2023-04-30 11:00:32
MPut a 50 euro note in your mouth, and you will see the difference between value and taste. Today the flavor is no longer popular. We prefer value, closer to the realities of everyday life. She vampirizes everything she finds in her path. The health crisis has shown us how much the concept of the value of a life is part of ordinary language in health economics. The climate crisis has taught us that the timetable for the reforms to be carried out is arranged according to the estimated value of our planet. The “pension crisis” reminds us that the value of a cushy end of life depends on future economic conditions.
Value is therefore protean, but its mode of operation is always the same: it classifies, sorts, and slices. Dry but effective. Draped in a seductive formalism, it becomes a formidable tool at the service of the decision-maker, for better or for worse. For example when we wonder about the value of giving life. How about a death value, while we’re at it? We are there, in fact.
During the health crisis, the reflection on the degree of confinement to adopt was posed in these terms by part of the academic research: if you confine too much, you lower the GDP too much; but if you confine too little, you kill too many people.
Calculate the loss of profit of a death
The formal framework used by the reference articles then made it possible to draw up an efficient frontier (expensive to finance), arbitrating the best possible allocations between units of lives saved and units of GDP saved (« Cost-Benefit Analysis of Age-Specific Deconfinement Strategies »Christian Gollier, Toulouse School of Economics, 2020; « A Multi-Risk SIR Model with Optimally Targeted Lockdown »Daron Acemoglu, Victor Chernozhukov, Ivan Werning and Michael Whinston, Working Paper n° 27102, NBER, 2020). Angelism is strongly discouraged in this regard. Nevertheless, we have the right to wince a little.
It is true that a dead man being dismissed from his functions, he is cordially invited not to practice any more. He no longer has any value in this world since his potentialities are confiscated from him by the grim reaper who has other plans for him. We then calculate the loss of earnings of a dead person who has become unsuitable for production. Note that a retiree has the same characteristics, one could almost be mistaken…
This value of life calculated as the sum of future potentialities is also the approach used by those who debate the anguish of death. Is life worth living? Death is judged good or bad depending on the deprivation of a desirable future or not.
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