Life is cheap(er)

Have you been feeling like you aren't worth as much lately? Not financially, but the value of your life as a human. Well, turns out you were right. The EPA has done the cost benefit analysis. Weighed the facts and figures. Your life is only worth $6.9 million dollars, a drop of $1 million from five years ago. But what does that mean, other than yet another revelation that you aren't as good as you used to be?

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.

Consider, for example, a hypothetical regulation that costs $18 billion to enforce but will prevent 2,500 deaths. At $7.8 million per person (the old figure), the lifesaving benefits outweigh the costs. But at $6.9 million per person, the rule costs more than the lives it saves, so it may not be adopted.

Surely the Bush Administration couldn't be as cynical as to cheapen the lives of Americans (statistically this time instead of the typical moral, social, financial, and ethical cheapening) just to get out of the way of some environmental regulations.?

Some environmentalists accuse the Bush administration of changing the value to avoid tougher rules, a charge the EPA denies.

"It appears that they're cooking the books in regards to the value of life," said S. William Becker, executive director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies, which represents state and local air pollution regulators. "Those decisions are literally a matter of life and death."

Dan Esty, a senior EPA policy official in the administration of the first President Bush and now director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, said: "It's hard to imagine that it has other than a political motivation."

The administration has yet to release the exchange statistics for the value of the life from another country. If current market trends stay true, one American will be worth 1.76 French and 1.96 British standard citizens. To get real value for the American life, one has to go to Iraq where one American life is expected to be worth nearly 10,000 Iraqis. But exact facts and figures will not be released until the opening of the Human Commodities Market in Bern, Switzerland next year.