This is Planet Money from NPR.

A lot of people, politicians mainly have been arguing about something.

Is it worth it to shut down the economy to save lives or should we let people die to

save the economy?

And baked into this argument is a question.

Okay, then how much exactly is a life worth in dollars?

It is a sticky question and it happens to be very familiar to economists.

So the people who say how could you put a value on life?

I say how could you not?

How could you pretend people are valueless?

This is economist Betsy Stevenson.

She's at the University of Michigan.

And what would it even mean to think about people as having infinite value?

We'd spend all our resources on saving one person?

People wouldn't make that decision.

Thinking at how much it's worth to save a life used to be part of Betsy's job when she

worked in the federal government in the Obama administration.

Federal agencies place a dollar value on life.

And this value is used to determine which safety regulations are worth the cost.

Like whether we should require seat belts to be bet you.

And whether we should require dangerous chemicals to be labeled dangerous chemicals.

And now it seems that people, politicians mainly, are asking for the same kind of is it worth

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