Why the U.S. Values Your Life at $12,500,000 

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The 3 people who said no to treating the 20 year old and yes to treating the 80 year old lol

I think its worth to remember that: 1. More money spent doesn't necessarily mean the outcome will be better. There are other factors coming into picture like impossibility to sustain budget over the lifespan of project (if u plan to spend 20 years on this, there's a chance that project will never be finished and money will just burned). The case studies of some countries having success most of the time aren't applicable on others. 2. There are scenarios where technology or investment are not reaching to what they attempt to solve, but simply still get passed through $$$ allocations because of side developments they lead to. See where "space" or "internet" were built for absolutely unrelated military & surveillance goals, but leaded to enormous amount of technologies built around it. The space is something we still probably see as a money burner, but it still worth it.

wow, your channel has to be one of the most underrated on RU-vid. my studies are mostly on econometrics in transport and oftentimes cover CBA and therefore VSL. The way you explained these concepts while referencing further literature is not something that can be found often on RU-vid, great job!

Bold to assume everyone is worth $12.5 million… certain people aren’t even worth 100 bucks

The quality editing, rigurous academic research and use of data behind this video is truly impressive. Super entertaining and insightful to watch. Thanks a lot for this excellent work!

I always enjoy the animation in the video but that flood part in the beginning… it was so cool and well animated, great job as always

Definitely some of the highest quality videos on YT rn! Great work🫶

Ah yes information, my favorite.

OMG the animation at 3:31 I'm crying, also how you represent death sometimes, it's like a punch of humour inside the video lol

Bro one of ur vids helped to get a A grade for Eff.Speech subject. Tysm

Really glad I am subscribed, the quality of your videos is astonishing! You motivated me to actually read Balmford et al., 2020.

Happy you are back - and with such a banger of an ethics-statistics-public health video! I enjoyed it a lot. // I think you'd be wise to continue picking topics like this. Your style is pretty similar to "fern" but they switched to storytelling. So by staying with abstract concepts, you differentiate yourself. For me, as a subscriber of both channels, this would be a reason to continue watching your channel even if "fern" has an even higher production value. All the best!

Been following you since the second video, they are really well made and get better each time. The topics are also quite interesting. Keep up the work!

I was waiting for this video. It turned out great. Also, fascinating topic. Thank you!

I love how the coversation is always lockdown vs no lockdown. Rather than talking about things other that lockdowns, like communication, hospital improvements, mitigation research, ect. Instead the conversation is always economy(money) vs lockdown... as if the world is that simple.

The sponsor was actually genius the way you put it in, I can tell when a ad read is coming up but I didn't get suspicious until you said "aboard"

man this channel is so fascinating. What a great video

It’s not entirely unethical to put a dollar price on a human life its unethical when those prices differ from person to person.

great work, I love the part where you mentionned the Covid policy paper

There are 8 billion people. A human life is not priceless, people just think their own is because they only have one but a government has millions.

Netherlands is built different, they literally just uno reversed flooding

With the question of the 19 year old, I think he should certainly get the treatment, both from a moral viewpoint, and an economical viewpoint, because in 61 years, that boy can generate more value than $1.5M , so in the long run the government would gain money

I am going to say it: in most of the global south and eastern dictatorships, life is nearly worthless.

Love your content man, I bet your channel will blow up to 1 mill pretty quick. Would love to see some videos about the job market or housing market, idk how you would do that, but hey are pertinent topics

Your videos are amazing! Congratulations to you and your team! Greeting from Chile😄

In this discussion it is also important not to neglect an individual’s own choices. It’s ultimately up to the driver to decide which road they want to drive on, like you said. The government cannot (and should not) assume the role of removing all risk in activities. Eliminating all such risks eliminates a persons choice to drive on the less safe road

The problem is that sometimes the cost benefit analysis is not worth it. As in we shouldn't be checking how much it costs to save a life because it's too hard to estimate how useful that thing will be.

