The "value of a statistical life" is a wonky and heartless-sounding concept that's hard to explain to normal people, but sometimes you have to explain it, because if you don't then people won't notice it when something huge like this happens.
New York Times [no paywall version]:
...What is the value of a human life?
Under both Democratic and Republican administrations, the answer has been in the millions of dollars. The higher the value, the more the government has required businesses to spend on their operations to prevent a single death.
But for the first time ever, at the Environmental Protection Agency the answer is effectively zero dollars.
Last week, the E.P.A. stopped estimating the monetary value of lives saved when setting limits on two of the most widespread deadly air pollutants, fine particulate matter and ozone. Instead, the agency is calculating only the costs to companies of complying with pollution regulations.
“The Trump administration is saying, literally, that they put zero value on human life,” Marshall Burke, an environmental economist at Stanford University, said in an email. “If your kid breathes in air pollution from a power plant or industrial source, E.P.A. is saying that they care only insofar as cleaning up that pollution would cost the emitter.”
...[the change] appears to shelve a powerful tool, known as the value of a statistical life, that agencies have used for decades in the cost-benefit analyses that justify new regulations.
To estimate the effects of a policy, analysts conduct a cost-benefit analysis, a model used to weigh the policy's pros and cons against one another. In order to do that, you have to have an estimate of how much a human life is worth.
Many people object to this morally under the premise that human life is infinitely valuable, but that's an unworkable assumption. If every life is worth infinite dollars, then the appropriate maximum speed limit for drivers would be zero. Every unit you raise the speed limit by trades the additional benefits of driving that fast (mobility, economic value, reduced time costs) against the additional costs of the lives lost by new auto accidents. If the value of a human life is truly infinite, then it would be unacceptable to allow any road deaths, meaning that driving should be illegal at any speed. A society which does not allow for any risk of human death is one which cannot reasonably function.
We already make implicit assumptions about the value of human life when discussing our policy preferences, we just keep this value vague and undefined in our heads rather than setting an actual dollar amount out loud. The Value of a Statistical Life (VSL) is a concept that turns our implicit assumptions explicit, attaching a specific dollar value to a life to allow for the calculation of cost-benefit analyses.
The higher you set the VSL, the more likely it is to suggest that regulations are worthwhile. The costs of a safety rule might outweigh the benefits when you assume a VSL of $1 million, while the opposite would be true if you had a VSL of $5 million.
For this reason, the exact benchmark for the VSL is highly contested. In fact, different government agencies often adopt different standards in different contexts. The HHS guidelines from 2024 provide a range of VSL values from $6.1 million to $19.9 million for that year.
The EPA formerly valued a statistical human life at about $11.7 million. Under this estimate, clean air regulations have benefits that massively outweigh their costs (NYT offers a ratio of about 30-1). But by setting the VSL to $0, practically all life-saving government regulations at the EPA are now unjustifiable. By taking the largest benefits out of the equation and counting only costs, virtually all regulations will appear inefficient. It doesn't matter if a rule costs businesses only $1 to save 100 lives, that $1 in costs will be enough to reject the rule (unless other benefits are sufficiently large).
So long as this policy remains under the second Trump administration, regulatory rulemaking at the EPA will be heavily biased in favor of big business while entirely ignoring the value of human life.
