Quanto vale uma vida humana? Entre 3 milhões e 6,1 milhões de dólares...
The Human Factor: human life is priceless.
But the government set a price for it four years ago: $6.1 million. That's the figure the Environmental Protection Agency came up with when it was trying to decide how far to go in removing arsenic from drinking water. [...]
The Department of Transportation also puts a price tag on a human life when deciding which road improvements are worth making, although it's the rather more modest one of $3 million. [...]
How, exactly, did the E.P.A. arrive at its figure of $6.1 million?
Economists looked at the salaries paid to workers in riskier jobs like mining. They figured out that such workers received, on average, an additional $61 a year for facing an extra 1-in-100,000 risk of accidental death. Evidently, these workers valued their own lives at 100,000 times $61, or $6.1 million. (In 2002, the E.P.A. revised the price of a life downward, to $3.7 million -- or if you're older than 70, $2.3 million.)