Just wanted to say the effort and quality put into these videos are amazing and the animations are top notch. Love the style of presentation and the information that you provide is amazing ❤❤

The road safety one doesn't really make sense though because pedestrians don't die randomly they have to walk in front of cars so if you're just vigilant around roads then it doesn't decrease your chance of death at all since you're already completely safe

I'm proud of you! Excellent work like always ❤

Wow, these topics were pretty much covered verbatim in one of my economics classes last year. You explained them extremely well, especially the value of using a QALY! A lot of economics centers around trade-offs, and especially in the public domain, people tend to see a lot of government spending as only a cost with no benefit. However, when we don't spend money on things like social services and infrastructure, we suffer lower productivity and a lower quality of life. Especially in regards to healthcare, we've shifted a lot of public spending towards older people instead of young people, ensuring a marginally better quality of life for the elderly at the cost of some of our country's future productivity.

Super interesting! Thank you for all your work!

Really high quality video great job

You should also consider the value of preventing situations in other ways, like the mentioned road safety cost. Perhaps improving the driving course programs for situation awareness would decrease deaths

Your channel's gonna become huge!

I chose $4.40, but honestly? I make 3x more now than I did just two years ago, so I can afford to pay the toll without much, if any hit to my wealth and budget. But if I was still making the same amount from a few years ago? Man that would hurt my wallet.

such an interresting video, ty !

Dutch people know at 2:05 we see a Swapfiets

Love your work ! Keep going !

I worked at the construction site and with such questions I always ask myself if the lives of the workers are being taken into account when calculating this. For example the work accident rate in the construction site is very high and sometimes it leads to death so imagine you're building something to save 1 life but building this 3 workers die, is it still worth it? Or just count the time all workers together spend on the project, from the architect and the engineers to the builders, is it worth it to spend a total of let's say 4000 years (summing together all the time spent by all the people working there) to save one single life that will probably live 40 years? I know all those risks are somehow implied with the money ypu spend but if you're a construction worker that gets paid 1000€ per month, does it mean you're ready to lose your life for that anount of money (monthly)?

My compliments on your clear and concise explanation of the complex problem of risk management. Even more complicated is the question about comparative risk. The US budget for armed forces is approaching $1 trillion annually, yet I am not aware of any civilians inside the USA who have died or been injured as a consequence of attacks by foreign forces. However, more than 38,000 elderly Americans died from accidental falls in 2021. In comparative risk analysis, it would be more cost-effective in terms of the value of a statistical life to establish a Ministry of Balance to promote training in equilibrium retention as a means to mitigate the mortality and morbidity associated with the vestibular disorders of ageing.

I feel it makes sense for a value of a life(i get its priceless but as the video said there has to be a cut-off point) being the number of money in the country/the numbers of live living in said countries So its more of a dynamic price and it accounts for inflation and economic state of the country at the moment

It's really good video better then what I thought from thumbnail

I like the running sound

In Brazil our life for the government probably worth less than 50.000 dolars. :(

So the title was clickbait then It’s a joke, great video

“9:47 - even if we don’t assign a value to life implicitly, we assign it explicitly”: true.

10:54 WHAT IM CRYING THIS IS SO FUNNY

lets go i was waiting for this

1:20-Option A easily! With option B you reduce the risk to 1/4 but with 100 times the cost,and option C reduces the risk to 1/20 but with 5000 times the cost! 4:50-Road 2 is worth it. Double the price for half the deaths. 5:07-Damn,and i thought i am cold with such decisions! 7:13-yes. 7:32-Nope. 9:40-Because like it or not,there is a price for anything.

I would like to add that a twofold reduction in the accident rate with a double increase in cost can have an order of magnitude cheaper alternatives.

A country or a person has limited resources and I think a countries duty is to spend those resources most effectively to improve its citizens lives. Any cost saved is money that can the spent elsewhere towards that goal. I think the video covers this nicely, but when looking at only one metric like dams or healthcare, its hard to put into perspective how that saved dollar amount can go into saving more lives. So in the full context its not about dollars to lives, its about maximizing the lives in general, and how to allocate money towards that goal. I think some people don't see that and get mad when the government doesn't throw the whole gdp at any given humanitarian problem. Also a thing I think may have impacted the polls is that for traffic deaths I can imagine it easier to blame the people who died for doing something stupid in the road than I can blame someone for getting a random deadly disease, and thus may be more favorable towards giving money to those who are suffering through no fault.

