IS THIS PRICE RIGHT?

Today, before the government considers taking action to protect health, safety, or the environment, it tallies up the economic costs and benefits of the action it is contemplating. The recent rise of economic analysis in public policy has inspired scores of studies trying to determine the monetary value of priceless things - human life and health, nonhuman species, natural resources, even the future itself. Some of the strange results of this analysis:

The value of…

• a human life: $6.1 million (EPA, 2000)
  
  
• a human life: $3.7 million (EPA, 2002)
  
  
• an elderly person's life: $2.3 million (EPA, 2002)
  
  
• a year of life: $163,000 (EPA, 2002)
  
  
• a case of chronic bronchitis: $260,000 (EPA, 1997)
  
  
• a case of non-fatal bladder cancer: use the same value as for chronic bronchitis (EPA, 2001)
  
  
• reducing arsenic in drinking water to lowest feasible level: less than 3 cents per household per day (EPA, 2001)
  
  
• a school day missed due to air pollution: $0 (if child's mom stays at home) (EPA, 2003)
  
  
• an IQ point: $8,346 (EPA, 2000)
  
  
• an IQ point: $1,100 (conservative think tank, 2000)
  
  
• preservation of humpback whales: $18 billion (economics journal, 1996)
  
  
• preservation of bald eagles: $23 billion (economics journal, 1996)
  
  
• preservation of gray wolves: $7 billion (economics journal, 1996)
  
  
• preserving 60 million acres of national forests (money saved by not building roads): $219,000 (OMB, 2002)
  
  
• preventing another oil spill like the Exxon Valdez: $9 billion (study commissioned by State of Alaska, 1992)
  
  
• protecting millions of fish from being killed by power plants: less than a penny per household per day (EPA, 2002)
  
  
• anything, a decade from now: 50 percent less than today (OMB, 2003)
  
  
• anything, a century from now: 99.99 percent less than today (OMB, 2003)