The value of human life

“Human life has infinite value” is the axiom at the heart of poor policy decisions, funding misallocation, and the downstream disorder observed in liberal cities. Thomas Sowell once said "There are no solutions, only trade-offs", expressing the obvious truth that the interests of different groups within society often come into conflict and policymakers must employ some metric in order to choose which outcomes to pursue.

At this point it should be obvious why placing infinite value on human life makes any attempt to do policy impossible: if a single human life has infinite value, then we should be willing to spend infinite resources in order to save that one life. But how many Americans truly believe that we should spend unlimited amounts of money to house, feed, clothe, and care for each homeless person?

Consider a middle class American who pays 30-40% of their income in taxes each year. That’s three to five months per year working, spending time away from their families, doing work that they might consider meaningless drudgery, for what? Imagine spending nearly half your working life earning money to support people who produce no benefit to the rest of society. People who make everyday life actively worse for others by shooting drugs in public or shitting on the sidewalk or looting the Walgreens. It would be understandable if knowing this made people want to lie flat and subsist on generous government support too.

Because we put a high positive value on each human life, our polices incentivize exactly the opposite of what we want: “Move to San Francisco with nothing, set up a tent, do drugs in the street and simply wait to receive a free apartment and free everything for life!”

But we could do better. Instead of taking the value of each human life as a given, we could try evaluating in terms of ROI: “If we spend money on this individual instead of doing nothing, will they eventually contribute more than we spent?” We could also consider the tradeoffs: “How much of whose time do we waste (what is the opportunity cost of this waste) vs what do we expect to gain from this policy?” This can be applied across the board, but will have the most impact in the following areas: