My friend Dan will die today. I am writing this on Friday morning, Oct. 16. Later today, doctors will turn off the machines that are keeping Dan alive. Dans symptoms began two days ago. He is young in his early 30s and this is a shock.

As I have learned of Dans short illness and impending death, I have been especially sad for his young wife. Dan does not have COVID-19 but due to the pandemic, his wife has not been able to visit him as he lay dying.

This is a familiar, tragic story for so many families who have lost loved ones this year. So far, COVID-19 has killed almost 219,000 Americans, and we have heard floods of stories not only of grief but also of the added trauma of separation as loved ones die alone.

We have lost so much this year.

As I am trying to wrap my head around all we have lost, I return to one of the more interesting results from the field of labor economics, a trick used to assign a dollar value to human life.

Certainly, the true value of the lives lost cannot be measured and is known best in the hearts and lives of those who loved them.

But, as impossible as it may be and as dehumanizing as it may seem, the ability to assign an approximate value to human life is an important one in many policy decisions. For example, it can be a factor in determining how we set fines for pollution or other behavior that can be shown to be a risk to life. It can be a factor in settling lawsuits involving loss of life. Or it can be a consideration in evaluating insurance premiums and payouts.

There are a couple of ways to think about the value of a life. One is to consider the productive potential of an individual, which, in theory, is approximately equal to what he or she would earn as a participant in the labor market.

Productive potential, however, is a very narrow way to define ones value.

A more all-encompassing technique is to observe human behavior and to infer from our choices the value we place on our own lives.

Every job has associated with it a risk of injury or death. Other things equal, the higher risk involved in a job, the more an individual in that position is paid. When a market is in equilibrium, workers are indifferent between a higher-paying riskier job and a lower-paying safer job.

This is how we know the dollar value workers place on their own lives.

We can observe labor market behavior to see how much money workers are willing to give up for a specific decrease in their probability of death, and this gives us what is known as the value of statistical life.

There have been many estimates of the value of statistical life, but the EPA currently uses a value of approximately $7.4 million, regardless of the age, income, or other characteristic of the individual.

You can do the math, but we really dont need a dollar sign to know we have lost a lot this year. Praying it ends soon.

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The value of what we have lost in 2020 - Brunswick News