life Worth? Which life? The reality is that we do not value all lives equally. Wealth, location, legal status, and less acknowledged factors like age, sex and race, all result in some lives being more valuable than others. That is the world in which we live. So when we look at covid-19 one must first ask: who is it killing? Is it killing the more or less valuable members? Or, rather than face that horrible question, are we willing to take the hard road and value all lives equally? That road leads to dangerous areas such as universal health care and government-sponsored wellness.
- WaitWaitWha 6y ago
  The article mentions this explicitly. "Some economists even think that globally, poorer people in the developing world may well value their risk lower because they simply have less to spend, and more to lose. Even if it’s true, acknowledging it puts you on a slip-n-slide to racism and eugenics."
altmind 6y ago
In monetary value, there's couple estimates in Wikipedia. I've heard that for airplane designers, they assume the value of life at 10M for safety features design purposes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life
ken 6y ago
This is a pretty good overview of the issues, but I note one significant omission. > Take a program to save lives in a large, well-known population with a risk that’s well-understood but small, and then ask, OK, what’s that worth? You can figure that out through surveys or consumer behavior— “revealed preference,” as economists call it. Take what people will spend individually to avoid a teensy risk, and multiply it by the odds of that risk coming to pass and the total number of people it might affect. That’s it. Humans are notoriously bad at estimating risk, especially with very small numbers. We can't even accurately tell you which of two small risks is greater. Asking people for estimates could be a good system if there were a solid correlation between risk and cost.
foolzcrow 6y ago
Wired is a project mockingbird rag.

35 points by danielrpa 6y ago

Why do articles insist on providing numbers with no appropriate context? What do the absolute number of deaths of 9/11 or absolute number of deaths in Viet Nam have to do with this? Perhaps better comparisons would be: how many deaths are there in the world per day? Before and after the instigation of covid19? How many deaths due to pneumonia before and after? Has the death rate in other categories been reduced? Are there fewer accidents? Maybe we should just lock down forever because it might save at least one death due to accident? "On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero".

aaronbrethorst 6y ago
The absolute numbers provide context for people to compare this current tragic loss of life with past tragic losses of life. It’s an important caveat, though, that we don’t know the total number of dead from the Vietnam War. The numeric threshold we’ve crossed is for American soldiers killed. A number that includes the Vietnamese in that increases to the hundreds of thousands or into the millions.
ForHackernews 6y ago
I'm not sure why 9/11 or Vietnam are "not appropriate" contexts. They're both widely considered national disasters in which too many American lives were lost, yet neither one claimed as many as this covid-19 outbreak. Comparing to other sources of mortality is interesting, too, but if the question is "how many deaths is too many deaths" -- in the context of 9/11 and Vietnam the bar seems to be much lower -- it's worth reflecting on why that is. Is it "worse" for Americans to die needlessly in terrorist attacks or foreign wars than in nursing homes? If so, why?
DennisP 6y ago
Appropriate context: right now, daily US deaths from covid19 are about equal to heart disease and cancer. That's pretty high for a threat that didn't exist a few months ago. We try pretty hard to reduce heart disease and cancer deaths, but we don't social distance for them because they're not contagious. If we allow covid's exponential spread to resume, it will be our leading cause of death before long. Meanwhile, countries that did strict lockdowns for a while and used that time to roll out lots of testing are getting through this with little damage.
- pacala 6y ago
  If the countries you are referring to are South Korea, Taiwan and New Zealand, it may be that the rest of us have very little chance to follow suit. We are too interconnected and too diverse to counteract the exponential nature of the threat. At some point we have to make peace with ourselves.
  - DennisP 6y ago
    South Korea started early with a massive amount of testing. Asian countries in general have had a high rate of mask wearing and good compliance with social distancing measures. We could do this sort of thing in the U.S. If our challenges are more difficult, that's not a good reason to do less.
- glofish 6y ago
  The problem with your math there is that by and large, we are talking about the same people - only the timeline is different. It is just as possible that over a longer time period say a year the math will be radically different. We'll have fewer cancer deaths because the patient had already died of COVID. It is possible that a country has many deaths because up to that point it was able to keep large swaths of "terminally ill" people alive. Delay, isolation and testing do not actually solve anything. For large segments of the population the virus is not a risk at all, they can't even tell that are infected. Long term it is not obvious who gets out better, the population where the infection rates are high and they can reduce the crippling economical restrictions or populations where they managed to have no infections but the sanctions remain for years. History, in general, is characterized by surprising twists and turns where it was impossible to tell what comes next.
  - DennisP 6y ago
    To conclude that a lot of covid victims would have died anyway, you would have to show that the total number of deaths is up less than the number of covid deaths. In fact, we see the exact opposite: total daily deaths has increased by more than the known covid deaths. This appears to be partly from missing covid deaths (e.g. from people dying at home), and partly from heart attack and stroke patients delaying trips to the ER from fear of covid. But wait, you mentioned that "the timeline is different." Well of course, we're all going to die eventually. That doesn't mean we should just lay down and die today. Epidemiologists strongly disagree with you about delay and testing. If you lock down enough so the replication rate goes below one, you can get the virus down to manageable numbers. If you cautiously open with lots of testing, you can isolate the cases that show up, and tests all their contacts. On the other hand if you shut down without bothering to build your test and trace infrastructure, then you're right, the delay didn't help at all, because you were incompetent. The idea that we can just open up and people will happily go back to work and shopping while the bodies pile up is unrealistic, to put it mildly. We're actually extending the economic crisis, not shortening it.
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6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
The comparison to 9/11 is motivated by "look how much we changed things and how much we spent because of that." If we changed that much for something less devastating, we should be willing to change/invest at least as much for this.

