The value of life, measured

The NGO’s have introduced me to the concept of the ‘standard monetary valuation of life’.

Parsing; it costs money to save lives and NGO’s have limited resources, so they need a mechanism for choosing which lives to save. In order to do this, and amongst other factors, they use a measure of the relative value of various people’s lives, and this is done by the ‘standard monetary valuation of life’.

The highest value lives are in the wealthier countries (roughly the monetary value of life is a multiple of the GDP per capita). The other key factor is the expected average extension in life expectancy as a result of the interventions by the NGO’s – the longer the increase in life expectancy, the greater the impact on the standard monetary valuation of life.

Wouldn’t you hate to be in charge of making these decisions? Moral hazard 101.