> In Western countries and other liberal democracies, estimates for the value of a statistical life typically range from US$1 million—US$10 million; for example, the United States FEMA estimated the value of a statistical life at US$7.5 million in 2020
haha, already in rich EU countries it's much below EUR 100k - see e.g. Germanwings Flight 9525. In other countries it tends to zero. Even in US, I don't think that life of people awaiting visa amnesty is (statistically) worth more than zero. These claimed millions are weird numbers. "Life is priceless" is very dangerous notion to believe in, because it gives treacherous sense of security. In critical situations it might be "we are not spending more than EUR 3k to save his life and EUR 3k merely pays for 100km of transport and two paramedics".
> Note that the VSL [value of a statistical life] is very different from the value of an actual life.
The part about the calculation the EPA uses is very relevant:
> Suppose each person in a sample of 100,000 people were asked how much he or she would be willing to pay for a reduction in their individual risk of dying by 1 in 100,000, or 0.001%, over the next year. Since this reduction in risk would mean that we would expect one fewer death among the sample of 100,000 people over the next year on average, this is sometimes described as "one statistical life saved.” Now suppose that the average response to this hypothetical question was $100. Then the total dollar amount that the group would be willing to pay to save one statistical life in a year would be $100 per person × 100,000 people, or $10 million
In the other words, there is a cost function `f(p)` which is the amount of money to spend in order to prevent the fatal risk of probability p. For low enough p this function can be linearly approximated, and we named the value of `f(1)` under this approximation as the value of statistical life only for convenience. (In reality `f(1)` or even `f(0.01)` is not defined, and the true value is mostly determined after the fact.)
The National Health Service in the UK maintain a value of life years, used to calculate whether to pay for the use of life extending drugs: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-28983924. It's quite low in the grand scheme of things; about £30-80k/year depending on the metric.
This is more of a negotiation tactic against pharmaceutical companies that are marketing new wonder drugs that give terminal cancer patients 1% longer life expectancy for 10x more cost.
The drugs company can sell their new wonder drug to the UK for 80k a year, or not at all. That's why these drugs are so much cheaper in the UK than in countries such as the US.
> That's why these drugs are so much cheaper in the UK than in countries such as the US.
Well, sort of. The drugs come to us in the UK after the US customers have paid for the R&D. That's why they're cheaper; they're not being used to fund new drug discoveries.
Drugs dont come to the UK after R&D has been paid. UK/EU approvals times are often close to the US, but anticipated US revenue is what justifies the initial R&D spend.
E.g.
You are deciding if you will spend 1 Billion to develop a drug with a 20% sucess rate. Europe sales are projected at 2 Billion, and US sales at 10 Billion.
It is US sales that make the expected value positive. If the US paid European rates, the product would not be developed.
>The R&D funding came from the previous drug, not the current drug.
In practice, yes that is often the case, but it doesn't matter for the new drug development decision.
If a new drug is unprofitable, it doesnt matter if there are funds from a prior one. A company will invest it elsewhere instead of spending it on a revenue negative drug.
Similarly, If a new drug looks profitable but internal funds are scarce, the Company will secure funding or sell distribution rights to raise the funds.
The Key role that the US is currently playing to making drugs profitable to develop that otherwise would not be.
I have worked on several programs, and the question is always "what is the return on investment" and never "how much do we have in the bank".
I think it is more than just a negotiation tactic. Spending controls drive prioritization within socialized health systems. You cant spend "whatever it takes" for each person.
A person who earns $57k/year working full time from age 18 to age 68 "only" makes $2.85 million over the course of their life.
Obviously, a certain premium is appropriate, to reflect all the value that isn't reflected in salary, like raising children, caring for elderly parents, chores around the house, voluntary work and so on. And there's no amount of money that will make a person whole again after, say, the loss of their spouse.
But if for statistical purposes we absolutely have to?
From the wikipedia article where this number is taken from:
> Suppose each person in a sample of 100,000 people were asked how much he or she would be willing to pay for a reduction in their individual risk of dying by 1 in 100,000, or 0.001%, over the next year. Since this reduction in risk would mean that we would expect one fewer death among the sample of 100,000 people over the next year on average, this is sometimes described as "one statistical life saved.” Now suppose that the average response to this hypothetical question was $100. Then the total dollar amount that the group would be willing to pay to save one statistical life in a year would be $100 per person × 100,000 people, or $10 million. This is what is meant by the "value of a statistical life.”
Something that wasn't really addressed in the article is that smooth operation of the economy also saves lives.
