How much is human life worth?: somewhat insensitive

[Bozeman]

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