How Much Is a Human Life Worth?
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https://www.npr.org/2020/04/15/835571843/episode-991-lives-v...
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".
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.
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?
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.
At some point we have to make peace with ourselves.
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.
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.
What you should be asking are two questions: what impact those deaths happening all at once has on everyone else when the medical system is overwhelmed and how much earlier are COVID victims dying than they otherwise would?
In the latter case, the early studies suggest even elderly people are losing at least a decade early. That’s a lot of time to casually blow off the way you’re doing even before you consider the younger victims. Maybe you’re young, healthy, and low-risk but do you really have no older people you know that you wouldn’t want another decade to share time with?
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/05/02/would-mo...
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/people-coronavirus-dying-10-ye...
This virus is killing people years and decades before they would otherwise die. Having a chronic medical condition (e.g. diabetes or heart disease) is very different than having a terminal illness with only months to live.
Conclusion: We are underpaying nearly everybody in society.
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.
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.
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.
So the total value of your life, to you, should necessarily include all the money you can earn plus all the things you do that you value more than working.
Etc.
Edit: I’m not disputing that other systems, including non money based systems are possible, it just seems way outside of the scope of the original contention.
- All corporate profit is theft! - Profit not theft because money is our primary means of compensating people for shouldering risk, etc etc etc.
I would nonetheless appreciate a pay raise.
If you’re interested US GDP is $22tn, with a work force of 164m people. That gives an economic product of about $134k per person per year on average. That includes unemployed people though, because it’s the labour force size not the number of people in employment.
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/corona...
> 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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
> ...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.
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...
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).
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."
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.
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.
Absent illegal activity, money will continue to flow when a person dies, but votes can be guaranteed to stop.
Value ~= (sentimental value) + (entertainment value) + (financial value) + (time value)
time value being how much time you add to my life, so someone inventing a vaccine has high value to lots of people who aren’t friends.
It’s very fashionable to say everyone is priceless as you say, but this simply isn’t true.
A better way to phrase it might be “everyone is worth the access to goods that are cheap enough to make for everyone, but aren’t available to everyone because of profit motives”.
People typically only demand a right to something when someone else has it, or at least demand equal access. People are more or less ok with dying on a waitlist for a transplant when the rich are thought to die at the same rate.
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.