To put in terms of the infinite trolley problem: The longer the trolley gets, the bigger the probability that one of the passengers is an EMT commuting to his shift, where being late could cost a life. You can add many such passengers, with various levels of complexity, where being late could end up costing a life or a livelihood.
So at some point, not hitting the brakes becomes worthwhile even just in terms of lives saved. The problem is that it is very hard to measure the exact impact of "inconveniencing" the 8 million passengers. I expect many lives will be lost if you stop a train with 8 million passengers for ~15 minutes. I would probably not stop the train with even less passengers, maybe a few hundred thousand.
Edit: added the last paragraph, to drive my point home.
Once upon a time I used much the same reasoning as your last point to calculate the expected total change in quality-adjusted life years for reducing the speed limit on our local freeway to various points. I don't remember the exact outcome (although I'm pretty sure that reducing it below something like 80km/h was a net loss) but it was an interesting thought experiment to begin with, and it got a lot more interesting once I started getting angry responses to my results. :P
I think rewording this from "value" to "how much can we afford to spend to save a life" would be interesting. It sounds less capitalist-y and more naturalistic and grounded.
On the actual value itself, it would be interesting to see a report of the actual metrics that different industries and entities use to calculate that value. I'd expect it would be very varied.
Agreed, and the effects of this kind of positive vs. negative phrasing us one of the fascinating things to examine using tools like the trolley problem.
Speaking of which, I believe the trolley equivalent of this rephrasing would be one track, one person tied to the track, one freight trolley with no passengers but with a total dollar value of $x, and one lever which will derail the freight trolley destroying it and cargo entirely. What value of $x would be worth pulling the lever?
That's literally the point of the trolley problem. "You can't put a dollar value on human life, or compare the value of different human lives" is the socially accepted 'correct' answer. It's also a polite fiction, and using a mental tool like the trolley problem you can uncover what you and others actually think.
Reminds me of a scenario that I was asked once in an assessment center (a military one): Ypu are defending a bridge, the last one across the river, the enmy is approaching, refugees are on tje bridge, the enemy crossing would mean the front collapses. What do you do, let the enemy cross or blow the bridge? My, partially smart ass answer: retreat, let tze enemy and refugees cross. Because I don't see a point in killong non-combatants to, maybe, save a situation that was screwed up months ago. Because why am I, without enough forces to hold the bridge, the last obstacle for the enemy before he breaks through? And even if I blew the bridge, I don't take out the enemies engineers, so they will just cross the river elsewhere.
Since I didn't fail the assessment, the answer at least wasn't completely wrong I think.
Eh, the formulation you've proposed doesn't really give people much reason not to derail the train.
The moment you start saying "10 million dollars of cargo" people will naturally picture a container full of ipads owned by some trillion-dollar megacorp that won't feel the loss at all, and derail the train.
I think I might also need some idea of the degree to which the contents of the trolley can be replaced and what will happen if we lose those resources. Does it contain diamonds that are valuable but useless or a limited supply of life saving medicine?
It would also be relevant to know who will bear the cost of losing the trolley. Is it society as a whole or some capitalist?
On the contrary, I think "value of life" is an important phrasing - especially given that it is extremely uneasy for anyone except some die-hard libertarians.
Otherwise, we live with a dissonance - on the one hand, we consider life priceless; on the other, we often spend a very limited amount of money to save it. We switch back and forth between these two modes of thinking, making it unable to form a rational policy.
Everything has either a dignity or a price. If it has a dignity no amount of money is worth it. If it has a price it’s just a business transaction. It’s much easier to declare something is priceless and above market forces when you accrue the benefits and don’t bear the costs of maintaining it.
GiveWell can point you to various charities in 3rd world countries where you can be reasonably certain you can save a life for about $5000-7000. https://www.givewell.org/
Save 1 life in the USA, or take the same 7.5 million and save ~1000 lives in Africa. Interesting lens on which to view these numbers.
It costs me 100 bucks to produce and sell an item, the market is only ready to pay a price of 80. I loose 20.
In terms os life: the value of life is universal (at least it should be), the cost of saving one (or ending one...) depends on circumstances. And the price someone is paying in order to safe / end said life is again something different.
Edit: The value of the item initially mentioned can be anything: from the 80 for the customer at the time of purchase, 500 because it provides the customer with clean water a week later or even negaitive (e.g. because it is a replacement part, non-original, for a classic car and the resulting values of the car decreased after installation).
