Pricing Lives: Guideposts for a Safer Society

How society’s undervaluing of life puts all of us at risk—and the groundbreaking economic measure that can fix it

Like it or not, sometimes we need to put a monetary value on people's lives. In the past, government agencies used the financial "cost of death" to monetize the mortality risks of regulatory policies, but this method vastly undervalued life. Pricing Lives tells the story of how the government came to adopt an altogether different approach--the value of a statistical life, or VSL—...