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How Much is a Human Life Worth?

2013-03-23 · Hank · watch on YouTube · Economics · explainer learning

Hank surveys ways of pricing a human life (wages, organs, ad-sold attention, economists' risk-premium and willingness-to-pay methods, both near $10 million) and argues that valuing life is not crass: its value lies in enabling life, not in preventing inevitable death.

What is said

00:00:00 — Can a life be priced? Minimum wage and lifetime wages as a first answer

  • ★ In the description, Hank recalls that at about ten, looking at a school auditorium's fire exits, he realised there must be a calculus for how much trouble or money a human life was worth. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ Hank asks what dollar amount a human life is worth; the easy answer is that pricing it is immoral and incalculable, but he says we do it. — 00:00:01
  • ★★ Hank says the US government sets the minimum price of an hour of your life at $7.80, and average lifetime wages are about $2 million. — 00:00:13
    • number check: $7.80 — doubtful
  • ★★ Hank says lifetime wages measure a person's economic input, not the value of a life: wages are only a surrogate for value created. — 00:00:27

00:00:35 — Black-market organs and the fallen-soldier payment, both about $500,000

  • ★★ Hank says, playfully, that selling his organs on the black market, everything from his eyeballs to his forearms, would bring in about $500,000. (playful) — 00:00:44
  • ★★ Hank says $500,000 is also what the US government pays to the family of a fallen soldier. — 00:00:56

00:01:02 — Selling your attention to advertisers; online ads pay a tenth of TV, so the brothers avoid pre-rolls

  • ★★ Hank says a 30-second TV ad costs about $24 per thousand viewers, i.e. $2.88 per hour of attention, about $2 million over a lifetime. — 00:01:10 · online advertising
  • ★★ Hank says selling only waking hours to TV advertisers would give about $1.3 million, and online video ads can go for less than a tenth of that. — 00:01:25 · online advertising
  • ★★★ Hank says that besides being annoyed by pre-rolls, he and John avoid them because they undervalue this community's time; valuing it at a tenth of TV viewers' time is 'dumb'. — 00:01:37 · online advertising, Nerdfighteria

00:01:51 — How economists value a life: risk premiums and willingness to pay, both near $10 million

  • ★★★ Hank explains the first economists' method: extra pay demanded for a job with a death risk; asking $10,000 more for a 1-in-1,000 risk values a life at $10 million, statistically. — 00:01:58
  • ★★★ Hank says, using this measure, various US government departments value a human life at about six to nine million dollars. — 00:02:22
  • ★★★ Hank explains the second method, what people would pay to save a life: about $130,000 per year of high-quality, non-painful life at the high end, so ten years is worth about $1.3 million. — 00:02:28
  • ★★ Hank says 78 years of high-quality life by this method comes to a remarkably similar ten million dollars. — 00:02:46

00:02:52 — Opinion: pricing life is not crass; value lies in enabling life, not preventing inevitable death

  • ★★★ Hank says putting an economic value on life may seem crass, but insisting on preventing death in every situation is a blindness to the inevitability of death. — 00:02:55
  • ★★★ Hank says value is not created or lost at the moment of death but in enabling life, the finite moments we have together; it is not about preventing a death that will happen anyway. — 00:03:13

00:03:25 — John fantastic on the Late Late Show; discussion of online video to continue; sign-off

  • ★★ Hank tells John he was fantastic on the Late Late Show. — 00:03:29 · John Green
  • ★ Hank says they will soon continue their discussion of how to make online video strong and awesome. — 00:03:29

00:03:41 — Closing clip, apparently John on the Late Late Show: sorted into Hufflepuff on Pottermore

  • ★ In a closing clip, apparently from John's Late Late Show appearance, the speaker says Pottermore's Sorting Hat made him 100% Hufflepuff, which he wears with pride: badgers are ferocious, excellent finders. (playful) — 00:03:41

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