While giggling and honking his red bicycle horn nose in two-four time.

Wouldn't those be bigger issues?

We were both certain the other was wrong, but I don't think I ever expected to be so right.

But to see the math laid out like this, combined with all the other stuff that's come out in the last week (possible shock collars -- okay, they're bracelets -- for anyone who dares to travel on an airline; my great hopes for a righteous fillibuster of the FISA bill crushed by the ones I thought sure to protect my constitutional rights, etc).. the math above did something that no math has done since those teen-aged days in highschool.

That math made me want to weep.

The value of the Average American Life has dropped because the Average Anerican is expected to earn less over a lifetime. And the causes could include reduced life expectancy for other reasons than those the EPA is concerned with.

Instead, economists calculate the value based on what people are willing to pay to avoid certain risks, and on how much extra employers pay their workers to take on additional risks. Most of the data is drawn from payroll statistics; some comes from opinion surveys. According to the EPA, people shouldn't think of the number as a price tag on a life.

The EPA made the changes in two steps. First, in 2004, the agency cut the estimated value of a life by 8 percent. Then, in a rule governing train and boat air pollution this May, the agency took away the normal adjustment for one year's inflation. Between the two changes, the value of a life fell 11 percent, based on today's dollar.
My question is, that mysterious cut in 2004. Why? Did danger pay decrease? Did people's tolerance of risk increase?

This is all around creepy, and I can see no other reason that a desire to make it easier to put people in danger.
Sigh...and I was feeling so optimistic today...

And I'm not sure I would assume that employers pay employees for taking the risks. It needs the EPA to make them pay for the pollution they cause.

Well, that's the problem. The methodology they used may not have any real meaning to you. Or to your family.

But if the Army has an official value for a soldier's life that is only $1m for a Private First Class (value is hypothetical here), and the EPA has a value of $6.9m, that matters. That means that it's financially better for a person's family for them to die in something the EPA is in charge of... and that a death in a chemical spill is "more valuable" than a death in Iraq. And it is not a small difference. This has serious, long term consequences since we're busy with a war that kills more of our soldiers than it ever should.

Add in that the EPA is reducing the value it puts on human life, and it's not a picture I like. This has serious negative consequences for real people.

I would be much more comfortable if there was a policy encouraging the various government agencies to compare their "value of a life" numbers... and if they all had to use the highest value an agency could come up with. (which doesn't mean I'm *happy* just that my natural valuing of a human life at infinite is a bit happier with the compromises involved in dying in the real world)

Really high exposures aren't always good models for long-term, low-level, chronic exposures. (For example, see this article on non-monotonic dose-response curves.)

@11: IIRC, the pay differential is actually based on risk and pay differences between professions. Extremely simplified example: take two professions, say professional fishing and driving a school bus. Subtract the bus driver's pay from the fisherman's pay, take the remaining number, and figure out how it stacks up against how much more likely the fisherman is to die.

Like all methods of calculating the cost of a human life, it has major issues. Fishing is probably more fun than driving a bus. Moreover, fisherman get paid based on their catch, and don't know exactly how much they're going to make from year to year. It's not like they're going to be able to sit down and do the fishing-versus-bus calculation every year.

There's also issues with how people perceive risk. Familiar risks are perceived as less unnerving to think about, so people are more likely to worry about working in a nuclear power plant than about working in a coal mine, even though all available statistics say the coal mine's more dangerous.

It also doesn't take into account the fact that people take jobs because they're what's available. If you live in West Virginia and you don't want to move away, you're going to be more likely to take a job at a chemical plant or a job as a coal miner. Not because they pay you enough to make up for the risk, but because they're the jobs you can get.

And hey, I can't even *find* the fatality rate for my profession online. What does that say about my ability to do the math?

I doubt there's much deep relevance to this number, honestly. Someone somewhere wants to plug this value into a formula on a spreadsheet, to assign a money value to some bit of regulation. It's likely that every single input to that formula is some kind of crude estimate like this--a guess about the costs of the new regulations, a guess about the number of life-years saved, a plausible-looking discount rate (because saving a life this year is worth a bit more than saving it next year), etc.

Am I missing the deep relevance here? Is there some evidence of the EPA monkeying around with the figures to get a lower value, so they can justify turning down some new regulation?

Given their latest punt on the Clear Air Act as it relates to global warming, I'd say they don't feel like they need anything at all to justify their decisions.

WHAT?

Air safety proposal: shock-bracelets controlled by flight attendants

Either way, no way in hell I'll wear one.

Reading the article actually made me nauseous. I don't remember the last time that happened.

While I don't know if the EPA uses the same meaning for the official value of a human life as I was taught, the value as I understand it has nothing to do with compensation after death.

What I was taught (industrial health and safety class, chemical engineering program) is that for every given safety feature there is an installation and maintenance cost, and there is the probable number of lives saved.

