Revisiting the Cost of Life.

AuthorBatkins, Sam

Ultimate Price: The Value We Place on Life

By Howard Steven Friedman

232 pp.; University of California Press, 2020

Monetizing the value of either a human life or years of life has been a well-worn subject in academia over the years. From the countless pages of literature by former Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) administrator Cass Sunstein to the work of Vanderbilt professor Kip Viscusi, regulatory scholars have explored the topic in-depth. However, rarely does the existing literature make the moral case that valuing lives differently is unjust. That is the argument in Ultimate Price by Columbia University statistician and health economist Howard Steven Friedman.

Friedman teaches by anecdote and example about how individuals, corporations, and governments explicitly and implicitly place a value on life. In previous literature, this discussion can wade deep into the weeds and leave "the uninitiated" with a feeling they were mired 400 pages into a dense regulatory impact analysis. Friedman takes a different approach: he opens the book with an anonymized example of 9/11 victims: their network, income, family, and potential future earnings. When it came time to compensate their families through the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, each "payout" reflected various socioeconomic factors. That conflicts with one of the central arguments in Ultimate Price: "all lives are worth the same." The complexities of following this ethic in practice--especially in the regulatory world--make it more difficult to enforce than it is to write, but Friedman's tour through the value of life is an excellent work for those willing to dip their toes into these regulatory waters without drowning in the scholarship.

Legality of life / Most voters would likely revolt at the idea that life can be assigned a monetary value. Especially revolting is asking parents to place a value on the lives of their children. Despite this impulse, Friedman demonstrates that consumers and even the justice system routinely quantify and monetize life. When we buy life insurance or a car without certain safety features, and when a civil jury is asked to compute compensatory damages, there are implicit and explicit values on life in common activities.

To explain this, he uses a real-life civil case over the accidental drowning of a disabled patient at a New York state mental institution. The patient had no lost earnings, no insurance, and no nest egg, so the initial...

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