{"id":1355,"date":"2004-06-03T12:16:33","date_gmt":"2004-06-03T20:16:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ogre.nu\/wp\/?p=1355"},"modified":"2005-10-23T20:24:46","modified_gmt":"2005-10-24T04:24:46","slug":"the-price-of-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/?p=1355","title":{"rendered":"the price of life"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>No comment on the thesis of &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/slate.msn.com\/id\/2101297\/\">The economic logic of executing computer hackers<\/a>&#8221; (Slate; cited by <a href=\"http:\/\/dev.null.org\/blog\/archive.cgi\/2004\/05\/27#2115_worms\">ACB<\/a>), but this caught my eye:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nWhen we say that a human life is worth $10 million, we mean nothing more or less than this: A typical person, faced with a 1-in-10-million chance of death, seems to be willing to pay about a dollar to eliminate that risk. We know this not from theory but from observation &#8211; by looking, for example, at the size of the pay cuts people are willing to take to move into safer jobs. On this basis, Harvard professor Kip Viscusi estimates the value of a life at $4.5 million overall, $7 million for a blue-collar male and $8.5 million for a blue collar female. (Viscusi acknowledges that it&#8217;s puzzling for a blue-collar life to be worth more than a white-collar life, but that&#8217;s what the data show.)\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Perhaps white-collar workers, unfamiliar with the concept of death on the job, underestimate its likelihood.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>No comment on the thesis of &#8220;The economic logic of executing computer hackers&#8221; (Slate; cited by ACB), but this caught my eye: When we say that a human life is worth $10 million, we mean nothing more or less than &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/?p=1355\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1355"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1355\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}