Yay i'm in the video :) also, a very informative video as always

Nunca tinha percebido que és português. Agora o sotaque parece-me óbvio. Continua o excelente trabalho!

the Netherlands background needs more bikes

Hey Memeable Data, I would love to see the impact of the gulf steam on our earth in the future and its development in the past.

Wow, awesome video!!

Hi, I ran into a similar dilemma. There is a war going on in my country, and this has forced a major revision of the current standards of risk regulation: it is much cheaper to increase the existing survival rate in war than on civilian roads. Therefore, I proposed to introduce bicycle lanes on a multi-lane roundabout instead of separated bike paths (I note that now there is already a wide sidewalk, which, however, would not interfere with repairing and lowering curbs). The reaction seemed unanimously negative. So in the updated version, I proposed to do without cycling infrastructure at all, only providing places for it. All this was influenced by subjective perception and incompleteness of data, perhaps something else. But here's the question I have: how to enable decentralized risk regulation in conditions of subjectivity, uncertainty, and variability, without losing the fundamental social institutions that allow us to think about independent risk regulation at all.

My country, Turkey is completely made up of mountains and I am happy with it 🙂 Having mountains for a second means having fault lines and we are exposed to earthquakes at least once a year, bruhh In our last earthquake, we lost 100,000 people and suffered a loss of $90,000,000,000 😢

2:16 letsgoooo broodje kaas!

7:42 I think that should be left up to him, like how "pulling the plug" is left up to the family.

3:00 add skip

OMDS, é um outro camarada tuga. tudo de bom para ti, rei

🇵🇹 esta orgulhoso, os teus videos sao incriveis !

with corona they also had values in austria, i think it was about 1 mil

I think it should be a matter of distributing recourses most effectively, not to a certain level of life worth. Every public policy should have that as an end goal

First option gives you 0.8% chance of no deadly tsunami happening per 1M, second 0.0095% per and last gives 0.000198 per. This makes the first option statistically the best

Reminds me of a choice, you had to make at the end of fable 3

Government can also treat people as source of income (taxes) and evaluate the life accordingly

So the USA put a higher “price tag” on a life, but they have much higher mortality rates than other parts of the world. For traffic accidents, homicide, covid, drugs overdose etc. So in the USA, practice is far worse than theory.

Nunca teria adivinhado que eras tuga, o teu sotaque tá mt bom mano 🫡🫡🫡

such a good video well done

excellent video

Great video!

Tbh I am flattered that they give our life this high of a value

I wish more people made choices based off of math like this

I would definitely do B because then it’s still very good and you have enough money to keep the county running

Your toll road example assumes I take the road one time. I take the highway to work probably 200+ times in a year, so then by picking the cheaper option I value my life at less than $2.5B, which I think wouldn’t remotely be controversial.

Risking lives for $2.20, while criticising the governments for putting a dollar value on them. Sounds about right.

7:45 wtf is with the people switching from left to right

This video really made me rethink quality of life because if the 20 year old has great health but get a life ending disease but before that he was usually in his house playing video games or on his phone his quality of life is poor then should he get the 1.5 million dollar treatment if he is just going to spend his life in is house doing nothing. Just a thought

Excellent video

Boeing Hitman: I deserve a raise

It’s definitely worth the wait❤

So when is the sea level rising exactly?

Amazing video!

Love your videos!

1:52 Mom look I'm famous!

The question of how long a society waited to implement lockdown isn't simply a question of lives vs economy. It also a question of freedom. People don't like being restricted from going out. It's the age old debate of safety vs freedom.

Great, now can you make the same video but with Euros?

10:09 more of an estimation of trust that the specific measures will do anything. And as we can see - they did nothing. It was at best huge corruption scandal.

Good video

"Or atleast I hope you do" BLUD ROASTED US 😭

I was about to make a joke about how black market think you cost more but after some searches(thay shit will forever be on my search history now) according to the black market you are worth 3M$

I'm Portuguese too!! :D

I am honored that somebody thinks I’m worth 12.5 million

Very good video.

Gosh your videos are amazing

Wow it went up from 10 Million…