snorrah 6y ago

$10 million is the current value of life, with the article ending by suggesting it’s probably worth less by now.

downshun 6y ago
That's about 30 thousand koi fish! Enough to feed a town for three days!
- davidajackson 6y ago
  Or 60,000,000 Bells.

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war1025 6y ago

The value of a human life is in most cases next to nothing. A life is priceless to the closest friends and family. Beyond that its value drops rapidly. If lives were anywhere near as precious to politicians as they like to pretend, we wouldn't be sending kids off to war. We would be investing in anti-poverty measures. The value of a life to someone in power is proportional to the likelihood of being overthrown or pushed out of office due to that person's death. Often a life has negative value to such a person.

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lowdose 6y ago
When there's a person, there's a problem. When there's no person, there's no problem. Josef Stalin
bilbo0s 6y ago
>Often a life has negative value to such a person. Never thought about it this way, but it's true. A dead person can't vote against you. So to the extent that a given person, or group of people, can be relied on to vote against you, it wouldn't be that bad for you game theoretically if they were not around.
- clairity 6y ago
  that's why we shouldn't let power concentrate in any person or organization, public, private, or religious.
  - bilbo0s 6y ago
    At least no organization that requires votes. Absent illegal activity, money will continue to flow when a person dies, but votes can be guaranteed to stop.
    - clairity 6y ago

lidHanteyk 6y ago

Consider: You are worth about $10mil, in terms of labor. If you work for 40yrs, from 20 to 60, then you are worth about $250k/yr. Conclusion: We are underpaying nearly everybody in society.

whiddershins 6y ago
You don’t work all your waking hours, and if someone does, they usually make that much or more.
- lidHanteyk 6y ago
  You've been downvoted, but it's worth pointing out exactly why you're wrong: I am talking about salary, which means that folks are compensated not based on a number of hours spent working but on the overall impact that their work has on the organization. Also, I have been salaried several times in my life, and in each case, I was expected to do various things outside of a 9-5 "workday" sort of framework. Without being too self-oriented, I think that I earned the salary commanded. I've never been compensated even $200k/yr, and my highest is about $150k/yr. Even those of us that are well-paid and well-respected for our work are not paid enough to justify the time that we lose to work.
  - whiddershins 6y ago
    I truly am not understanding how anything you write makes me wrong. If we value a life at a certain amount, it seems we can value it out at per year, per hour. These are all just estimates. But if your life is worth x per year, and you x * z number of waking hours, and you trade some of those waking hours for cash ... Where am I wrong? Edit: I’m not even sure why we are pruning non working years from the calculation.
    - lidHanteyk 6y ago
      Aha! It's because we are talking about the value of a laborer, of a plebian, of an everyman. The value of the typical person, to some society, is the labor that they can provide to the society. Money is the only way that society can estimate the value of people. This might be a foreign way for you to look at people, but it's common in the Marxist worldviews. In other words, society doesn't care what you're doing when you aren't working, as long as you're leaving society alone. Thus society has no real reason to pay you just for existing. We might demand that our society put money in everybody's pocket, as a way of creating a capitalism which respects humanity, but it is not strictly necessary, because money is not strictly necessary for a society to exist.

cousin_it 6y ago

The question doesn't make sense as is. It should be rephrased in marginal terms: if we decide to spend one extra dollar on saving lives compared to today's situation, how many lives will it save? Also it should be measured in QALYs, not lives. I don't know the exact answer, but I've seen estimates from 20K$ to 200K$/QALY. (That's for the West, in the developing world it's much cheaper.)

