How Much Is a Human Life Worth, In Dollars? | WIRED: “In some of the early work, it was pointed out that we don’t put a dollar value on an individual life. The example was, if a girl falls down a well, we don’t say, ‘sorry, it’s going to cost $10 million to go down there and get you, and you’re not worth $10 million, so good luck,’” Banzhaf tells me. “We just don’t do that.” As Banzhaf says, economists of the time were trying to distinguish, in terms of benefits and costs, between private consumption choices made by individuals and population-spanning policy choices made by, like, governments.
A former USAF pilot turned PhD candidate named Jack Carlson found the beginnings of a way out. In his dissertation, he tried to put a cost not on a life, but on saving lives—or not saving them. The USAF, Carlson wrote, trained pilots in when to eject from a damaged plane versus trying to land it. Ejecting would save the pilot, and landing might save the (expensive) plane.
Carlson ran the numbers on bail-out versus landing and found that the tipping point implicitly valued the saving of the pilot’s life at $270,000. In another case, Carlson noted that designing, building, and maintaining ejection pods for the crew of the B-58 bomber would cost $80 million and save between one and three lives a year. Making the implicit explicit: Doing the math, the US Air Force pegged the “money valuation of pilots’ lives” at between $1.17 million and $9 million.
A former USAF pilot turned PhD candidate named Jack Carlson found the beginnings of a way out. In his dissertation, he tried to put a cost not on a life, but on saving lives—or not saving them. The USAF, Carlson wrote, trained pilots in when to eject from a damaged plane versus trying to land it. Ejecting would save the pilot, and landing might save the (expensive) plane.
Carlson ran the numbers on bail-out versus landing and found that the tipping point implicitly valued the saving of the pilot’s life at $270,000. In another case, Carlson noted that designing, building, and maintaining ejection pods for the crew of the B-58 bomber would cost $80 million and save between one and three lives a year. Making the implicit explicit: Doing the math, the US Air Force pegged the “money valuation of pilots’ lives” at between $1.17 million and $9 million.