Ah, cost is the amount to produce and price is the amount to consume then? I never actively tagged those ideas with distinct words, but I appreciate the insight.
Using "cost" to refer to the amount you pay for something and "price" for the amount you get for selling it is pretty standard usage, especially in accounting contexts.
Cost is on the producers side, peice is whatever the product can be sold for. Value is depending on circumstances, accounting value on the other hand is pretty well defined, and either based on cost (inventory at the manufacturer) or purchasing price (inventory and assets on customer side).
I think the term cost can only be specified with respect to an entity.
A given good has multiple cost, up and down the supply chain. A widget can have different costs to the original manufacturer, the wholesaler, retailer, and finally consumer.
It makes no sense to say the cost of a widget is X, without specifying cost to whom.
Interesting subject often overlooked in our humanist (as valuing human life over everything) societies.
On the subject, the bias I have found the most often when discussing it is when someone says that « a life has no price, everything should be done to save it ».
Such views often results in overlooking real risks and focusing on fears.
Even if I agree that value is not cost, having a number is better for decision making than having nothing, especially in engineering projects.
They were reducing the speed limit in part of the UK from 30 to 20mph. Some people believed it would save 4 or 5 lives a year. I worked out that it would cost an extra 50 lifetimes a year sitting in traffic.
I never posted this as the value of a life didn't feel proportional to the value of a lifetime, though i never really objectively understood why. Feels like a similar paradox to the repugnant conclusion.
These kind of talks always came up in philosophy class and I always made the same point - there isn't saving a life, we are all dying/will die, singularity permitting. Dying just means dying sooner, lifetime QoL should be the only metric for us mortals.
It's just the calculus suffers from the same existential problem as abortion morality - how do you weight a lived life vs non-existence?
There’s also something to be said that sitting in traffic is life. At least as much as getting wherever you were going to go faster, likely to just sit there instead.
> I worked out that it would cost an extra 50 lifetimes a year sitting in traffic.
Sitting in traffic is not the equivalent of being dead, so it's not as bad. The other side of the argument is that the people sitting in traffic are missing out on their peak years, while the reduced lifespan from a traffic death removes the last years, which at best are less enjoyable.
It's not a joke. Losing 30 minutes of your life when you're 25 costs you 30 minutes when you're healthy and full of energy. The average person experiences all kinds of problems after 75 (hips are bad, diabetes, effects of stroke, and so on). Conditional on having to choose when to give up part of your life, which is the tradeoff I was responding to, virtually everyone would choose after 75 rather than a younger age.
To the contrary - In many countries, average happiness is higher when you are older, despite physical challenges. The lowest happiness is typically in the 30s and 40s.
If you want to approach it from a happiness utilitarian perspective, a year at 60 or 70 is usually worth more than a year at the lifetime average happiness.
> Sitting in traffic is not the equivalent of being dead, so it's not as bad.
I would argue that it is considerably worse, since people sitting in traffic generally have to be conscious during the experience, which is not the case for being dead.
How would it cost extra lifetimes to people sitting in traffic? If there's sufficient traffic to slow traffic meaningfully from 30mph, a 20mph limit isn't going to make a difference?
Note that 4 or 5 fewer death probably also translates to 8-10 fewer paraplegics (statistic made up using that fact that the country where I am from has a 2x ratio between death and paraplegics).
But even that does not take into account secondary effects to reducing the speed limit like fewer people traveling, less air population, people having more time to meditate, etc...
All in all, it's very hard to estimate the impact of such policy.
Are you 2x as likely to become a paraplegic after a motor vehicle accident at 30mph as you are to die? That doesn't sound right.
> fewer people traveling
I don't think anyone says to themselves "it's a 20mph zone on the route so I'm not going, if it was 30 I would go." Lower speed limit != fewer travelers.
> less air population
Assuming you meant pollution, the same amount of cars going slower would cause more pollution in a given area, not less.
> people having more time to meditate
I'm sorry what? Most people don't meditate, and how is sitting in the car longer going to give you more time to meditate?
reminds me of the ted talk where the speaker said that helmet laws might be costing lives. The idea was that more people would be saved by the opportunity to exercise than were saved by the helmets.
Right: unlike dying, if someone sits in traffic more, they're able to change their situation and seek alternatives. It's not like increasing traffic in the short term is something reasonable to extrapolate to all drivers for the rest of their lives. More likely, traffic increases lead to either (or both) of infrastructure changes or lifestyle changes.
