Economic Value of Human Life Measure
An Economic Value of Human Life Measure is a value of life measure for a living human.
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- Example(s):
- a Economic Value of U.S. Human Life, e.g. of $10M.
- See: Infrastructural Capital, Value Theory, Marginal Cost, Wrongful Death Claim, Health Care, Adoption.
References
2020
- (Wikipedia, 2020) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life Retrieved:2020-5-29.
- The value of life is an economic value used to quantify the benefit of avoiding a fatality. It is also referred to as the cost of life, value of preventing a fatality (VPF) and implied cost of averting a fatality (ICAF). In social and political sciences, it is the marginal cost of death prevention in a certain class of circumstances. In many studies the value also includes the quality of life, the expected life time remaining, as well as the earning potential of a given person especially for an after-the-fact payment in a wrongful death claim lawsuit.
As such, it is a statistical term, the cost of reducing the average number of deaths by one. It is an important issue in a wide range of disciplines including economics, health care, adoption, political economy, insurance, worker safety, environmental impact assessment, and globalization.
In industrial nations, the justice system considers a human life "priceless", thus illegalizing any form of slavery; i.e., humans cannot be bought at any price. However, with a limited supply of resources or infrastructural capital (e.g. ambulances), or skill at hand, it is impossible to save every life, so some trade-off must be made. Also, this argument neglects the statistical context of the term. It is not commonly attached to lives of individuals or used to compare the value of one person's life relative to another person's. It is mainly used in circumstances of saving lives as opposed to taking lives or "producing" lives.
- The value of life is an economic value used to quantify the benefit of avoiding a fatality. It is also referred to as the cost of life, value of preventing a fatality (VPF) and implied cost of averting a fatality (ICAF). In social and political sciences, it is the marginal cost of death prevention in a certain class of circumstances. In many studies the value also includes the quality of life, the expected life time remaining, as well as the earning potential of a given person especially for an after-the-fact payment in a wrongful death claim lawsuit.
2020a
- https://npr.org/2020/04/23/843310123/how-government-agencies-determine-the-dollar-value-of-human-life
- QUOTE: ... SARAH GONZALEZ, BYLINE: There is kind of an official price tag on human life. We can tell you what it is. One human life is worth about US$10 million. And here's the guy who helped us come up with this figure. …