Free The Price of Everything by Eduardo Porter

conclude that increases in longevity between 1970 and 2000 added $3.2 trillion per year to the national wealth of the United States.

DO WE KNOW HOW MUCH WE ARE WORTH?
    Despite its democratic appeal, this metric too is troubling. Using people’s own choices to determine the price we are willing to pay to save lives could lead society down some uncomfortable paths. Given the choice between pulling a dozen thirty-year-olds from a blazing fire or saving a dozen sixty-year-olds instead, it might be an odd choice to save the seniors from the point of view of social welfare. For starters, saving the young would save many more years of life than the old.
    Cass Sunstein, the legal scholar from the University of Chicago who currently heads the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which oversees these valuations, has proposed focusing government policies on saving years of life rather than lives, even though that would discount the value of seniors. “A program that saves younger people is better, along every dimension, than an otherwise identical program that saves older people,” he wrote. But just try making this case to somebody over sixty-five. Not only do they value their remaining lives as much as the young do, they have enormous political clout and will vote against anyone who says otherwise.
    In 2002 the Environmental Protection Agency introduced a novel element into its analysis of how the Clear Skies Act—which regulated soot emissions from power plants—reduced premature mortality. Rather than evaluate every life saved at $6.1 million, as it had done in the past, it applied an age discount—implying that the life of somebody over seventy was worth only 67 percent of the life of a younger person.
    The backlash by the American Association of Retired People and others was so fierce that EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman was forced to abandon the approach. “The senior discount factor has been stopped,” she said. “It has been discontinued. E.P.A. will not, I repeat, not, use an age-adjusted analysis in decision making.” When the EPA again adjusted the value of life by age to measure the benefits of regulating exhaust from diesel engines, it bent over backward to please seniors. To come up with a system that valued the life of retirees the same as that of younger Americans, it had to price each year of remaining life expectancy at $434,000 for people over the age of sixty-five and only $172,000 for those younger.
    The risks of relying on people’s choices to put a value on their lives can be seen in opinion polls showing Americans believe a life saved from a terrorist attack is worth two lives saved from a natural disaster. This bias may explain the indifference with which the United States government responded to hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005, compared with the massive investment to avoid a repeat of the terrorist attacks against the United States in 2001.
    Above all, these valuations perpetuate economic inequities. Schelling cautioned about this: “Just as the rich will pay more to avoid wasting an hour in traffic or five hours on a train, it is worth more to them to reduce the risk of their own death or the death of somebody they care about. It is worth more because they are richer than the poor.” The fact that the Titanic didn’t have enough lifeboats for all passengers would be reasonable under this line of thinking. The distribution of deaths—37 percent of first-class passengers, 57 percent of those in second class, and 75 percent of those traveling steerage—would be uncontroversial.
    Yet if people thought the compensation by the 9/11 fund was unfair, what would they think of directing lifesaving government programs to the rich simply because they have more resources to invest in their own health and safety and are less willing to take risky jobs than the poor? This system ignores the fact that while the rich are willing to pay more to protect life and limb