Also the conversation assumes people are actually sitting in traffic for ages
Are the welsj streets so clogged? I recall an article stating that the average increase in journey length was a few minutes.
When I worked on a product with 10s of millions of users we could say things like "Yay! this 0.2 second improvement in page load will save 5 persons lives this month".
I always assumed it was about slowing cars from 35 to 25mph as hardly anybody sticks to the speed limit.
Llywodraeth Cymru (Welsh Government) claims that a public health study suggests its new 20mph limits will see, annually, a 40 per cent reduction in collisions, between six and ten lives saved, and anything from 1,200 to 2,000 people avoiding injury as a result.
Scale that up across the country and you are looking at way more than "4 or 5 lives".
Consider what happened after the Space Shuttle accidents. The vehicle was grounded for a long time (32 months for the Challenger accident). During that time the putative benefits of the launches were not being accrued. The stand down implies the value of these benefits couldn't be very large, given the expected number of additional astronaut lives saved during that time.
In general, it's economically irrational to spend large amounts of money making space travel safer for a small number of astronauts. It would be better to just say "this is dangerous as hell; we'll pay you $10M/mission (say) to justify the risk."
I'd say it illustrates that the Space Shuttle program wasn't actually worthwhile. When push came to shove, the supposed benefits were less than a rather piddling amount of astronaut life value. We have no trouble continuing to risk lives in other activities (the military, for example).
Quite possibly. But I suspect the full benefits are pretty hard to assess from our armchairs.
I imagine there's a fair amount of useful technology that got developed along the way, and a bunch of global cultural value (and US soft power) over several decades derived from having putting a person on the moon.
Those benefiting from the spending have incentive to exaggerate the benefits up to the limit of plausibility. So, as a rule of thumb, expect the actual benefits to be less than the claimed benefits.
It's certainly the case that many of the supposed benefits of the Space Shuttle (and the Space Station) didn't materialize. The Space Shuttle has the additional "negative benefit" of having retarded development of US expendable boosters. Something like an expendable Falcon 9 could have been created decades earlier, had policy been rational.
- Even with no one on board, losing a Space Shuttle is a big deal
- Astronauts received expensive training, you don't want to lose the investment
- Astronauts are not just random people, they have a hard to find set of qualities
- Having people die in public is bad publicity
It is not politically correct to say it like that, but it is undeniable that some lives are more valuable than others.
$10M is kind of an average. When you build a road for instance, astronauts and violent criminals can both take it. The astronaut is more valuable than the criminal, but it makes no sense to make the road safer for astronauts without making it safer for everyone else, so we take an average. But put in their respective environments (Space Shuttle vs prison), it becomes very obvious whose life is the most valuable.
Having a schoolteacher become an astronaut and broadcasting a disaster on live TV kids back the US Space Program tremendously.
Also the Cold War ended so the motivation behind funding dual use aerospace technologies weakened. (The same technology that can propel astronaut capsules and satellites into space and recover them can also launch nukes).
Another application of this is addressing people who say "nuclear is safer than solar/wind" and trot out some numbers they got somewhere.
Assuming those numbers are correct, when you look at them, the contribution of the putative saved lives to the cost of a kWh is somewhere around 1 millionth of a dollar (I forget the exact number), and so is totally swamped by the actual differences in cost. This is not the case for lives lost to fossil fuels, particularly coal; there the contribution is significant.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] threadWoah that's tiny.
The part about the calculation the EPA uses is very relevant:
> Suppose each person in a sample of 100,000 people were asked how much he or she would be willing to pay for a reduction in their individual risk of dying by 1 in 100,000, or 0.001%, over the next year. Since this reduction in risk would mean that we would expect one fewer death among the sample of 100,000 people over the next year on average, this is sometimes described as "one statistical life saved.” Now suppose that the average response to this hypothetical question was $100. Then the total dollar amount that the group would be willing to pay to save one statistical life in a year would be $100 per person × 100,000 people, or $10 million
The drugs company can sell their new wonder drug to the UK for 80k a year, or not at all. That's why these drugs are so much cheaper in the UK than in countries such as the US.
Well, sort of. The drugs come to us in the UK after the US customers have paid for the R&D. That's why they're cheaper; they're not being used to fund new drug discoveries.
E.g. You are deciding if you will spend 1 Billion to develop a drug with a 20% sucess rate. Europe sales are projected at 2 Billion, and US sales at 10 Billion.
It is US sales that make the expected value positive. If the US paid European rates, the product would not be developed.
The R&D funding came from the previous drug, not the current drug.
