How governments put a price on a human life

Transcribed from the audio; small errors are possible.

So you want to put a price on a human life? Sounds evil. Governments do it every week. It decides which safety rules get made. Here's how. Thirteen steps. Step one. Start with a paycheck. 1972. America's road safety office adds up one death. Lost pay. Doctor bills. A funeral. Total: about two hundred thousand dollars. Pain and sadness? Ten thousand. Step two. Send the math to the government. 1973. A car maker argues against a new safety rule. Fixing every car: eleven dollars each. A hundred thirty-seven million. The lives it saves: forty-nine million. So, no thanks. Step three. Watch the story grow. Everyone says that paper was about the Ford Pinto. It wasn't. In the famous Pinto trial, the jury never even saw it. Ford lost anyway. Step four. Never call it a price. The rulebook says: this is not what any one person is worth. It's a statistical life. A life on a spreadsheet. Step five. Do the chip-in math. Would you pay a thousand dollars to make your chance of dying this year one in ten thousand smaller? Ten thousand people chip in. That's ten million dollars. One statistical life. Step six. Raise the price every year. 2012: nine million. 2025: fourteen point two million. Same life. New price tag. Step seven. Run the test. 1991. The government bans asbestos, a material that causes cancer. A court throws most of the ban out. One part cost twenty-three million dollars to save less than a third of a life. Step eight. Ignore the test when people are angry. 2008. A train crash kills twenty-five people. Congress orders automatic brakes on trains. The math said the cost was about twenty times the benefit. They built it anyway. Step nine. Give grandma a discount. 2002. An environment study tries pricing people over seventy thirty-seven percent lower. People call it the senior death discount. It gets dropped. Step ten. Double the kids. 2024. A product safety agency prices a child at twenty-six million. An adult: thirteen. 2026. They take it back. Step eleven. Or stop counting. January 2026. The environment agency stops putting dollars on lives saved from dirty air. No number. No argument. Step twelve. Cross the ocean. Europe's transport handbook: three point six million euros. Then it subtracts what you would have spent on yourself. Step thirteen. Check your passport. In 2025, the OECD lists a value for each country. America: eight and a half million dollars. Germany: seven. Britain: under six. Poland: under three. India: two hundred thousand. Last step. Same heart. Same lungs. Different country, different number. So what is your life worth? Depends who's counting.