¹ A tragic choice is a choice that society finds intolerable, though it must be made all the same. A choice is tragic when something of great importance – the right to bear children, the right to live, or the requirement to bear arms in the defense of one's country – has to be assigned to some but not to all citizens. See Guido Calabresi and Bobbit, Philip, Tragic Choices (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1978).Google Scholar

² See, for instance, Dublin, Louis and Lotka, Alfred, The Money Value of a Man (New York: Ronald Press, 1930).Google Scholar Dublin and Lotka were quite explicit in asserting that the purpose of their calculation was to determine the appropriate amount of insurance. The same kind of calculation has been employed – inappropriately in my opinion – to determine the value of life for cost-benefit analysis. See Rice, Dorothy and Cooper, Barbara, “The Economic Value of Human Life,” American Journal of Public Health, 1967, reprinted and updated inGoogle ScholarSteven, Rhoads, ed., Valuing Life: Public Policy Dilemmas (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1980).Google Scholar

³ Broome, John, “Trying to Value a Life,” Journal ofPublic Economics, vol. 9 (February 1977), pp. 91–100.Google Scholar See also the comments by Buchanan, and Faith, , Jones-Lee, and Williams, , and the reply by Broome, , in Journal of Public Economics, vol. 12 (October 1979), pp. 245–265.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Buchanan and Faith's defense of the use of a value of life in cost-benefit analysis is that “The only test for Pareto-superiority of one project over another lies in the expressed or revealed unanimity of all persons affected by the alternatives. The Wicksellian unanimity test incorporates the Pareto-superiority criterion and the cost-benefit test, when properly conceived and applied.” Buchanan and Faith are right, in my opinion, and Broome is wrong.

⁴ There is now a substantial literature on the question of when knowledge is socially advantageous and when it is not. See Hirshleifer, Jack, “The Private and Social Value of Information and the Reward for Inventive Activity,” American Economic Review, vol. LXI (September 1971), pp. 561–574Google Scholar, and Marshall, J.M., “Private Incentives and Public Information,” American Economic Review, vol. 64 (June 1974); pp. 373–390.Google Scholar

⁵ For a good introduction to the theoretical literature on the value of life, see Linnerooth, Joanne, “The Value of Human Life: A Review of Models,” Economic Inquiry, vol. XVII (January 1979), pp. 52–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Much recent work is discussed in Jones-Lee, K. W., ed., The Value of Life and Safety (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1982).Google Scholar

⁶ See D. S. Shepard and R. J. Zechhauser, “Life-Cycle Consumption and Willingness to Pay for Increased Survival,” in Jones-Lee, Life and Safety. Shepard and Zechhauser distinguish between the “Robinson Crusoe” case, where an individual is entirely self-sufficient, the “perfect market,” where one can convert today's wealth into an annuity the amount of which increases with one's probability of death, and the “pensioner” case, where one's future income is independent of one's probability of survival.

⁷ See Conley, B. C., “The Value of Human Life in the Demand for Safety,” American Economic Review, vol. 66 (March 1976), pp. 45–55Google Scholar, and Arthur, W. B., “The Economics of Risks to Life,” American Economic Review, vol. 71 (March 1981), pp. 54–64.Google ScholarPubMed Arthur compares the value to the survivors of the assets of the dead with a person's own value of life by incorporating both considerations into a growth model within which one can evaluate alternative steady states corresponding to different mortality rates. He derives a simple formula according to which the value of life appropriate for cost-benefit depends on four elements: one's value of living longer, one's valuation of the per capita reduction in consumption when the average length of life is increased, the effect of the loss of labor of the dead, and reduction in birth rates from the death of people in the childbearing age.

⁸ See Mishan, E. J., “Evaluation of Life and Limb: A Theoretical Approach,” Journal of Political Economy, vol. 79 (July 1971), pp. 687–705.CrossRefGoogle Scholar So far as I know, the only attempt to measure one's valuation of another's life is a study of the willingness of relatives to donate kidneys to victims of renal disease. Needleman, Lionel, “Valuing Other People's Lives,” The Manchester School, vol. 44 (Dec. 1976), pp. 309–32.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

⁹ The relation between human capital and the value of ife has been examined in detail by Linnerooth (1979), Arthur (1981), Bergstrom, T. C. “When Is A Man's Life Worth More Than His Human Capital?” in Jones-Lee (1982).Google Scholar

¹⁰ E. J. Mishan “Consistency in the Valuation of Life – A Wild Goose Chase?” in this volume. The horrible examples are the papers by Conley and Arthur cited in footnote 7 and a paper of my own entitled “An Imputation to the Measure of Economic Growth for Changes in Life-Expectancy,” in Moss, M., ed., The Measurement of Economic and Social Performance, N.B.E.R. Conference on Income and Wealth, vol. 38 (1973).Google Scholar

¹¹ Black, Duncan, “On the Rationale of Group Decision-Making,” Journal of Political Economy, vol. 56 (February 1948), pp. 23–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹² This framework for the establishment of rules for the public sector has been analyzed by Harsanyi, John, “Cardinal Welfare, Individualistic Ethics and the Interpersonal Comparisons of Utility,” Journal of Political Economy, vol. 63 (August 1955), pp. 309–321CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and by Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971).Google Scholar The fact that the former derives utilitarian rules while the later derives maximum rules is irrelevant for our purposes.

¹³ Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, The Brothers Karamazov, Modern Library Paperback (New York: Random House, 1950), pp. 291–292.Google Scholar