Changing value of life

"In 2002, the EPA decided the value of elderly people was 38 percent less than that of people under 70. After the move became public, the agency reversed itself."

When the truth pisses people off, revert back to lies. Nice.

Outside of the repugnant nature of assigning monetary value to life, particularly through the measurement of economic impact, what truth?

If I think about the economic value of my parents, for example, now in their late 70s... Their investments have had long enough to mature, with annual income/economic impact rivaling their working years. They continue to work in a variety of ways, often with skills that no one else can find with younger people. They have more time to teach these skills to others. They provide a number of services to friends and neighbors that their "retirement" makes possible. They may not always charge for these services, but the impact on the recipients is measurable. Their economic impact on this household cannot be discounted. They spend more on entertainment, travel and luxuries than they have in most previous years and stimulate the economy. They also have a large impact on our economics in child care, child education, property security, pet care, and household maintenance allowing us to move ahead and earn significantly more. Their survival to this age means that we managed to get to a point when we could afford to buy much of their real estate, as opposed to them being sold at much lower values.

I don't think the value of any individual changes significantly at age 70, it is probably comparable to their overall economics prior to that age. Plus the simplistic statistical methods discount the fact that some people have billions of dollars of impact (i.e., research scientists) despite being paid miserable wages throughout their career.

Outside Utopia city, cost/benefit lines need to be drawn. Yes?

The EPA figure is not based on people's earning capacity, or their potential contributions to society, or how much they are loved and needed by their friends and family _ some of the factors used in insurance claims and wrongful-death lawsuits.

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.

I like to believe there's some truth left in pseudomathematics. What were these opinion surveys? Surely most people hold their elders in high regard. So why the old folk discount?

"This sort of number-crunching is basically numerology," said Granger Morgan, chairman of EPA's Science Advisory Board and an engineering and public policy professor at Carnegie Mellon University. "This is not a scientific issue."

The motivations to devalue life are obvious.

When drawing up regulations, government agencies put a value on human life and then weigh the costs versus the lifesaving benefits of a proposed rule. The less a life is worth to the government, the less the need for a regulation, such as tighter restrictions on pollution.

Interesting to learn that apparently the Dept of Transportation's magic number is still lower then the EPA's. The sky kills us slowly & softly, but those damn falling planes!