In practice, yes that is often the case, but it doesn't matter for the new drug development decision.
If a new drug is unprofitable, it doesnt matter if there are funds from a prior one. A company will invest it elsewhere instead of spending it on a revenue negative drug.
Similarly, If a new drug looks profitable but internal funds are scarce, the Company will secure funding or sell distribution rights to raise the funds.
The Key role that the US is currently playing to making drugs profitable to develop that otherwise would not be.
I have worked on several programs, and the question is always "what is the return on investment" and never "how much do we have in the bank".
Obviously, a certain premium is appropriate, to reflect all the value that isn't reflected in salary, like raising children, caring for elderly parents, chores around the house, voluntary work and so on. And there's no amount of money that will make a person whole again after, say, the loss of their spouse.
But if for statistical purposes we absolutely have to?
I'd say $7.5 million sounds pretty generous.
Are Musk, Bezos, Gates, Zuckerberg, Buffett 1 000 000 times more valuable than other persons?
> Suppose each person in a sample of 100,000 people were asked how much he or she would be willing to pay for a reduction in their individual risk of dying by 1 in 100,000, or 0.001%, over the next year. Since this reduction in risk would mean that we would expect one fewer death among the sample of 100,000 people over the next year on average, this is sometimes described as "one statistical life saved.” Now suppose that the average response to this hypothetical question was $100. Then the total dollar amount that the group would be willing to pay to save one statistical life in a year would be $100 per person × 100,000 people, or $10 million. This is what is meant by the "value of a statistical life.”
As to Bezos and Gates, fortunately the statistical value of a life only has to concern itself with the median person, not with outliers.
https://mikerowe.com/2020/03/walk-me-through-this-safety-thi...
To put in terms of the infinite trolley problem: The longer the trolley gets, the bigger the probability that one of the passengers is an EMT commuting to his shift, where being late could cost a life. You can add many such passengers, with various levels of complexity, where being late could end up costing a life or a livelihood.
So at some point, not hitting the brakes becomes worthwhile even just in terms of lives saved. The problem is that it is very hard to measure the exact impact of "inconveniencing" the 8 million passengers. I expect many lives will be lost if you stop a train with 8 million passengers for ~15 minutes. I would probably not stop the train with even less passengers, maybe a few hundred thousand.
Edit: added the last paragraph, to drive my point home.
Speaking of which, I believe the trolley equivalent of this rephrasing would be one track, one person tied to the track, one freight trolley with no passengers but with a total dollar value of $x, and one lever which will derail the freight trolley destroying it and cargo entirely. What value of $x would be worth pulling the lever?
Anyway, as philosophical or moral problem, the trolley question just sucks.
Since I didn't fail the assessment, the answer at least wasn't completely wrong I think.
The moment you start saying "10 million dollars of cargo" people will naturally picture a container full of ipads owned by some trillion-dollar megacorp that won't feel the loss at all, and derail the train.
It would also be relevant to know who will bear the cost of losing the trolley. Is it society as a whole or some capitalist?
Otherwise, we live with a dissonance - on the one hand, we consider life priceless; on the other, we often spend a very limited amount of money to save it. We switch back and forth between these two modes of thinking, making it unable to form a rational policy.
7.5 million is about 125 years of labor at the US average pay.
It is amazing society will pay this, and it came up more often, we simply couldn't.
https://www.npr.org/2020/04/15/835571843/episode-991-lives-v...
The topic is also related to yesterday's thread "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero (2022)"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38905889
Save 1 life in the USA, or take the same 7.5 million and save ~1000 lives in Africa. Interesting lens on which to view these numbers.
In terms os life: the value of life is universal (at least it should be), the cost of saving one (or ending one...) depends on circumstances. And the price someone is paying in order to safe / end said life is again something different.
Edit: The value of the item initially mentioned can be anything: from the 80 for the customer at the time of purchase, 500 because it provides the customer with clean water a week later or even negaitive (e.g. because it is a replacement part, non-original, for a classic car and the resulting values of the car decreased after installation).
The cost to a consumer purchasing a burger is the retail price, not the amounts the restaurant spent on labor and ingredients.
A given good has multiple cost, up and down the supply chain. A widget can have different costs to the original manufacturer, the wholesaler, retailer, and finally consumer.
It makes no sense to say the cost of a widget is X, without specifying cost to whom.
Even if I agree that value is not cost, having a number is better for decision making than having nothing, especially in engineering projects.
