Cass R. Sunstein, Columnist

The Compassionate Logic of Pricing Human Life

Assigning a monetary value to people facilitates trade-offs that promote both safety and equality.

September 10, 2019 at 1:00 PM UTC

Cass R. Sunstein is a former Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is the author of “The Cost-Benefit Revolution” and a co-author of “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness.”

Make that $10 million.
Photographer: Ricky Caroti/The Washington Post/Getty Images

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One of the unloveliest ideas in economics goes by the name “value of a statistical life” — VSL for short. In the U.S. government, the current value of a human life is about $10 million.

That means that if a highway safety regulation would save 10 lives, it is worth $100 million — a figure that must be weighed against the regulation’s cost.