Cost of Prevention
Introduction
The value of a life is an economic value used to quantify the benefit of avoiding a fatality.[1] It is also referred to as the cost of a life, the value of preventing a fatality (VPF) or the implicit cost of avoiding a fatality (ICAF). In social sciences and political science, it is the marginal cost of preventing a death in a certain class of circumstances. In many studies, value also includes quality of life, expected remaining life span as well as earning potential of a given person, especially for an after-the-fact payment in a wrongful death 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 (economics), healthcare, adoption, political economy, insurance, occupational health and safety, environmental impact assessment and globalization.[2].
In industrial nations, the justice system considers a human life "priceless", and then makes any form of slavery illegal (humans cannot be bought at any price). However, with a limited supply of resources or infrastructure (e.g. ambulances) or necessary skills available, it is impossible to save all lives so some compromise must be made. Furthermore, this argument fails to take into account the statistical context of the term. It is not usually associated with the lives of individuals nor is it used to compare the value of one person's life with that of another. It is primarily used in circumstances of saving lives, as opposed to taking lives or "producing" them.[2] Furthermore, life is our only resource.
Treatment in economics and calculation methods
There is no standard concept for the value of a specific human life in economics. However, when looking at the risk/reward trade-offs that people make with respect to their health, economists often consider the value of a statistical life (VSL). It should be noted that the VSL is very different from the actual value of a life. It is the value placed on changes in the probability of death, not the price someone would pay to avoid a certain death. This is best explained with an example. From the United States Environmental Protection Agency website "Environmental Protection Agency (United States)") (EPA):[3].
This emphasizes once again that the VSL is more an estimate of the willingness to pay for small reductions in mortality risks than the value of a human life. Using government spending to see how much is spent to save lives in order to estimate the average individual VSL is a popular calculation method. The United States government does not have an official life threshold value, but different values are used by different agencies. It may be that the government values lives too high or that the calculation standards are not applied uniformly.[4] Using the EPA "Environmental Protection Agency (United States)") as an example, the Agency uses in its cost-benefit analyzes estimates of how much people are willing to pay for small reductions in their risks of dying from adverse health conditions that may be caused by environmental pollution.[3].