etrevino 6y ago
FYI for those who don't know: QALY is Quality Adjusted Life Year. Parent is right that it's problem the best metric to use. I believe that we aren't using it because we don't know the morbidity that results from Covid-19. In other words, we don't know how Covid affects people's long term health. Someone might survive the virus, but end up having long term lung or liver or whatever damage. That reduces their capacity to work and may reduce their lifespan, i.e., their economic output after the life-saving intervention is reduced.
godelzilla 6y ago
Can we add even more pseudo-science though?
techmaster7b 6y ago
$20k to $200k

malyk 6y ago

Here’s a good recent RadioLab episode with the guy who calculated the current $10m figure. https://www.npr.org/2020/04/15/835571843/episode-991-lives-vs-the-economy https://www.npr.org/2020/04/15/835571843/episode-991-lives-v...

herrvogel- 6y ago
A bit older, but this[1] Freakonomics episode was also great. [1]https://freakonomics.com/podcast/kenneth-feinberg/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/kenneth-feinberg/
mercutio2 6y ago
Planet Money, not RadioLab, but still, good episode.

wtfrmyinitials 6y ago

I thought this was a pretty decent article until the very end when the author asserts: > ...nobody could be bothered to develop a nationwide program to test people for infection and trace their contacts if they were positive, or to adequately support a pause of economic activity... As for nationwide program to test people, of course nothing was built yet; it's a novel virus and therefore novel tests are needed. If a government had built out contact tracing pre-covid, they would be (rightly) criticized for taking steps in an authoritarian direction. Apple and Google have stepped in and built contact tracing, so to say this hasn't been developed is also factually inaccurate. Finally the comment about the ability to "adequately support a pause of economic activity" is kind of silly. To pause economic activity is to pause everyone's lives. What does it mean to adequately support people when they're no longer allowed to do the things they enjoy? It was a breath of fresh air to read an article that admitted that this is a difficult trade off, not some kind of easy decision that's being ruined by the other guy. It was disappointing that it was concluded with a similar tone.

verall 6y ago
> adequately support a pause of economic activity They mean to support people & families that lose their jobs. A good example is Florida and a couple states with intentionally byzantine and understaffed unemployment offices - claims are being handled so slowly that tons of at-risk people who have lost their jobs and are eligible for federal dollars will not see them. Adequately supporting a pause in economic activity might have included overhauling or providing alternate systems for states with broken unemployment or paying wages private wages to prevent layoffs. I don't particularly like the latter option but I certainly feel like a competent government could have paused economic activity and then supported its frozen citizens better. 3 of my favorite local restaurants have closed since the pandemic. There are "nonessential" businesses still expected to make $6k/mo rent without any customers. The private equity that owns most of the land in the area seems not to mind at all; construction is still booming...
- aaronbrethorst 6y ago
  Florida’s junior senator brought this upon the state. I hope Floridians remember in 2024: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/florida-unemployment-benefits-desantis-trump-rick-scott.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/florida-unemployment...

deleted 6y ago

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alex_young 6y ago

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shiftpgdn 6y ago
Everything you've written is wrong. No dead were burried in a park and there was mostly plenty of space for dead bodies. You should watch less CNN.

missedthecue 6y ago

Whatever someone's willing to pay for it

generalpass 6y ago

No matter whether people own their own lives. It is for experts and bureaucrats to decide what are lives are worth, what our lives are for, what is safe, what is acceptable. Human life is just an equation for the central planners to tweak. Soon, we will be each be followed an assigned quadcopter monitoring our every activity to make sure we are not engaged in any unsafe activities so as to be certain we are providing our maximum societal output.

lowdose 6y ago

> Assuming that social distancing measures can substantially reduce contacts among individuals, we find net benefits of about $5.2 trillion in our benchmark case. The article linked to this paper but I find their conclusion very unlikely. $5.2 trillion is 6% of the world combined GDP. When people are not performing value adding activities they consume value. Inventing money out of thin air is not similar to people actually creating value. If these are the numbers our politicians base their decisions on we are in deep trouble. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3561934 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3561934

flexie 6y ago

A better question would be ‘How many years do we save’ because the vast majority of the people dying from covid-19 are old people who already suffer from one or more prior diseases. The average life lost in Vietnam or Afghanistan had maybe 55-60 years left, had it not been for the bullet that cut it short. The average age of covid-19 victims is maybe 73 or so, and those people would in average have lived another 0-5 years (typically less than the average life span for men of 78.5 years because of the prior illness).

