How much is human life worth?: somewhat insensitive
 

It seems like one could estimate what value individuals place on their own lives by looking at what risks they take on a regular basis. Probably the most dangerous thing that we do regularly is drive cars (at least for Americans). If we avoided automobiles, we could probably reduce our daily risk of death or seriously quality of life reducing accident by more than a factor of 2. The fact that we don't implies that the things we do with our days are more valuable to us than the extra life "EV" we could save. There is of order 1 in a million chance of dying in a car crash each day. Suppose Mr. X is principly driving to his $20/hour job ($160/day). Then Mr. X is implicitly placing a value of <$160 million dollars on his life. Interestingly, this is about an order of magnitude larger than the amount of money Mr. X will make in his lifetime (another possible estimate of the value of human life).

Craig

it\'s worth as much as the media says your worth isnt it?
 

i mean, after all, they put much more importance on some deaths than others dont they? regardless of whether the person was good or bad. so they spread the news about a particular death than a different one of a normal great person in some unknown city...

many times they value children more than adults in homicides...is this right? one beauty of a quote in the paper the other day about the sniper killer, since he took a shot at a kid at a school. the sheriff said, "now it's personal." i wonder what the relatives of the other victims thought when reading this. the other deaths were just ho-hum?

b

Re: it\'s worth as much as the media says your worth isnt it?
 

There is some mathematical sense to valuing a child's life more than an adult, because of the relatively longer statistical lifetime remaining.

However, humans seem to take more risks when they are young,
Craig

Re: How much is human life worth?: somewhat insensitive
 

Ask a hires gun killer.

He'll probably charge u less for a personnal vandeta whit a random person then for shooting some politicians or any public personalities.

That guy as the answer.

[img]/forums/images/icons/grin.gif[/img]