Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll. And here's a question for you

What is the value of a human life?

This is not a completely academic question of course right now

We're struggling with the existence of a pandemic going through the whole world the novel coronavirus

COVID-19 disease is causing people to wonder how to balance

Getting the economy and society more generally fact work versus the possible cost of deaths

because people are spreading the virus back to each other and

The answer if you want to know the value of a human life is between about five and ten million dollars

That's the number that economists have thought of if you go into an industrialized country

If you look at the economic value of a human life you need to put a number on it

I know that in some sense we think that life is

infinitely valuable to the person living it

That's all they have if they lose that life. There's no other loss that really matters

But on the other hand you can't just say well

I will spend all of the world's resources to save this one person's life

There has to be a limit because there might be someone someone else's life that also needs saving

So how do you spend your money?

How do you just do that cold hard brutal calculation?

And the answer is if you want to know how much money it is worth spending economically

To save a life it turns out to be between about five and ten million dollars

But this is a different question that I want to answer today although it's a closely related question

The question I want to think about is why life has a value at all?

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