chinathrow 6y ago
It's way more than 0-5 years, it's 10 years according to a study made by researchers at University of Glasgow. https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/5-75 https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/5-75 "Deaths from COVID-19 represent a substantial burden in terms of per-person YLL, more than a decade, even after adjusting for the typical number and type of LTCs found in people dying of COVID-19. The extent of multimorbidity heavily influences the estimated YLL at a given age. More comprehensive and standardised collection of data on LTCs is needed to better understand and quantify the global burden of COVID-19 and to guide policy-making and interventions."
afthonos 6y ago
Leaving aside the disturbing American trend of minimizing the value of the elderly, your math is based on comparing with life expectancy at birth. You should instead be looking at life expectancy at time of death, which is significantly higher (a decade or more).

godelzilla 6y ago

Not sure why they're doing all these calculations when capitalism already assigns everyone a numerical worth.

praptak 6y ago

So, how much money or effort would you spend to avoid a hypothetical event that kills you with a well known probability, say half percent? I don't even know a conceptual framework to think about it. For 100% it would probably be "all my money" (I'm not suicidal). Should it be half percent of my money for a half percent event?

shakezula 6y ago
But it’s not just your life you’re gambling with. You’re gambling with other people’s lives. People who have just as much right to life as you do. People who may be in a much higher risk bracket than you. People who might very well die.
- praptak 6y ago
  I'm not talking about the virus, just a hypothetical event that kills only me
mettamage 6y ago
That doesn't sound like a linear relationship to me and unfortunately many people have experienced this IRL. There are enough people with 33% chance of dying who will go into debt if they have to.
clairity 6y ago
> "I don't even know a conceptual framework to think about it. For 100% it would probably be "all my money" (I'm not suicidal). Should it be half percent of my money for a half percent event?" without knowing anything else, it's pretty straightforward: 0.5% * $10MM = $50K. that's what you should pay. but, that's not considering any priors that change that result drastically one way or the other. in any case, it's irrational to think we should (and can) save every life at all costs, at all times. that's not living; that's cowering in fear. we have no control over many things that can kill us, so we need to buffet our understanding of risks and steel our resolve to face them. more importantly, it's inconsistent with our very own actions. we take many, many risks every single day that have non-trivial likelihood of death, like getting into a car (1 in 100 lifetime odds of death). we need to work hard to contextualize new risks based on our past actions, so that we know how much mitigation we should invest in. we can't mitigate everything all the time. we must pick and choose to maximize the return of those mitigations, balanced against the value of the things we cherish.

ovslylegit 6y ago

wharton published a "Coronavirus Policy Response Simulator" on may 1st [1]. Their analysis comes to the conclusion that fully reopening ("States immediately lift all orders listed above as well as restrictions on the operation of businesses and restaurants.") would lead to 500k lost jobs from May first and 350k deaths until end of june 2020, while partially reopening ("States immediately lift emergency declarations, stay-at-home orders, and school closures.") would result in -11.3 Million jobs lost and 162k deaths. Both assuming, that each individual maintains their current social distancing practice. Year-Over-Year GDP change % would be almost identical, -10.1 vs. -10.7. So fully reopening, compared to partially, would save ~11 million jobs, but lead to roughly 190k more deaths. Considering the $10 million as the current value of a human life, a job would be $~172k for the comparison fully vs partially reopening while maintaining current social distancing measures. [1] https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2020/5/1/coronavirus-reopening-simulator https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2020/5/1/corona...

sandworm101 6y ago

>> How Much Is a Human Life Worth? Which life? The reality is that we do not value all lives equally. Wealth, location, legal status, and less acknowledged factors like age, sex and race, all result in some lives being more valuable than others. That is the world in which we live. So when we look at covid-19 one must first ask: who is it killing? Is it killing the more or less valuable members? Or, rather than face that horrible question, are we willing to take the hard road and value all lives equally? That road leads to dangerous areas such as universal health care and government-sponsored wellness.

WaitWaitWha 6y ago
The article mentions this explicitly. "Some economists even think that globally, poorer people in the developing world may well value their risk lower because they simply have less to spend, and more to lose. Even if it’s true, acknowledging it puts you on a slip-n-slide to racism and eugenics."

altmind 6y ago

In monetary value, there's couple estimates in Wikipedia. I've heard that for airplane designers, they assume the value of life at 10M for safety features design purposes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life

ken 6y ago

This is a pretty good overview of the issues, but I note one significant omission. > Take a program to save lives in a large, well-known population with a risk that’s well-understood but small, and then ask, OK, what’s that worth? You can figure that out through surveys or consumer behavior— “revealed preference,” as economists call it. Take what people will spend individually to avoid a teensy risk, and multiply it by the odds of that risk coming to pass and the total number of people it might affect. That’s it. Humans are notoriously bad at estimating risk, especially with very small numbers. We can't even accurately tell you which of two small risks is greater. Asking people for estimates could be a good system if there were a solid correlation between risk and cost.

foolzcrow 6y ago

Wired is a project mockingbird rag.