The Value Of Life: Lower?

The Associated Press reported Friday that the value of a human life, as calculated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), has declined almost 11% over the last five years. The new going rate for a human life is $6.9 million. This news provided fodder for numerous sardonic new articles in which it was variously observed that, “It's not just the American dollar that's losing value. A government agency has decided that an American life isn't worth what it used to be.” [Daily News, Los Angeles, July 10, 2008] The news that the government has estimated that the value of a life is less than it used to be is certainly an easy way to get people’s attention, because Americans tend to take it as an affront to their personal contribution to the world. This would seem to be a classic case of the government assaulting the dignity of human life, but the details of this story are a little less exciting than that. What the EPA actually lowered was the “value of a statistical life” not the value of an actual life. What does this mean and what difference does this make?

What does it mean? The government has to have some way of determining whether certain public projects are worth what they are going to cost. They have to do a cost/benefit analysis. In other words, they have to determine whether the benefit of a project (such as improved quality of life or lives saved) will be worth the price of the project. At first glance, this appears to be perverse. How can you compare money to lives? This is like comparing apples to oranges. But, there is only so much money to be spent in the budget and there is no end of various projects that are clamoring for some of that money, so how do you determine which projects are worth the money that you spend and which aren’t?

This is where the “value of a statistical life” comes in. Say you have a project that is estimated to save 10 thousand lives but that project costs $80 billion. If the “value of a statistical life” is $7 million then that would mean that the total value of the lives saved would only come to $70 billion. Hence, you wouldn’t be getting as much out of the project as you had put into it. There would be no need to start that project. But, let’s look at the same $80 billion project if we place the “value of a statistical life” at $10 million. Those same 10 thousand lives would be worth $100 billion with this new estimation, and since our project still costs $80 billion we would be getting a lot more out of the project than what we had put in.

So, what difference does this make? Simply put, the higher you calculate the value of life to be the more likely you are to commission a certain project. To put it another way, the more value you see in the lives of others, the more money you are willing to spend in order to see that those lives are protected. There is an obvious object lesson here for the Church. The more value we see in the lives around us, the more time and treasure we are willing to hazard in order to see them saved. God has always called His people to risk in order to bring other people to Himself. He has always called us to be passionate about the same things that He loves, but sometimes we are as thickheaded as Jonah who felt more sorrow over the death of a plant than he did over the possibility of the destruction of a city. God reasoned with him by saying, “You cared about the plant, which … appeared in a night and perished in a night. Should I not care about the great city of Nineveh, which has more than 120,000 people who cannot distinguish between their right and their left?” [Jonah 4.10-11 (HCS)]

The government has a complicated set of calculations that it uses to determine the value of a statistical life. The Church has a relatively simple set of calculations by which we determine the value of an actual life. We need to constantly remember the cost of our actual lives. Let God remind us that we “were bought, not with something that ruins like gold or silver, but with the precious blood of Christ, who was like a pure and perfect lamb.” [1 Peter 1.18-19 (NCV)] When we realize that the blood of God’s Son has been shed for sinners (who are just like we were), are we really willing to say that our time, money, and effort are too precious be spent for them as well?