I never posted this as the value of a life didn't feel proportional to the value of a lifetime, though i never really objectively understood why. Feels like a similar paradox to the repugnant conclusion.
It's just the calculus suffers from the same existential problem as abortion morality - how do you weight a lived life vs non-existence?
They won't help you with non-existence though.
* not clear 2 * 50% QALY == 1 * 100% QALY
* maybe factor in "non-existence" with expected life expectancy?
* need negative QALY to factor in pain, dissatisfaction
Probably because no single person loses their entire remaining lifetime due to slower traffic, vs the person who dies in traffic that does.
Sitting in traffic is not the equivalent of being dead, so it's not as bad. The other side of the argument is that the people sitting in traffic are missing out on their peak years, while the reduced lifespan from a traffic death removes the last years, which at best are less enjoyable.
I can't tell if that's a joke or not.
If you want to approach it from a happiness utilitarian perspective, a year at 60 or 70 is usually worth more than a year at the lifetime average happiness.
Various sources show something like this: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/201207_...
I would argue that it is considerably worse, since people sitting in traffic generally have to be conscious during the experience, which is not the case for being dead.
But even that does not take into account secondary effects to reducing the speed limit like fewer people traveling, less air population, people having more time to meditate, etc... All in all, it's very hard to estimate the impact of such policy.
> fewer people traveling
I don't think anyone says to themselves "it's a 20mph zone on the route so I'm not going, if it was 30 I would go." Lower speed limit != fewer travelers.
> less air population
Assuming you meant pollution, the same amount of cars going slower would cause more pollution in a given area, not less.
> people having more time to meditate
I'm sorry what? Most people don't meditate, and how is sitting in the car longer going to give you more time to meditate?
Longer travel times result in fewer people wanting to travel. Was not expecting this to be controversial.
> The same amount of cars going slower would cause more pollution in a given area
Drag is proportional to the square of the velocity
> Most people don't meditate, and how is sitting in the car longer going to give you more time to meditate?
Meditate is perhaps the wrong word.
In general the slower you drive the lower your mpg (and hence pollution).
I think this one?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07o-TASvIxY
There was also some evidence that drivers give cyclists more room if they see they aren't wearing a helmet.
Personally I'm going to buy some pink lycra as I've noticed my wife gets far less aggravation from drivers than I do when we are out cycling.
(but we did it as a joke)
Llywodraeth Cymru (Welsh Government) claims that a public health study suggests its new 20mph limits will see, annually, a 40 per cent reduction in collisions, between six and ten lives saved, and anything from 1,200 to 2,000 people avoiding injury as a result.
Scale that up across the country and you are looking at way more than "4 or 5 lives".
In general, it's economically irrational to spend large amounts of money making space travel safer for a small number of astronauts. It would be better to just say "this is dangerous as hell; we'll pay you $10M/mission (say) to justify the risk."
Yes, that's rational. But being careless with other people's lives is something many people (including me, an economist) are morally not OK with.
I imagine there's a fair amount of useful technology that got developed along the way, and a bunch of global cultural value (and US soft power) over several decades derived from having putting a person on the moon.
It's certainly the case that many of the supposed benefits of the Space Shuttle (and the Space Station) didn't materialize. The Space Shuttle has the additional "negative benefit" of having retarded development of US expendable boosters. Something like an expendable Falcon 9 could have been created decades earlier, had policy been rational.
- Astronauts received expensive training, you don't want to lose the investment
- Astronauts are not just random people, they have a hard to find set of qualities
- Having people die in public is bad publicity
It is not politically correct to say it like that, but it is undeniable that some lives are more valuable than others.
$10M is kind of an average. When you build a road for instance, astronauts and violent criminals can both take it. The astronaut is more valuable than the criminal, but it makes no sense to make the road safer for astronauts without making it safer for everyone else, so we take an average. But put in their respective environments (Space Shuttle vs prison), it becomes very obvious whose life is the most valuable.
Also the Cold War ended so the motivation behind funding dual use aerospace technologies weakened. (The same technology that can propel astronaut capsules and satellites into space and recover them can also launch nukes).
Assuming those numbers are correct, when you look at them, the contribution of the putative saved lives to the cost of a kWh is somewhere around 1 millionth of a dollar (I forget the exact number), and so is totally swamped by the actual differences in cost. This is not the case for lives lost to fossil fuels, particularly coal; there the contribution is significant.
You can place an infinite value on a human life, but killing five people to save one still doesn’t make sense.
Some infinities are larger than other infinities.