The bad old days of valuing lives

When I was in grade school, I was impressed by the “scientific” judgment that a human being is worth only $3.76 – the value (in 1950s prices) of our bodily chemicals if sold on the open market. It never occurred to me that it would cost much more than this to extract these chemicals, so that the true “scrap” value is zero. (This must be why people are generally buried or cremated.) Looking back, however, what makes the strongest impression is my willingness to affix a number, any number, on the value of a life.

In fact, from the time of Hammurabi attempts have been made to establish the “value” of the lives of different classes of people, primarily for the purposes of punishment and restitution. A prince would be worth so many peasants in the harsh calculation of early justice, and no justification would be provided other than that of power and tradition. With the spread of markets, however, people came to think in terms of the calculus of wealth, and the idea dawned that prices could set the value not only of the things people own and use, but of life itself.

The main occasion for this development was the problem of establishing awards in wrongful death judgments. Clearly it is not enough to demand reimbursement for the direct economic costs of dying, such as burial and funeral rites, since this does not cover the opportunity cost: the income a deceased person would have earned had he or she lived on.