If a safety feature will cost $10,000 to install and has a probability of preventing 100 serious injuries or deaths each year, it is worth installing. $100/person in the first year.

If a safety feature will cost $10,000,000 to install and has a probability of preventing 1 serious injury or death - the EPA would not require it, because it is more than the $6.9M they have selected as the value of a human life. If that same feature has a probability of saving 5 lives ($2M/person), then an organization that values a human life at $6.9M would install it, but an organization that values a human life at $1M would not.

Whiners.

Or is that the value of a death?

Less. At the current exchange rate, 2 drachma are worth less than US $0.01. Getting into Hell is cheaper than it's ever been.

Once:

Because I was curious about his reaction, I once told an ex-refusenik* about the American government's encouraging children to turn in their parents for drugs offences. His response was a gratifying, "That sounds Soviet."

I replied, "Yushku, you 're like the child of abusive and crazy parents who doesn't understand that some of the stuff they did is what all parents do."

*Trained geologist who'd spent ten years as a hospital janitor, assisting in several births along the way; Denied access to computers, so he designed a relational database using 20,000 index cards, which he probably go "na'levo" from friends. Big fan of Reagan, who took a personal interest in him when he was still a refusenik...nice guy, who could be forgiven his authoritarian patches. Another time, I'll tell you about the physicist zoo-keepers of Kharkov.

"It's not going to get as warm as even the moderate parts of the models say. The poles and glaciers aren't going to melt enough to raise the oceans that much. And since that's the case it's cheaper for us to adapt to the changes than try to drastically reduce CO2 production." So their arguments go. If you actually accept the first two parts it minimizes the potential cost and suffering. And that's just what they want. When it's pointed out that there are factors that can't be adequately quantified at this time and that therefor the IPCC left them out (making their estimates very conservative) and that makes it quite possible that things could also be worse than the current models predict you can hear the crickets chirping.

Change the assumptions. Change the numbers. Suddenly your policies can make sense...sort of, maybe.

Because I was curious about his reaction, I once told an ex-refusenik* about the American government's encouraging children to turn in their parents for drugs offences. His response was a gratifying, "That sounds Soviet."

I replied, "Yushku, you 're like the child of abusive and crazy parents who doesn't understand that some of the stuff they did is what all parents do."

Yes, I realize the USA may no longer qualify for that category.

On the other hand, the type of calculation described in #22 *does* require a number, even if it's a made-up number. But in that case, the consequences of *lowering* that number are quite obvious: fewer safety precautions when they might be expensive, and as a result, less safety for the citizens of the country that values them less. This is a pretty good argument for a rule that that value should only ever go up (pushing industries inexorably in the direction of greater and greater safety).

Tort law imposes a related calculation (anyone who doesn't want to be bankrupted by a tort lawsuit might want to try to prevent the accidents that spawn them; anyone who carries tort liability insurance is likely to be harassed by his insurer to implement risk-reducing measures), a fact which ought to be borne in mind whenever you hear about tort reform. Some attempts at tort reform are attempts to remove the economic danger (to business) of the accidents, without removing the accidents.

I would hold that they do, for crimes that they deem particularly grave---the differences lie in the relative sanity of the gravity meter. The Dutch, even with their current government, would still probably be contemptuous of going that far for a few pot plants, but would encourage kids peaching their parents' serious, violent, crimes.

I can understand some anarchists' take on this, that this proves that democracy is not really better than autocracy, but I think that's excessively topological---some governments are coffee cups, some are doughknots, and some are burning tyre necklaces.

I have yet to see one that didn't fit that description. As far as I'm concerned, the phrase "tort reform" is just code for "let the greedheads do whatever they like, without recourse for those they damage in the process."

The program uses a million dollars as the "cost" of a human life.

Here's the thing - if a family member is abusing the family relationship by committing a crime I think the government should definitely encourage the family to turn them in; domestic violence and abuse aren't things that can or should be dealt with solely within the family and hidden from the outside.

I think that offences that don't break family trust (in addition to illegal drug use etc. I might include things such as creative tax accountancy) shouldn't be being targeted for turning in (in part because hardly anyone is going to). I note that here in the UK, when the Police make an appeal for witnesses for high profile violent crimes, they will often say something like "If you know anything about this incident, even if it concerns a family member, we would strongly encourage you to come forward", which is fair enough.

I'd assumed so, and so it set off warning bells when, in an episode of "Weeds" a couple of seasons back, a character claimed that if they[0] married another character, their[0] testimony couldn't be used against them[1]. (Neutral and confusing pronouns used to avoid a spoiler---and I haven't seen beyond that episode, so don't spoil the dramatic consequences for me.)

(And spousal privilege doesn't cover confederates of the spouse, I'd assumed.)