Econstudentlog

The difference

Well, one of them:

That would be the economist’s take. The economist with philosophical leanings would probably add that even if people claim that they find the idea of putting a value on another human being horrible, they do it themselves all the time anyway without even thinking about it.

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June 30, 2010 - Posted by | Cartoons, economics

2 Comments »

  1. I remember that during or after the first Copenhagen Climate Consensus I saw an economist in danish television trying to explain, how they estimated not the value of a life, but the different values a life has in different parts of the world. It was something like the total expenditures on safety belts including costs of governmental regulation if present divided by the number of life it saved, that gave them a relative scale of human life value. I found it fascinating, but I’m sure it must have been provoking to many – if people who would be provoked by the thougt actually understood what the man had explained, which I’m sure not all did.

    Comment by info | June 30, 2010 | Reply

  2. It’s also common to use such measures in the health care sector, using such measures would likely yield different estimates as to the ‘international value-differences’ (such estimates are always very context-specific and should be treated as such).

    Anyway, every time somebody buys an I-pod, that money could instead have been spent buying a starving person some food. We don’t like to think about that, so most people don’t. More or less objective evaluations are one thing, but subjective evaluations everybody engage in all the time. People value the lives of people living far away far lower than they value the lives of people close to them, they always have, they always will, even if they wont admit that that’s what they do.

    Comment by US | June 30, 2010 | Reply


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